An Inbound Marketing Plan In 7 Easy Steps

  

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For Business Growth From the Web Make a Complete Inbound Marketing Plan

Inbound marketing offers your company the opportunity to get found by targeted visitors and convert those visitors into top of the funnel leads which can then be nurtured into highly qualified prospects that are ready for your sales team...what a great addition to your marketing program! One of the most powerful aspects of creating and implementing a comprehensive inbound marketing plan is the transformation you'll see in your website from an:

Make no mistake, there's a lot of work involved, but the results...do they justify the work? That's for you to decide, however, as we see the use of the internet continue to grow, it makes sense to maximize it's use for business development...doesn't it? When an inbound marketing plan is well constructed and implemented with full automation it's like creating a free marketing employee that doesn't take vacation or sick days or ask for a raise, it works 24/7 and delivers new leads without ever complaining, what a concept!

Too often when we speak with company executives we find that they've spent money on their website with little by way of results. There haven't been traffic increases or they haven't generated new leads (of any consequence), and most importantly there's been no real business growth that they can attribute to their effort and expense. Sound familiar? To avoid this requires a comprehensive inbound marketing plan, an approach that combines the key inbound marketing elements in a meaningful way and achieves the results your company is looking for like a gain in website traffic and increased internet lead generation. While each companies plan will differ as far as emphasis and tactics are concerned, each plan should include these basics to ensure success.

7 Steps of a Comprehensive Inbound Marketing Program

1. Evaluate the current situation- Inbound marketing includes 6 key elements, content, social media, SEO (search engine optimization), lead generation, lead nurturing and analytics. Look at how your company is currently approaching these and what the results have been. A great tool for this is Hubspot's Marketing Grader.
2. Define goals- As a starting point this should be a quantitative set of measureable results that you want to achieve over a given period of time such as 'x' increased number of visitors, 'y' number of top of the funnel leads, 'z' number of middle of the funnel leads etc.
3. Create strategies- For each inbound element determine how you will use them to achieve your goals, for example, Content: "As a company we will develop 1-3 new pages of content weekly that our target audience will find interesting or useful because the content is relevant to the problem they have that we can solve. We will do this using both internal and outsourced resources." (A recent poll on Linked In showed that many companies overlook the value of new and relevant content.)
4. Brainstorm tactics- Every strategy that you created in step 3 needs to have specific actions attached. If your strategy for social media was something like, "We will use social media to promote our content development and encourage interactions with interested parties.", and one of the goals from step 2 was 100 new twitter followers in one month, then your tactics might include, a) implement content promotion automation, b) search twitter for people in our industry vertical and follow them, c) create 'specials' that are easily shared and promote them on social media...and the list goes on. (Speaking of social media, most companies who have had success in this area begin with small goals as related to their social media initiative.)
5. Assess and task resources- After completing step 4 you will have an outline that will look like a lot of work, make no mistake, there is work to be done! As you break it down you'll see that it's not complex work, in fact a lot of it is very easy but it has to get done so look to your internal team for people who can take on various tasks or look to outsourcing as appropriate. Many companies find working together with an inbound marketing agency to be a good fit because these companies can fill in the gaps in your team and can provide guidance on the overall program.
6. Implementation- Depending on how you've decided to task the work to be done, it may be that you move forward on all the key inbound elements at once. If you're working with an outside inbound marketing agency, they should advise you that content creation and development is critical and the strategy for this should be executed as quickly as possible. In addition, you will want to get your internet lead generation program underway as soon as possible so the creation of an industry overview whitepaper, or general guide such as "10 Key Considerations When Buying ______ For Your Company" are good top of the funnel lead generation offerings.
7. Measurement- This is important! The most powerful characteristic of the internet is that everything you do can be measured. Unlike outbound marketing where the old saying is "We know 50% of our marketing efforts are generating results, we just don't know which 50%.", each inbound marketing action you take can be measured and evaluated for it's effectiveness. With this data transparency your company is in control of where to focus your efforts as to future development initiatives. (Another recent Linked In poll showed most companies are ignoring analytics data.)

What's outlined here is a basic framework for your company's inbound marketing plan. Use this as a starting point and keep in mind that it's a living document that you should review and modify as your business grows. Obviously goals that you set at the beginning will change over time and your plan needs to respond to these changes. One thing we'd like to finish with, companies like yours that are using comprehensive inbound marketing for business growth are achieving the results they want. It requires time and effort, but once your company's website begins this transformation, the results you observe will motivate further actions. You'll see real results, gain in website traffic, increase in internet lead generation and ultimately business growth that you can attribute to the web...what will that mean for your company?

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