How to Implement an Inbound Marketing Strategy in 3 Steps

Inbound marketing is an impactful way to promote your brand online and get in front of a targeted audience. With a well-developed plan, you can accelerate your goals and significantly better your numbers one year from now.

Closeup view of silhouette of three darts sticking in a professional sisal dartboard. All three darts hit the inner bull / bull's eye / mark.

Getting started today positions you for a greater tomorrow. Here’s how you implement a strong inbound marketing strategy for your business.

1. Be Clear on Your Goal

Your inbound marketing strategy must align with your ultimate business objectives. This makes your marketing intentional as every blog article, social media post, and video will be aimed at achieving this goal.

So, what is your goal? Do you want to build brand awareness? Are you seeking to grow your followers, engagement, and/or website traffic? Or perhaps you desire revenue growth through your content marketing. Whatever your goal, it’s important that it’s well established prior to developing your plan.

Gain clarity on what success looks like from your inbound strategy so you can create it.

Additionally, having a clear understanding of your target audience and the market you serve is also crucial to a strong inbound marketing strategy. Creating buyer personas is a great method to knowing the pains, problems, and challenges of your audience so you can produce content that addresses their concerns which positions you as an expert in your niche.

2. Know Your Strategy

Once you’ve identified your goals and formed your personas, now its time to decide how you will market to your audience and the channels you will use to get eyeballs on your content.

In other words, what’s your strategy? Will you share valuable content blogging or leverage social videos to share your message? The good news is that there is a multitude of online platforms to connect with and attract prospective customers. Research where your customers hang out so you can show up when they’re looking for you.

Create remarkable content that captures attention, speaks to their problems, and bolsters user-experience. This bolsters your thought-leadership and makes you a credible source.

The following are different content strategies you can employ in your inbound marketing:

• Blogging – extremely important to being found in the search engines, the #1 source consumers revert to in locating information
• Social media – humanizes your brand, building the know, like and trust factor as people engage in your genuine content
• Videos – easily demonstrate your products, share your brand story, or get people to take action quickly. Videos have an amazing engagement rates
• Live-streaming videos – connect with your social media followers using platforms like Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, and Periscope.
• Webinars – dive deeper into content topics and build your list as participants join your broadcast
• Email marketing – an absolute must to move your leads through your sales funnel to becoming customers
• Retargeting – purposely follow people who’ve visited your website but may not have converted into a lead wherever they go on the Internet

This list is just the beginning of what you can do. If you want to leverage the experts and discover which strategies would work best for your unique audience, reach out to us here and let’s chat.

3. Develop the Plan

The final step to implementing an inbound marketing strategy is creating the plan. Here you’re determining how often to publish content daily (or weekly), your content topics and themes, and how you’ll test your efforts to improve results.

How Often to Publish
The more you create quality-rich blog posts that are optimized for search, the more opportunities you create for your audience to find you on Google. This also opens doors to capture new leads and generate sales. In fact, companies who blog regularly have 434% more indexed pages than companies who do not.

Therefore, your blogging schedule largely depends on your goals for increased brand awareness. Whatever you decide, whether daily or three times a week, remain consistent. Leverage an editorial calendar to help you organize, plan and schedule your content.

In regards to social media, it’s imperative to discover the times that your audience is most engaged on respective networks. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite include analytical features that inform you of the best times to post. No guesswork…it simply informs you when to publish so you can get the most out of your post.

Choosing Content Topics, Themes and Formats
You’ll want to create content that targets your personas and where they are in the buyer’s journey. The stages include the Awareness, Consideration, and the Decision phase. Tailoring content that appeals to each component seamlessly moves your prospects closer to the purchase, bolstering your email and closing strategy.

Here is a guideline for creating content and formats that fits best with each stage

• Awareness – Prospects know they have a problem and are simply researching content. Growing your brand awareness and highlighting that you’re a solution provider is key here. Social media, blog articles whitepapers, and infographics perform well here
• Consideration – Prospects are actively seeking solutions. The focus is to capture leads as they land on your content and nurture them in your email campaigns. Content types to consider include downloadable offers, video series, guides, product webinars, and case studies.
• Decision – Your prospect is now ready to make the buying decision. You want to make this an easy transition towards the sale. Convert leads into customers by offering free trials, implementation (how-to) guides, and live demonstrations as your content types.

Remember, the focus is to share valuable content that speaks to your audience. Keep that in mind during your content creation process.

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Equipped with this blueprint, you’re setting a solid foundation to achieving success in your inbound marketing efforts. You’ll foster better engagement from your audience, increase website traffic, improve lead generation, and experience revenue growth.

The key is developing the plan then creating a schedule where you consistently execute your strategy. And as always, test and measure your results so you make necessary adjustments and continue implementing what’s working best with your audience. Discover which channels are most effective so you can spend more time there.