The Five Pillars of Inbound Marketing Success
Strategy is arguably the most important element of any inbound marketing program. The good news is, if you’ve embarked down the inbound route, you’ve already made some commendable strategic decisions:
Despite these promising statistics, inbound marketing is not a program that works for every business. For items with a short sales cycle (like that of a B2C apparel business), the attract, convert, close, delight methodology loses effectiveness. However, if your business demonstrates the following characteristics, an inbound strategy has great potential to deliver outstanding results:
Once you’ve committed to an inbound marketing program, it’s time to begin documenting your strategy. In these early stages, it’s important to align all stakeholders to common definitions, marketing goals and measurable KPIs. In particular, spend considerable time aligning your sales and marketing teams, so that each function with defined processes like lead handovers and qualification. Fundamental questions to settle between marketing and sales may include:
Organisations with a strong marketing and sales alignment, often called ‘smarketing’, enjoy 20% annual revenue growth.
Your inbound marketing strategy is the mechanism through which you attract visitors to your website, convert them into leads, close them into customers and delight them into promoters and advocates of your business. There are many tactics at your disposal to action this methodology, and the ones you select will depend on your personas, your resources and your marketing goals.
The following are five essential elements of an inbound marketing strategy:
1. Goals
Without measurable goals, your inbound marketing strategy will struggle to deliver tangible business results. Your goals may be as finely-tuned as increasing email newsletter signups by 10% over a 3-month period. Or they may be larger in scope, like delivering a 20% year-on-year increase in Sales Qualified Leads over the course of 5 years.
For campaign-based marketing efforts, some common goals may centre around traffic, lead generation and conversion. Each of these should be measured with defined metrics, and involve collaboration between departments.
2. Content Creation
As the primary way to attract quality visitors to your website, a significant portion of your inbound marketing strategy should involve the creation of strategic, relevant and optimised content. This can take several forms:
The list of possible content formats is extensive. Again, the ones you select will depend on the way your buyers prefer to consume information online. However, choosing a format is only part of the content creation puzzle. Determining the contents of your content, where it fits into your buyer’s journey, and its larger role in delivering measurable results for your business is a process that continues to challenge even well-established inbound marketing teams.
3. Search Engine Optimisation
Without effectively optimising your content for search engines, your content creation efforts will suffer from underperforming traffic - having a flow-on effect on lead volumes, conversion and sales. Traditionally, the presence of target keywords throughout content has formed a large part of a marketing team’s SEO efforts. However, new research is finding that keywords are waning in importance as a ranking factor.
According to a comprehensive study conducted by search engine marketing leaders SEMrush, the most important ranking factors are:
The Mechanics of a Mobile-First Marketing Strategy
Mobile isn’t just big business, it’s most business.
SEO is a multidisciplinary activity that touches every aspect of your digital activity, which is why it’s an essential element of your strategy. Some of the most important SEO tactics you undertake may not even lie in content creation, but in website redesign to improve the user experience; reducing bounce rates and increasing time on site and page views per session.
4. Content Amplification
Many businesses fall into the habit of allocating significant resources into creating content, but fall short in their amplification efforts. Unfortunately, a ‘build it and they will come’ approach isn’t viable in inbound marketing. While you should be optimising your content to rank for specific long-tail search terms (even with keywords waning in importance as a ranking factor), you also must promote the content you produce via the channels used by your audience.
Possible content amplification tactics may include;
As you can see, amplification strategies can be comprehensive, however your efforts are best focussed on the specific channels used by your buyer personas.
5. Lead Generation
Lead generation is usually a primary focus of inbound marketing programs. The creation, optimisation and amplification of content should attract relevant traffic to your website, but your lead generation efforts will convert these visitors into leads.
A time-tested approach to lead generation is producing “gated” content offers - that is, content offers that can only be accessed in exchange for contact information. Downloadable eGuides, white papers, templates, webinars, eCourses and product trials are strong candidates for your gated (or “premium”) content offers.
The typical lead generation lifecycle can look like;
For an optimised lead generation campaign, remember to;
Every content asset that you produce should fit somewhere into your buyer’s journey. As defined by HubSpot, the buyer journey consists of three stages: awareness, consideration and decision:
Determining how your prospects act at each stage of the buyer journey will inform the content you produce, the channels you use to promote it, and the premium offers you use to nurture them through the sales funnel.
The buyer journey is closely related to the sales funnel, which can also be divided into three general stages: top-of-funnel (TOFU), middle-of-funnel (MOFU) and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU). Of course, in reality, the sales funnel is more intricate than this and even unique to each prospect. However, to implement a strategy that speaks to each stage of the buyer journey, it’s useful to work with TOFU, MOFU and BOFU categories.
A holistic inbound marketing campaign addresses each stage of the buyer journey, with a combination of relevant content assets and premium offers.
For example, consider the following campaign for a fictional email marketing software company, that allows businesses to create custom email newsletters with drag-and-drop functionality. This campaign is focussing on their software-as-a-service persona;
Gated content offer: eGuide: How SaaS Companies Can Drive Revenue With Email Marketing
Content to direct visitors to gated offer: Engaging editorial series designed around general email strategies for SaaS companies.
Gated content offer: 15 Email Newsletter Design Templates for SaaS Brands
Content to direct visitors to gated offer: Video tutorial series on creating effective emails.
Gated content offer: Free Trial of our Email Marketing Software
Content to direct visitors to gated offer: Comparative articles on email marketing providers, pros and cons of email marketing software.
As you can see, each stage of the buyer journey is addressed with a gated content offer to capture leads and supporting content to direct visitors to that offer. TOFU content introduces email marketing as a valuable strategy for SaaS companies, MOFU content provides some hands-on examples of how to implement an email marketing strategy, and BOFU content positions their product as the ideal solution to this problem.
Years ago, businesses that published regular blog content were applauded for their content marketing prowess.
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