Inbound or content marketing can be burdensome, but it’s more important than ever to do it well because statistics show it can save your business money. Hubspot’s 2012 Inbound Marketing report said organizations focused on inbound marketing experience a cost-per-lead average 61 percent lower than outbound marketing organizations. However, this process requires a lot of time, effort and creativity to spur the results that you and your business need. It’s also important for components of inbound marketing – including blogging, social media, lead conversion and nurturing and closed-loop analysis – to work seamlessly together.
So how do you do all that without going crazy? A simple solution is to create an inbound marketing plan. I know, now you’re thinking “great, even more work for me.” I have news for you: A successful inbound marketing plan can be simple. Include these four areas in your strategy and you’ll soon be raking in the leads.
Goal – What is your goal of your inbound marketing efforts? Interpreting what issues or problems you are facing is a good way to figure out your goal. Does your website receive a lot of traffic, but the visitors aren’t converting? Do you have high traffic and get a lot of leads, but the leads aren’t marketing qualified? Addressing those issues can inform the goals you have for an inbound marketing plan. Your plan could have multiple goals you work toward at the same time or focus on a single initiative such as increasing website traffic.
Plan – Here, list the tactics you believe will help you reach your goal. Get as specific as possible on each of the tactics so there’s no confusion later in the process. For example, rather than saying you want to increase the amount of blog posts on your website each week, list exactly how many blog posts you expect to have during a set time period.
Challenges – What challenges can you foresee happening while you are implementing your plan? It could be that you don’t have the time or resources needed to complete the plan you’ve laid out. If your goal was to get more leads through your website, a potential challenge could be that the leads aren’t marketing qualified. It’s important to identify any challenges you can ahead of time. That way, you are aware of them and able to adapt your strategy appropriately to avoid them.
Timeline – This is one of the most important components of your inbound marketing plan. Without a timeline, how will you know if your strategy is working to reach the goals you’ve proposed? Be sure to keep your timeline reasonable. Is this a short-, mid- or long-term strategy? Each business’ time frame could be different depending on its sales cycle and the urgency of the results.
Finally, stick to the timeline. If you say that you should reach your goal within three months, then at three months it’s time to evaluate what you’ve done. Did you reach your goal? Which of your tactics are working and which are not? Are there certain ones that require less time, but give you better results? These are all items that should be considered when your timeline is up. From there you should tailor your campaign to what seems to be working.
An inbound marketing strategy is important because it will help you keep your sanity, but also because it’s an effective way to see more detailed results from your inbound marketing efforts.
Here at WordWrite, we provide and implement inbound marketing strategies for our clients and ourselves. Anyone can employ inbound marketing tactics, but we strive to create and implement a strategic plan that has measurable outcomes.
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Emma Walter is an account executive for WordWrite Communications. You can find her on Twitter @emmasreallytall.
