Inbound isn’t about creating a ton of content, publishing it, and hoping for the best—it’s about targeting a specific audience, tailoring content to that audiences’ pain-point, and then creating a nurturing workflow to ensure the potential customer stays within the buyer journey.
Here are 5 crucial elements to ensure you include in your strategy, and why you need to outline them next time you create a blueprint for an inbound marketing campaign.
1. Buyer Personas
Every company needs to understand their customer (and prospective customer). Determining your buyer personas will help you understand customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
It takes work to develop personas by conducting surveys, interviews, and so on. Without this information, it’s difficult to attract, sell to, and delight your current and potential customers.
2. Good Content
Content is the backbone of any successful inbound campaign. It should cater to the personas you develop and address a specific pain point that persona is facing.
Because content fuels the inbound journey, it should have a clear purpose. Writing content for the sake of content will only derail your buyer journey and confuse your core personas.
3. Valuable Offer
All inbound campaigns should lead up to some sort of bottom-funnel offer, for example, a free consultation, assessment, or estimate.
As your customer makes their way through the funnel, they expect that the end result is what will solve their problem. If your deliverable doesn’t meet this expectation, your campaign will fail.
4. Sales and Marketing Alignment
Inbound marketing brings in leads—leads that are qualified and ready to hear about your product or service. If you don’t invite your sales team to the table, then you’re losing a lot of potential revenue. Sales and marketing have traditionally been two separate departments, but the inbound methodology strives to bring those departments together.
It’s the responsibility of the marketing team to pass qualified leads to the sales team as they go through the buyer’s journey. Expecting the sales team to do all of the work is a thing of the past.
5. Reporting
It is critically important to pay attention to the metrics of your inbound campaign. How can you improve if you don’t analyze your performance?
These metrics show you what your prospects are responding to, and the content that is most important. These valuable insights can inform future strategies or even expand your current strategy with more content or additional offers.
Do You Have What It Takes?
In order for any inbound campaign to be considered successful, you must be willing to invest the time and resources that support the assets that make up a profitable campaign. Without proper planning, a campaign will almost never succeed. Covering all the bases before your team’s work for the campaign begins will ensure you’re set up for success.
Are there any details you’ve implemented during an inbound marketing campaign that I’ve missed? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
Anna Crabill 