7 steps for implementing inbound marketing strategy

Effective inbound marketing requires a combination of strategic analysis and tactical execution. Skip the planning and it’s likely you’ll fail to create the right content and messages. Spend too long on strategy and you miss out on opportunities to engage, test and learn where it matters. In order to ensure your implementing inbound marketing strategy right, follow these steps.

• Define the problem(s) you solve. It’s crucial to focus on how your business helps people in terms of the actual, specific problems it solves and the pain/frustration/need that your customers have.
• Define the personas of your target customers. What type of person are you targeting? What role do they have? What do they need help with? Where do they look for information?
• Identify and prioritise the keywords you need to be found for. Based on the problems your business solves, what will your target customers actually be searching for? How much traffic is there? Who else appears against these terms?
• Identify the social media platforms and channels to participate in. It’s sensible to distribute and promote your content to most social media platforms. However, it’s important to actually participate in the social media where your prospects are active.
• Outline your sales and nurturing process and define your objectives. Map out how you typically engage, inform, propose for and close business. Think about the information that prospects usually need at each stage and the questions they ask.
• Develop key content to drive lead generation. Key content is the stuff that prospects are prepared to give you their email address for. It’s specific enough to be valuable in their research and it shows that you understand how to address their needs.
• Map out your content creation and promotion plan. Regularly creating new content in the form of blogs, comments and postings is essential. In order to make sure that your content is supporting your inbound marketing strategy, it’s essential to plan it out so that your key content is promoted through blog posts and social media activity.

3 steps to further sharpen your inbound marketing strategy

• Identify key influencers in your space. Understanding who has influence in the topics and forums that you’re working in can help you engage more prospects and drive more traffic and inlinks back to your content. Your influencers could be journalists, analysts or potential clients.
• Set up key metrics and analyse. One of the best things about adopting an internet marketing strategy is how measureable it is. You can quickly see how effective specific blogs are at driving targeted traffic, how well-ranked your site is in search, even how many leads a specific Tweet delivered. To make sense of the data you have access to, make sure you have a close eye on your key metrics and analyse your leads to discover which keywords and channels drove them.
• Set up a social media dashboard and track key conversations. Social media moves at a staggering pace so it’s essential to set yourself up to monitor relevant conversations that you should look to join – without needing to spend hours glued to your browsers. A social media dashboard will help you manage your social media time and alert you to opportunities.

Inbound marketing strategy should constantly feedback and adapt as you learn about what content works best and which channels drive most engagement and – ultimately – customers. Implementing inbound marketing is the first step, after that it’s about testing, learning and building out content.  

If you want to talk about how inbound marketing can work for your business, get in touch.