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What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a proven and powerful strategy for creating brand
awareness and generating leads. It’s also more necessary than ever because
buyers are online, spending more time doing their own research prior to
making contact with potential vendors.
Inbound marketing enables you to attract prospects to your brand by ensuring
that engaging content is online, exactly where and when prospects want it. With
inbound, you are not buying attention like you do with paid programs—you are
earning attention.
So why does this matter? You need to make sure these potential buyers find you
before they find your competitor’s product or service! Roughly 93% of buying
cycles start with an online search, and 88% of clicks come from organic search.1
In your customers’ minds, the higher search engine ranking your brand has, the
better the product or brand is.
1. Marketo
3. INBOUND STRATEGY CHECKLIST 3
TOTAL ROI
How many touches did
it take before your lead
converted to a customer?
How much did you spend
on the campaigns they
interacted with? What
did it cost you to win that
customer?
STEP 1: REVIEW CURRENT BASELINE & MARKETING PERFORMANCE
By understanding how you’re doing right now, you’ll be able to identify
the areas that need improvement. This will allow us to focus on which
inbound tactics will provide the biggest return on your investment.
OVERALL SITE TRAFFIC
How many visitors
are checking out your
site and the content
you’re producing?
TRAFFIC SOURCES
Where are your site
visitors coming from?
Knowing which sources
bring the most traffic
allow you to better plan
your campaigns.
CLICK THROUGH RATE COST PER CLICK
How successful are
your campaigns? Are
people actually clicking
on them? See which of
your campaigns are
the most popular.
What is the ROI of your
campaigns? How much
did you have to spend
before a prospect clicked
through to your site?
CONVERSION RATE
Once a visitor lands
on your site, do you
have enough content
to convert them to a
lead? Can they find
your content?
COST PER LEAD
How much time did
you spend creating your
content? How many
leads did it generate?
How much did each
lead cost you?
BOUNCE RATE
Is your content easy
to find on your site?
If not, you run the
risk of visitors leaving
immediately upon
landing on your page.
PAGE VIEWS PER VISIT
Which pages of your site
are the most popular?
Throw some good
content on there to
convert more leads!
RETURN VISITORS
When it comes time for
your prospects to buy,
you want to be at the top
of their mind. Provide
them with valuable
content to keep them
coming back to your site.
EMAIL METRICS
Total number of opt-
in email subscribers.
Engagement of email
subscribers How often
are emails sent?
Deliverability rate? Open
rates? Opt-out rate?
ROI PER CAMPAIGN
You need to know
which of your inbound
efforts is producing the
greatest return so you
can continue to focus
on them. Focus on the
money!
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STEP 2: BUYER PERSONAS REVIEW
Do you have detailed buyer personas? This is a critical step when
creating your inbound strategy. A well-defined persona is crucial to
helping you determine how to best attract your targeted customers,
convert them to high-quality leads, and nurture them through the entire
buying process.
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STEP 3: MAPPING THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Customer journey maps are an illustration or diagram of all the
touchpoints with which your customers come into contact. Customer
journeys are not a “one size fits all” template. It’s important for us to
sit down and determine your customer’s touchpoints and how they buy.
Doing so will allow us to better tailor inbound tools to your brand.
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STEP 4: DETERMINE THE INBOUND COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE
Having a thorough understanding of how your competition markets
itself will allow you to get a leg up on them. Conducting research on your
competitor’s content, social media, emails, backlinks and paid marketing
efforts will give you better insight into their inbound marketing strategy.
1. Are your competitors blogging? If, so, how often?
2. What main topics are your competitors writing about?
3. Is this content valuable to the reader or is it self-promotional?
4. Is their content being shared via social media?
5. How many social followers do your competitors have?
6. How often are they posting to their channels?
7. What type of engagement are their posts receiving?
8. What types of content are they sharing? Promotional?
Educational?
9. Do they use guest authors? Is the same person writing all the
time?
10. Is the blog mobile friendly?
11. Does your competitor’s website have valuable backlinks?
12. How are your competitors attracting website traffic?
13. Is it organic, paid, a mix?
14. What keywords are they ranking for/using to drive traffic to their
site?
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STEP 5: REVIEW INBOUND MARKETING GOALS
We’ll use a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely)
framework for identifying your goals. These goals are tracked by leads,
customers and revenue; they are not tracked by email opens, social
followers, etc. These goals are based on what you are trying to achieve
for your brand, but examples include:
1. Total new leads this month/quarter/year.
2. Total qualified marketing sourced opportunities sent to sales.
3. Total new customers sourced by marketing.
4. Total revenue generated from marketing sourced leads.
ATTRACT
NURTURE
CONVERT
ENGAGE
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STEP 6: VALUE PROPOSITION REVIEW
A value proposition is a clear sentence that tells your visitors exactly
what you do, how you are different and why they should buy from you
rather than your competitor. A firm value proposition is a crucial part of
your inbound strategy. A strong value proposition leads to a significant
increase in conversion rates.
• Focus on clarity
• Avoid jargon and keep it short - it shouldn’t take any longer than 5
seconds to read your value proposition
• Highlight the benefits and results your customer can expect from
your product or offering
• Tell why you are different and better
01. BANKNEWPORT
PROUD TO BE YOUR COMMUNITY BANK.
02. GRAIN SURFBOARD
LOCALLY GROWN, HAND-BUILT
SURFBOARDS.
03. NORTHEAST CREDIT UNION
WE’RE YOUR TRUSTED NEIGHBOR.
04. SILVERSTONE
THE FREEDOM TO BE YOU.
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STEP 7: CONTENT REVIEW
The main goal of inbound marketing is to attract visitors to your website
and then convert these visitors to leads. When you produce quality
content through inbound marketing methods, you can present your
business as being credible on a topic or a service.
1. What are your profitable keywords? Your website should rank for
the right keywords.
2. Are you creating compelling content? Engaging content is what
will attract visitors to your brand. The more thoughtful the content,
the more willing visitors are to give you their information in order
to read it.
3. Identifying which keywords are most profitable for your brand will
help guide the direction for your content creation.
4. Content Promotion. Once this content has been created, how are
you promoting it? We’ll determine a plan to distribute this content
via: Email, Blogs, Social media, Content syndication, PPC / Re-
marketing, Influencers, etc.
SOCIAL
ECOMMERCE
EMAIL
WEBSITE
WEBINARS
LANDING
PAGE
REPEAT
AUTOMATION
GOOGLE
ANALYTICS
SEO SEM
MOBILE
SOCIALGUIDES
PODCAST CONTENT
BLOG
LANDING
PAGE
CRM
REVIEWS
SURVEY
RETARGET
CONTESTS
REFERRALS
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STEP 8: WEBSITE REVIEW
Your website should be optimized for conversions. If a lead does not
convert, you don’t have that potential lead’s information and you’ve lost
the opportunity to market to them. If you can increase the number of
quality leads you’re generating, you can create more sales opportunities
and, in the end, generate more revenue. We’ll review your site to ensure
it is optimized for maximum conversion potential.
BEFORE AFTER
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STEP 9: MARKETING AUTOMATION REVIEW
Marketing automation tools enable you to both deliver your content and
measure the impact of every inbound tactic and channel. Implementing
an automation platform allows you to “close the loop” by integrating
your marketing analytics with your CRM sales data.
We will not prescribe an automation tool for you based on any
preconceived notions. We’ll work with you to determine which marketing
automation tool is most effective for your organization. If you already
have a tool in place, we’ll work with you to optimize that tool.
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STEP 10: MARKETING AND SALES ALIGNMENT
If you want to be successful with inbound marketing, you will need to
align your sales and marketing teams around one common goal—revenue
generation. No technology, training, or management technique will
magically create a harmonious relationship between sales and marketing.
If you want these two teams to collaborate and achieve your goal, you’ll
need to make a conscious decision to bring the two teams together.
We will work with both your marketing and your sales team to determine:
• How you qualify leads
• Who is responsible for various aspects of business development
process
• How you will measure performance
QUOTA
- Sales quota is sales
- Marketing’s quota could be measured in leads, marketing qualified
leads, revenue percentage, etc.
LEAD GENERATION TERMS
- What is a lead
- What is a marketing qualified lead
- What is a sales qualified lead
- What is an opportunity
COHESIVE REPORTING
Both sales and marketing should have access to the reporting
dashboards. Your sales team should have insight into the marketing
metrics and marketing should have insight into the sales metrics.
This helps build a harmonious, results-driven team.
PROGRESS CHECKS
These sessions will give you a set time to review the quality of
inbound leads that are being generated, recap the most common
questions and objections that leads are posing, and discuss ways to
improve the inbound lead generation and qualification process.
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STEP 11: BUDGET REVIEW
A recent Gartner survey showed that, on average, US companies allocate
2.5% of their annual revenue to digital marketing activities. Therefore,
if your annual revenue is $10 million, your annual spend for digital
marketing should be around $250,000.
We’ll work with your budget to help you determine the appropriate
amount to allocate to:
• Inbound marketing software
• Inbound marketing integration, setup, and conversion-centered
website iterations
• On-going content creation and promotion
• Conversion rate optimization
• Reporting
