digital-marketing strategy-and-planning

What to consider for an inbound marketing strategy

Alison Johnston - Internal Operations Director 10th December 2019 Read time 5 minutes

It can be difficult to know where to start when creating the perfect inbound marketing strategy for your brand. In a lot of respects, you need to work much harder at reaching and supporting your customers than you do with outbound marketing activity. This is because a successful inbound strategy requires you to not only attract customers, but engage and then work to keep them engaged - to not only convert, but ensure they remain a loyal customer too.

What's the difference between outbound and inbound marketing?

You may already have some inbound marketing activity in place but to implement a solid inbound marketing strategy that delivers leads cost-effectively, it's key to firstly understand the difference and benefits of outbound marketing and inbound marketing.

• Outbound marketing puts your offering in front of your prospects - by way of more 'traditional' paid advertising such as TV, radio and out of home media.
• Inbound marketing uses more of a tailored strategy to drive prospects directly to you (or your website). This involves more brand storytelling and 'drip feeding' information than direct advertising of a product or service; ultimately building trust with those customers who show an element of active interest. This primes them and helps to place your brand forefront of your mind when they're ready to buy. Typical examples of inbound marketing activity are blogs, e-books, whitepapers, social media campaigns, optimised website text (SEO), videos, webinars and events.

Having an inbound marketing strategy is crucial if your business has a relatively long sales or nurture cycle. If your customers are those who tend to take their time researching different offerings in your sector, then building brand awareness and trust is key.

How to plan an inbound marketing strategy

Setting your goals for your inbound marketing strategy will identify exactly what you want to achieve and in what timeframe. Set KPIs and targets and review them regularly. All goals should be realistically achievable, relevant and importantly, measurable. For example, being 'realistically achievable' means that your website should be able to handle traffic and convert as required once a customer is onsite. If your website can't do this, then the resulting experience will only disappoint your customer.

But before you implement any strategy, it's key to plan. This starts with defining your buyer personas. You need to understand exactly who you are marketing to; what interests and engages them, in order to know how to craft communications and content to suit them. There can be many personas within your target audience too, each of them having different interests and intentions.

Inbound marketing triggers

Next is to identify the triggers; what makes these customers search for information around your product or service? What are their 'pain points'? Trigger-based marketing will meet potential customers at a time of need by being targeted, rather than simply taking the form of a generic message pushed out to large audiences.

But what are your customers actually searching for and how? Undertaking keyword research is crucial and will open-up insight into search volumes. This will illustrate rankings, allowing you to budget for the likes of paid search. Google has a Keyword Planner which is a great tool for generating keyword lists, enabling you to plan against search volumes and competition levels. Ultimately, your keywords will help you to craft a content marketing strategy that includes answers to the questions your customers are asking at different points of their journey. This should include dedicated top of funnel content (research-level information), down to conversion content (more product-specific).

Regularly creating and posting content to suit the various levels of the sales funnel ensures you keep up to date when appearing in searches and will set you apart as a trusted source if you're able to own up-to-date content that relevantly answers your buyer personas' questions.

How inbound marketing can expand your business

But it's not just all about creating content and hoping customers find it. You have to plan and develop a lead nurturing process and every step within it. A lead can convert more quickly, or adversely more slowly, across personas and at different points in the sales funnel. Some leads require a lot of answers and research, but take care - if you miss a step in the conversation, the engagement can go cold and you may lose your customer to a competitor.

Depending on the business, it could be worth considering the use of marketing automation. Automated emails or dynamically served content can help nudge customers along the process by giving regular access to information about your product or service. Meaning that come conversion time your customer is well informed and reassured. And the conversation should continue after conversion to maintain engagement and trust.

Use of marketing automation can be of huge benefit where in-house sales team resources are limited (for example, where a chat or callback service can't be managed), but whether automation is utilised or not, seeking the expertise of inbound marketing specialists will ensure the gaps can be filled seamlessly, which your sales team or automation alone cannot.

Specialist inbound marketing teams have access to a range of skills such as audience profiling, PPC, SEO, email marketing, data analysis, blog / copywriting, social media management, conversion rate optimisation and website development. This means enlisting the expertise of a wider marketing team can be of huge benefit and a cost-effective way to implement and manage an inbound marketing strategy. The marketing team are specialists in collaboration and will ensure the strategy is carefully planned and works seamlessly across all channels.

Get in touch with our inbound marketing specialists at M3 Agency today and find out more about how you can generate the best quality leads at a lower cost, backed by a measureable and scalable strategy.