The Complete Guide to Inbound Marketing

Transcription

1 The Complete Guide to Inbound Marketing

2 Introduction Inbound marketing and marketing automation are the big current buzzwords in the industry. The nature of marketing has changed drastically over recent years with the dominance of the digital age. As marketers, we have to adapt to the behaviour of the audience. Inbound marketing is the perfect way to do this, however, it can seem very intimidating. There are new processes, new strategies and new jargon. That s where we come in. Our easy guide to inbound marketing takes you through what it is, setting it up, and how to make it work for your business.

3 Contents 1. Understanding Inbound Marketing 2. The Inbound Marketing Methodology 3. Building your Campaign 3.1 Buyer Personas 3.2 Campaign Goals 3.3 Creating Engaging Content 3.4 Landing Pages 4. Attracting your Audience 4.1 Call to Action Buttons 4.2 Blogging 4.3 Social Media Paid Advertising 5. Managing your Leads 5.1 Segmenting your List 5.2 Personalising web Content 5.3 Nurturing your Leads 5.4 Lead Scoring 6. Assessing your Results 6.1 Reporting and Measurement 6.2 Testing

4 1.0 Understanding Inbound Marketing Get customers looking for you Inbound marketing is the upcoming way of attracting and converting new business. It s based on the change in the buyer journey within the last 10 years. Historically, the buyer journey was primarily focused on the buyer acknowledging they had a problem and then sourcing a solution. Nowadays, this is significantly different. Awareness Stage Consideration Stage Decision Stage Free Whitepper Free ebooks Free Checklists Free Guides / Tip-Sheets Free Videos Free Kits (Combination from above) Free Webinars Case Studies Free Samples Product Spec Sheet Catalogs Free Trials Demonstration Free Consultations Estimates or Quotes Coupons The buyer journey is now preceded by research. The average buyer has already done at least 12 pieces of research before sourcing a solution. The buyer now wants to know all details of what they want, how it works, and the potential problems. The final stage of initiating contact is for final questions and searching for the right price. Buyer/vendor contact, therefore, only truly happens at the point before sale. For marketers, this creates a very different responsibility than previous years. Your company has to be in front of the buyer at every point of the journey and throughout their research. Essentially, it is a content- centric strategy that welcomes potential buyers to you rather than an interruptive strategy to get noticed. One of the greatest aspects of inbound marketing is the automation technology involved. Automated marketing takes away the stress of dealing with leads individually, but retains the ability to deal with them personally. All of the marketing automation is set by you, defined by rules and triggers in relation to persona, behaviours and journey. This reduces your time but maximises your output.

5 2.0 The Inbound Methodology The four inbound stages The inbound marketing methodology goes through various different phases of activity to reflection of the stages of the buyer journey. Attract The attraction stage is all about producing activity that will drive traffic to your content. Key in the attraction stage is that you are attracting the targeted traffic to ensure you re getting the right visitors. Convert When someone visits your website, they need to be engaged with the content. If your content is valuable and of interest, the more likely a visitor will leave the details you need to convert visitors into leads. Close Once a visitor has been converted into a lead, you ll be able to nurture them into a close using their details. You will be able to provide them with relevant and useful information, personalised to them, therefore establishing both trust and your authority in the market. Delight The delight stage is focused on converting a customer into an advocate and using your promoters to feed new strangers into the beginning of the process. This drives value, more potential leads and even opportunities to resell.

6 3.0 Building your Campaign The building blocks of inbound marketing An inbound campaign is the complete package of achieving a goal through the inbound marketing process. 3.1 Deciding Customer Personas The customer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. Initially, you should base the buyer personas on your current customer base. There will be multiple, as your customers will cover a breadth of various different people, with their own priorities and pain points. The personas use a combination of demographics and psychographics. The personas should include age, income, gender, and job role as part of the demographic aspects. Their psychographic detailing should include their goals, their challenges and their values. Overall this will give you profiles to ensure you re creating content that will attract this audience, content which can be individually catered to each persona. 3.2 Setting your Campaign Goals Every campaign needs to have goals and benchmarks to allow for accurate measurement reporting. Your goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time related. The metrics for these goals are visitors, leads, and customers. You need to check these metrics against each stage of the inbound methodology process. 3.3 Creating Engaging Content To attract your targeted audience, set by the customer personas, you need to have a content offer. This content offer is focused on having value in education. There are a variety of different formats of this content including presentations, webinars, e-books and white papers. As a content-centric marketing strategy, this engagement is vital, as you become a useful resource in the reader s research. Establish your authority and create a great impression with insights to engage the reader. This content will be your lead magnet. 3.4 Designing Landing Pages To get your visitor to convert, you need to be able to get their details. This is achieved by using landing pages. The average landing page conversion rate is 20%, so yours must be impactful. There must be clear headlines and consistent calls to action. Reduce distractions in the navigation to keep the visitor on the landing page as opposed to avoiding it. Images, videos and cinemagraphs also add to the wow factor of your business, and provides relevant visual content. Visuals are processed 60,000X faster than text, giving a lasting and quick impression. Your landing page should also have a thank you follow-up page. This is vital in establishing your brand as helpful and useful. The thank you page will deliver the requested content, and give further opportunities for the lead to engage with your company.

7 4.0 Attracting your audience How to bring customers to you Once you ve built the content, and have everything in place, you need the traffic. Driving traffic to your content offer can be done through many different tactics. 4.1 Call to action buttons There needs to be a number of different call to action buttons to promote the content you are offering to take you to the landing page. The location of this call to action is very important. You want as many people as possible to have access to the call to action buttons, therefore they should be present on relevant blogs, through social media posts, s and throughout your website. 4.2 Blogging Blogging is vital in an inbound marketing strategy to increase traffic and engagement to your website. B2B marketers who blog regularly generate approximately 67% more leads than those who don t. The blog content needs to be relevant and useful to your target audience. Use blog titles that naturally lead into an introduction to your content with an embedded call to action button. An engaging title will increase your click-through rate to get people to follow through into the content offer. 4.3 Social Media Using your social media profiles to drive people towards the content you offer is an incredibly cost effective method. By 2018, the estimated number of people using social media is 2.5 billion. Use link tracking programmes to measure and report on the engagement, with individual strategies on each social platform to ensure maximum reach Your landing pages and content offering are more than just attracting new people. You need to engage existing customers with your new content. your current database to inform them of your offering and why it would be of interest to them. If you compile a series of related information, you can create a succession of s. With automation technology, you can set personalised s and be certain the right content is sent to the right person, at the right time. This keeps you at the forefront of the buyer s perspective whilst avoiding being interruptive. 4.5 Paid Advertising Paid advertising is a very quick and effective tool to drive traffic to your website. Social media advertising allows for direct target advertisements. You can use your buyer personas to attract the targeted audience for your content offering. Google AdWords also uses targeted long tail keywords to relate to the content offer and/or blog.

8 5.0 Managing your Leads Be dynamic to your customer Once you have your content offer in place with your campaign built and have traffic being driven towards this, you need to manage your leads to keep people engaged and following through the inbound methodology process. which would be reflected further in the personalised content. When personalising any content, marketing automation software does the intricate and difficult work for you. All you have to do is set the dynamic content and their rules. 5.1 Segmenting your List The traffic driven towards your landing pages and content offer must be segmented in line with the profiles of those visitors. The segmentation into different lists allows for better management of these leads. It also gives you the opportunity to provide your audience with information which is relevant and personalised. The more divisions you are able to make based on differentiation, the more accurate you can be in personalisation. Possible separations can be based on their current position in the buyer journey, the persona they belong to and the content in which they have been proven to show interest. 5.2 Personalising Web Content Dynamic website and landing page platforms will allow you to personalise content based upon data captured in previous steps of the buyer journey, dependent on the buyer persona and their specific interests. Their buyer persona may determine that they would be better suited to a financial incentive, for example, so the web content for them should feature this. Alternatively, you can personalise web content based on the buyer journey as indicated by their previous website and link interaction. Leads showing repeated interest will be closer to making a buying decision 5.3 Nurturing your Leads It s all very well having the traffic, the content and a database of leads, but you need to nurture leads to convert them into customers. To nurture your leads, you need to maintain contact with them across multiple channels, multiple times. You can reach out through social media and marketing to provide relevant information which reinforces their initial interest in your business. Creating a contact timeline allows you to approach the lead as a solution as opposed to simply selling. This builds up your trust relationship with the lead alongside establishing yourself as an authority of the matter at hand. 5.4 Lead scoring Lead scoring is a quantifiable approach to assess buyer engagement with your content and figure which leads are most likely to convert to a sale. With lead scoring, you assign a score to the individual prospect depending on the actions that they have taken. Your scoring system will depend on your business and the perceived importance of lead engagement with various content elements. The higher the engagement, the higher the score, and the higher the likelihood for the lead to adopt or purchase your solution.

9 6.0 Assessing your results Achieving your Goals It is imperative with an inbound marketing strategy that you are constantly assessing your results. Assessing your results allows you to make decisions based on activities and assets that are producing the results in line with your campaign goals. 6.1 Reporting and Measuring The reporting and measuring of your inbound strategy relies on various metrics. Some metrics will be individually based on the nature of your business and the goals set, however, there are some which should be universal. Your metrics should include your landing pages, blogs posts and content download. From here, there are individual parameters such as the number of views, clicks, shares, social activity and generation of leads. 6.2 Testing Once you ve created your content offer, you shouldn t just leave it to be static. The traffic drivers to the offer and related content must be measured, and from here you can make decisions in tweaking and perfecting the drivers and content. This will ensure the maximum impact from your marketing efforts. By continually testing metrics, such as views and number of visitors, your opt in rates will improve allowing for a predictable flow of leads into your business. Inbound marketing is the end-to-end solution to building new business, maximising brand awareness and establishing your authority. Plus, it s all in a format which is suited not just to marketers, but also (and most importantly) to your audience. Web: thumped.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)