“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” –Edith Lovejoy Pierce
With the start of a New Year you have the opportunity to capitalize on what you didn’t in the previous year. Like the quote above, we are given a blank book in which we choose the story. This year, choose to capitalize on inbound marketing. Buyers are finding more ways to control the information they receive and traditional marketing tactics are failing. Inbound marketing costs 62 percent less per lead than traditional outbound marketing. If your company has yet to make the leap into inbound, consider these resolutions to get started.
I will create a strategy
Create a strategy for all of your marketing, communications and social media initiatives. Your strategy should include specific, numerical goals and you should be tracking your results against them. By creating a strategy you’ll be able to better track what’s working and what isn’t. Next, consider the priority of your goals and create a plan that will help you achieve those goals. For more information on creating an inbound marketing strategy see this blog post with steps.
I will provide my web visitors with valuable content
Search engine optimization has gone through a complete overhaul since people first began paying attention to it. Google now gives top search priority to those who provide valuable content on their site consistently. One of the easiest ways to do this is to begin blogging on a regular basis. Hubspot’s 2012 Marketing Benchmark Report found companies that blog six to eight times per month generate two times more leads than companies that blog just twice a month.
This year, spend some time determining who your buyer personas are and what pain points they might have. Use your blog posts to address those pain points with a solution your business and its services can provide.
I will use social media to complement my inbound marketing efforts
Social media is one of the best ways to promote and spread your great content. An effective social media strategy can help pull in new leads and move them through the buying cycle. You want to provide value to your fans and followers. Sometimes the most valuable information for them isn’t going to come from you or your business.
At WordWrite, we believe in following the one-third rule. One-third of your content should be self-promotional. Use this to promote the great content you’ve created. One-third should be information about your industry. Do you have someone in the field that you respect and does he or she create great content? Take the time to share their content across your networks. Finally, social media is all about creating a conversation, so the last third is having an actual conversation with your fans and followers. One of the easiest ways to keep all this on track is by following a social media calendar. Click here to download our free social media planning and execution tools, including a social media calendar.
I will tie each traditional public relations or marketing tactic to an inbound marketing campaign
An excellent way to track the effectiveness of a public relations placement or advertisement is by tying it to a specific inbound campaign. Our first instinct is to direct people to our homepage, but if you can you should direct them to a targeted landing page. Consider what persona you’re trying to reach with the placement or advertisement and create content specific to that persona. It has to be compelling enough that a visitor would be willing to give up their personal information to receive it. Then use website analytics to track how many people are visiting that page from your placement or ad and see how many actually convert to leads.
At first it can be a challenge to develop the great content, but once you’ve got an inventory of valuable offers and tools, you’ll be able to tie many of your efforts to specific campaigns.
I will analyze my marketing efforts
If you’re not analyzing what is working and not working with your inbound marketing tactics, how will you ever improve? This year, set time aside each week to compare your actual results to the goals you set. By analyzing the results on a weekly basis, you’ll be able to tweak your strategy as necessary.
Here at WordWrite we use Hubspot’s all-in-one marketing software for our efforts. Its platform provides powerful analytics to track all of our marketing, communications and social media strategies and watch as a website visitor moves throughout the sales funnel.
If you’re not using inbound marketing for your business yet, the New Year provides the perfect opportunity to get started. This year is currently a blank book and you have the opportunity to choose how it is completed. By implementing these inbound marketing resolutions you could be filling it with new customers.
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Emma Walter is a senior account executive for WordWrite Communications. You can find her on Twitter @emmasreallytall.
