Just stepping into inbound marketing can be a little overwhelming. There are lots of things you can do to support your inbound marketing efforts, including blog posts, videos, social media, case studies, white papers, podcasts, webinars, and more.
“How do I do that?!” I'm often asked. Actually, you can't do everything. Especially in the early stages of an inbound marketing strategy.
So how do you make your inbound marketing strategy a success? Also, how do you decide which inbound marketing strategy to adopt?
I like to think of marketing builds as growing children. And like saying, “Before you run, you must walk, and before you walk, you must crawl.”
To the extent that toddlers who are crawling still can't walk, you can't expect everything to work out in their early marketing efforts.
With this in mind, I've organized the long-term marketing goals for all of my clients as follows:
What does it look like when crawling? If you're a small business that's just starting out and isn't receiving outside help, you might just be seeing a few new blog posts and social media posts growing every month. That way, you can get inbound leads, gain followers, and build SEO.
Even in the same business, walking may seem like a buyer persona is superimposed on an editorial calendar. This allows you to plan to create content offers that target personas.
In other words, start small, get some results early on, and grow from there. Don't try to do everything.
If there's one thing I've consistently seen in my career, it's that we assume we know our customers much better than we actually do.
My mentor always said, “Know your customers.” And no matter how much I thought I knew about them, he always reminded me that 1) I'm not my customer, and 2) there's always so much I can know about customers.
Buyer personas are arguably the most important tool in a marketer's toolbox for getting to know customers. In HubSpot's words,
A buyer persona is a semi-fiction representation of an ideal customer based on market research and actual data on existing customers.
From buyer personas, identify personas' communication preferences and locations used to obtain information. Do your personas spend most of their time on LinkedIn but not Facebook? Then you should prioritize LinkedIn over Facebook. Especially if you're just learning to crawl.
If you've spent a lot of time on outbound marketing—email “blasting,” trade shows, print ads, buying lists, cold calling, etc., then you need to reset your beliefs and expectations as you begin inbound.
With outbound marketing, you get results from budget and iteration. Outbound implementation results may come out right away, but that is costly. It's like pushing a rock up a hill. If you don't keep pressing it, it will roll down. And these days, the average user sees 4,000-10,000 ads per day. As a result, people are avoiding intrusive marketing.
In inbound marketing, investments are more about time than money. Content marketing, SEO, and social media take time to build, and implementation results aren't always immediate. It really is a snowball effect. The “snowball” rolling down the hill slowly grows into a larger one. Inbound marketing initiatives take time to build, but they gain momentum. Also, unlike outbound marketing, you can continue to get results from your existing content and SEO even if your efforts are interrupted for a few weeks.
What are the benefits of your patience and hard work? According to HubSpot's research, it costs 61% less to acquire inbound leads than to acquire outbound leads. Also, content marketing is 62% lower in cost while generating 3x more leads (demand indicator).
The traditional marketing paradigm was to promote products and services. Of course, the goal of inbound marketing is to increase sales from work. Today, however, the way people prefer to consume information is vastly different.
In short, people prefer to do as much research as they can on their own. Again, people watch thousands of ads every day. So the average consumer is good at filtering out things that are too promotional.
To adapt to this, the primary goal of marketing should be customer education. If you can be a trusted expert on topics related to your products and services, then customers will naturally tend to trust you when it comes to buying things from you that meet their needs.
A big mistake seen among inbound newcomers is that they want to focus on their own company or service. Rather, the goal should be to provide valuable, insightful information. And from time to time, promotional elements may also be gently incorporated.
For example, one rule of thumb I like to follow on social media is sometimes called the “golden ratio.”
Spreadsheets and Powerpoints are helpful up to a point. Without effective tools to manage, execute, and track the implementation results of inbound activities, you're limited.
Google Analytics is a great tool to get started with analysis for free. It's limited, but it's a great way to control the basics. For example, you can track the number of visitors, places visited, length of stay, etc.
But once it's up and running, you'll need something to help tie it all together. Additionally, you'll need a place to manage and track the leads you've started generating. Spreadsheets are cumbersome, making it difficult to monitor how sales teams are responding to leads.
An all-in-one marketing and CRM platform like HubSpot is a great place to start. If you're unsure how to get the most out of it, talk to a HubSpot Authorized Solution Partner.