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The success of your content marketing hinges on your ability to attract leads to your business. If you want to do that effectively, then you need to roll out all the helpful content your customers are wanting in order to move them through the buyer’s journey. Blogs, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, webinars, whitepapers, email campaigns, and how-to guides are a few of the tools you'll need to get started. But just providing content on your website is only the beginning. A true inbound strategy involves a lot more.
While anyone can write and post a blog, it takes a whole different level of thought, planning, and knowledge to be able to set up a truly effective inbound marketing strategy. Fortunately, it's one of the things we do really well. Ever wonder what all the hype around inbound marketing was about? Here are some of the steps involved that make all the difference.
Research and Setup
A great inbound marketing plan starts with targeted research into your industry, competitors, and company goals. In the initial research phase, we perform industry studies and competitor analyses to see what you’re up against. Armed with this information, we’ll create a target buyer persona and map out their ideal buyer’s journey.
Once that’s done, we can focus on creating a path to success by building an effective content strategy for your brand. This part of the plan involves good old-fashioned goal setting. Once we know where you want to land, we can build the bridge to get there. Our team performs extensive research into the right keyword strategy and related topics that will drive the results you are looking for. We do a competitive analysis and get a very clear picture of how your business is performing online and craft the plan to grow that visibility.
Marketing Automation Software
Inbound marketing is not a "set it up and forget about it" strategy. It takes daily work to stay on top of data, content, promotions, and lead flow. To make that job easier, marketing automation software is a non-negotiable requirement. There may be other options out there, but we quit looking after falling in love with Hubspot.
Within that platform, you can easily create your marketing materials, distribute them through the proper channels, track results and set up customized email marketing. The software also integrates with a sales CRM, streamlining the process of collecting inbound sales leads. As the marketing management automation software does the heavy lifting, the marketing team is able to do their job more effectively and efficiently.
Inbound Training
Your inbound marketing strategy will only work at its best if your entire team is on board. To get them to buy in wholeheartedly, you just need to offer excellent training – and we can help. We provide all our clients with comprehensive, in-house training for all the employees in their marketing and sales departments.
Our training approach inspires confidence in the creation and distribution of inbound content marketing materials. We then go above and beyond by teaching your team how to track key performance indicators and adjust your approach to get great results every time. By the end of the training, everyone on your team will have the knowledge needed to push your marketing program to the next level.
An important partner in the inbound process is the sales department. Every sales department we've worked with understands how inbound marketing can make their job easier and help them be more successful. Part of making that happen is teaching the salespeople how and when to use content in their sales process. The result? Salespeople have the tools they need to sell more.
Content Strategy
Every voice is valuable when it comes to creating an effective content strategy for your brand. You need key stakeholders to chime in with their insights to form a content plan that appeals to customers and prospects at every stage of the buying funnel.
From product development and management to marketing and manufacturing, all the teams in your company get in on the conversation. Throughout that process, we collect all the info needed to really put ourselves in your customers’ shoes and see what they need from your brand.
In the end, the brainstorming sessions reveal ways you can use content to support your customers' needs. Then, you can create the right assets every time and position your brand as a leader in the industry.
Content Creation
After using the brainstorming data to create your content strategy, it’s time to start producing quality content of all kinds. Depending on your industry, you may get by with basic tutorials, blogs, and product demo videos. However, there are a wide variety of formats to present to viewers, each with its own strengths. Most likely, your strategy will combine many different options to keep your viewers interested and engaged.
Our team can produce all the content your brand needs most, including:
- Web pages
- Blog articles
- Case studies
- Whitepapers
- Guest posts
- eBooks
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Video tutorials
- Product demos
- How-to guides
- Checklists
- Infographics
- Quizzes
- Questionnaires
Campaign Promotion
The last but most crucial step is garnering as many eyeballs on your content as possible. While the content itself does the hard work of growing SERP results, we'll also craft a campaign designed to drive traffic and grow results faster. This is done by sharing your content through email marketing, social media marketing, digital marketing, and even traditional marketing like radio, tv, and magazine. We distribute your carefully crafted content through the channels your customers use most. Our smart omnichannel approach to distribution ensures all your content lands in front of your customers whenever they need it most.
Bottom line, Inbound Marketing is a must-have strategy for any business in growth mode.
