The Five Pillars of Inbound Marketing Success
Audio Version Coming Soon
Henry Ford
Many years ago, businesses that published regular blog content were applauded for their content marketing prowess. Marketers that followed a defined SEO strategy were idolised, and those that optimised their marketing based on real data were envied. Today, these (and many more) activities fall effortlessly into the one program: inbound marketing.
Strategy, content creation, amplification and distribution, analysis and optimisation, growth-driven website design, lead nurturing and sales enablement - an inbound marketing program has several moving parts. Today, bringing them together is only a beginning. Keeping them together is progress.
Having all of the gears of your marketing machine working together is marketing success.
The creation, dissemination and measurement of content alone is a multidisciplinary process, which requires a carefully designed framework and collaboration between departments. As Gill Worby, Virgin’s Head of Digital Marketing, says:
When you consider the countless other activities that are essential in any effective inbound marketing program, like optimisation, design and development, sales and marketing alignment and consistent data collection and analysis, it’s easy to see how even small-scale inbound programs require significant legwork.
However, five pillars govern how businesses should approach each of these individual marketing activities:
Buyer personas are the bread and butter of the inbound marketing methodology. These semi-fictional representations of your “ideal” buyers aim to shed light on your target audience, inform your marketing messages, your content formats, your keywords and your distribution channels.
Unfortunately, like many other guiding documents, buyer personas are often a “set it and forget it” asset. There are countless articles written about how to create a buyer persona, but not nearly as many on how to use them effectively within your marketing program. This is because their application is often limited by the accuracy of the documents themselves.
Some marketing organisations may feel that their buyers have changed, or that their initial customer research process was flawed. The truth is, both of these assertions are most likely correct. Buyer persona documents should be ever-evolving because no one gets it exactly right the first time. Even if they do, their customer profiles will be approaching obsolescence after a few months, because the way prospects navigate the digital environment is changing as rapidly as the environment itself.
How can businesses use buyer personas to guide their marketing activities, when in reality, their buyer's habits are changing rapidly? The answer isn’t to make them more generalised, but to establish the systems and processes needed to form a constantly updating picture of your buyers, that changes as they do.
Below is a 3-part roadmap to consistently gathering information on your buyers and using it to guide your marketing efforts:
1. Input Your Personas into HubSpot
Mapping your buyer personas into HubSpot is an essential first step. Generally speaking, five individual personas should be enough to summarise your target customer base.
2. Analyse the Underrepresented
Once you have mapped your personas into HubSpot, you should begin analysing the volume of contacts who fall into these categories each month. A large portion of contacts with a “no value” attribution doesn’t guide your future marketing efforts, so ensure your forms include persona triggers wherever possible.
For example, a simple “which role describes you best” question on contact forms can be an easy way to identify the personas that make up the majority of your actual audience. If you notice that a persona is consistently underrepresented, and it’s a persona you are dedicating resources to, it may be time to revisit your strategy or your picture of the buyer.
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3. Review and Revise
Once you are collecting regular information on your buyers, ensure you review and revise the persona documents. As mentioned, businesses often find that their primary persona is in fact overtaken by an unexpected buyer group, in which case a reallocation of resources may be required. Persona data to analyse may include:
Using this data will allow you to refine your persona documents, and leverage them to implement better-performing marketing strategies moving forward.
Years ago, businesses that published regular blog content were applauded for their content marketing prowess.
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