“Inbound marketing” is a relatively “new” term in the marketing industry, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less important to getting people to your website and getting sales. If you want to learn the best steps in taking inbound marketing to the next level, you have to first figure out what steps you need to take to prepare for inbound marketing. – Determining Your Inbound Marketing Goals:
Before starting any campaign online or offline, it’s important to ascertain exactly what you want from your campaign and who you are marketing your product or service to. One of the best ways of going about this is to use the SMART goals checklist.
S – Specific – What do I want to accomplish? Why do I want to accomplish these goals? Who is involved in the campaign?
M – Measurable – A goal that is measurable will be able to answer the how many, how much and how will I know when the goal is accomplished, questions you may be having.
A – Achievable – An achievable goal will usually answer the question “How can my goals be accomplished.”
R – Relevant – Having a relevant goal can help drive your team or organization forward. It should be a goal that helps support alignment with other goals.
T – Time Bound – Having a time-bound goal will answer the when and what goals i.e.; what can I do one year from now? What can I do 2 years from now? What can I do today? Having SMART is necessary when starting your inbound marketing campaign because it will help you really to decide if and when you need one.
– Create Buyer Personas: Once you have your goals set into place via the SMART list, you need to start thinking about what audience you want for what you are offering. The best way to go about this is to start creating buyer personas – different personalities to find the best one, two, three or four types of people that you will be promoting to. Using a template for buyer personas will make life so much easier for you and help you stay organised. Make sure you bring any survey data or research that you have on potential customers and clients.
– Understand Your Message: Make sure you clearly define what you are promoting, what makes your product/service unique, how it alleviates your target market’s pain points and what the compelling reason/s are to purchase.
– Create a Strong Call to Action: Develop a strong call to action that will prompt people into action. Make sure the process is in place to deliver on that call to action in a timely, professional manner. Nothing worse than churning and burning leads.
– Blogging Calendar: I think, by now, we all realise how important fresh content is on a website. A blogging calendar is just a calendar that is set up for blogging to help you stay on schedule and choose the best topics for that specific day so you know what to promote and how to promote.
– Social Media Scheduling: Social Media is also a very important aspect in inbound marketing. The ability to use social media outlets for your campaign is a superb way to promote your products or services and keep your campaign organised with all of the other efforts you will be expending. A social media scheduling template will also help you understand the best channels to use for your specific buyer personas.
– Optimise Your Campaign: As with anything that deals with the internet, it’s important that you optimise it via SEO. Make sure that your campaign is SEO friendly and that its optimised so that your potential customers won’t just be able to find you today, tomorrow or a month from now, but for several months to a year from now.
– Track Your Visitors: When at all possible use your stats on your website as well as trackable urls to stay up to date on where the most traffic is coming from, what time of the day you get the most traffic, and if possible, which campaigns tend to get the most clicks/visits. Make a regular report on your results and take the time to review it and refine your campaigns based on the learnings Whilst the preparation might seem like an added time user and expense when you just want to get on with the campaign, what you will discover is that your execution and consequently results are only as good as the planning and preparation.
