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1
I’M SENSING A CHANGE
Something’s different. You’re pushing out banner ads and trying all-things-
traditional marketing, and yet—practically, out of nowhere—your sales funnel has
dried up (or else it’s filled with a plethora of weak leads that are sapping time and
resources to unqualify). You’re breathing down your sales and marketing teams’
necks, wondering: what’s the problem? Where’s my new business?
Sounds like you have an inbound marketing problem. But—do you have an inbound
marketing strategy? In this white paper, we discuss inbound marketing and how to
drive inbound leads. This is the first in a series on this topic, and to begin—we’re
going to talk content and the need to be agile.
Do you have an inbound marketing plan in place? Do you have the team and the
resources needed to create and implement a sound inbound strategy?
It’s okay if you don’t. We know a thing or two about pushing high-volume, relevant
content that drives qualified leads to your always-hungry sales team. So let’s dig in.
INBOUND MARKETING AND
THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTENT
First things first: what is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is about creating and sharing attractive content
with your target demographic in an effort to drive the most qualified
traffic back to your brand with the hope that, once there—they’ll
convert. Gone are the days of buying lists, creating ads and tossing
a marketing-Hail-Mary for the ever-sought-after qualified lead.
Inbound marketing, now in its promising prime, has replaced these
“traditional” (read: old) methods of pushing out in favor of pulling in
—and attracting prospects to your brand.
It’s not necessarily a volume play, but the truth is: the higher the
number of touches (i.e., the more content you have out there and
available), the higher the likelihood of conversion—that key metric in
your world that indicates your users are doing what you want them
to (be that downloading a whitepaper, requesting a proposal, asking
to speak with your sales team, etc.) with the end goal being revenue.
OF CONSUMERS ARE
MORE LIKELY TO BUYFROM A COMPANY THAT DELIVERS CUSTOM CONTENT
Custom Content Council
Roper Finds Majority of Consumers
Value Custom Media

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So—what’s key to any inbound marketing plan? A marketing persona and content.
Content, content, content. Be it blog posts, infographics, whitepapers, e-books,
banner ad copy, website copy—whatever it is that boils your brand down to some
digestible, shareable, tangible form and is—in all cases—relevant and useful to your
target audience.
So—this requires two things: knowing your target audience and creating content
geared towards that target audience. For the sake of this being the first in a series on
inbound marketing—let’s assume you know your target audience and let’s get down
to brass tacks on how to get your content marketing house in order.
HAVE YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER
Do not simply create content for content’s sake. Content creation is not easy and
(in the final analysis of your marketing efforts), it’s not cheap. Before you start any
initiative, know why you are creating a particular piece of content and how you
intend to measure that piece’s effectiveness (whether it is working or not). So:
1. Determine the campaign goals—if your leads are drying up, you want to drive
a higher volume of leads. If you have a lot of weak leads coming in, you want
to drive more qualified leads.
2. Define what a Qualified Lead looks like to your business. Don’t be afraid to
involve other stakeholders in your business. Get with your sales team, talk
to your project managers. Determine which leads are converting more and
which leads bring in more revenue share than others.
3. Determine where your qualified leads spend their time. Where are they finding
your brand? Where should they be finding your brand? What is their typical
sales cycle?
4. Identify and/or create points of conversion.
5. Implement a closed loop marketing system using automated marketing
software and a dedicated customer relationships management service.*
*Need help with this one? It’s more complicated than you might think—but we
wrote a white paper on that topic, too, and we encourage you to check it out:
Closed Loop Marketing Whitepaper.
With your house in order, it’s time to rev up your content creation and curation machine.

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REVVING UP YOUR CONTENT CURATION MACHINE
A steady stream of useful, relevant content is the key to any inbound marketing
strategy. Armed with that, you’ll want to ramp up your content output, but not so
much that the quality suffers. We recommend:
1. An agile (discussed below) curation and creation strategy. It’s time to make
a plan, Stan—and it needs to be comprehensive and detailed. Now, we
don’t suggest mapping out every piece of content for the next year. Given
how quickly things change, you’ll run the risk of having a content calendar
that is irrelevant next week. Instead, plan your attack in two or three week
intervals. Describe what piece of content needs to be created (a blog post, an
infographic, a white paper), where it needs to live (gated by a landing page,
accessible in your social channels, etc.), who the content is for, what its call
to action is and why it’s relevant. Think about your target audience: What is
it they want to know from you? What are their pain points?
2. A plan for repurposing content. The last thing you need is for your content to
dry up. Inbound marketing requires you to have big back pockets stuffed with
content, waiting to be delivered. This means making a plan for repurposing,
remixing or reformatting existing content (if it’s still relevant and useful) and
the content you create. An e-book can turn into a series of blog posts. A
section of your last white paper can become an infographic. An infographic
can become a video and a video can become a presentation. Each repurposed
piece of content will keep your content arsenal fully locked and stocked.
3. Create a “backlog bucket.” You’re going to run out of bandwidth—that’s
normal. But rather than lose those ideas or that content, create a backlog
bucket, which is a great resource for brainstorming new content with the
content marketing team.
4. Be smarter with social. Because
users now consume information
in a variety of visual and text
based formats, you can tailor
your existing content to work
smarter for your social channels.
5. Identify extra collateral needed to
support your content. A blog post
promoting your latest white paper
needs your latest white paper to
be done, after all. Know ahead of
time what content and collateral
you need to support other pieces
of content.
SOCIAL MEDIA SITES AND BLOGS REACH
(THAT’S OVER 196 MILLION PEOPLE)
OF ALL U.S INTERNET USERS
8OUT OF10
ExactTarget
50 Awesome Content
Marketing Stats

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6. Communicate. Communication is key. Keep the team informed on where
each piece of content is in your strategy. Maintain a feedback loop for how
content is performing: What content went live? What is the click through
rate? How many whitepaper downloads or RFP requests did it generate?
What was the referral site? Was it organic or paid?
THE LAY OF THE LAND: BEING AGILE
We’ve talked content and revving up a content machine—now it’s time to talk about
how you keep that machine running in good order. It requires one very important
thing: agility.
You may hear the term “pivot.” Pivot and agility go hand-in-hand. You must be agile
enough—and aware enough—to recognize the need to pivot (change direction or
change strategy) quickly, without too much collateral damage (and ideally—with no
collateral damage). Consider the adage: “Life is what happens while you are busy
making other plans.” You cannot do it all, but must be able to do the important
things—no matter when those important things happen to pop up.
You do that by being agile and pivoting when the time comes.
Agile development is a concept that has been around software development agencies
for a long time now. It is an iterative way of tackling a project with a team that deals
with bite-size chunks. Agile development is equally applicable—and important—to
an inbound marketing strategy.
Here’s a common example: You have a particular project/campaign, and a short
deadline—30 days, maybe. This is known as a sprint. To sprint your way from start
to finish, hold an initial kickoff meeting, where tasks are assigned and the team is
made of key players across departments. Everyone is accountable for something
and everyone is accountable to each other. After tasks are assigned, roles defined
and lines of accountability drawn—it’s time to get down to it. Check-in regularly
to keep the team on task. Digital marketing is an ever evolving medium—an agile
approach is a must. Of course, because marketing is a lot like the weather—or life—
there will be times where you’ll need to change course and to pivot.
Here is how you stay agile:
1. Develop a process. Collaborate with your team and define a set of “To Dos,”
“Ongoing Tasks,” “Completed Tasks,” and a summation of the project’s
progress in general.

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2. Prepare yourself for requirements churn. This is a fact: during a project,
the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (a
phenomenon known as “requirements churn”), and those unpredicted
challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned
manner. Don’t let this fact stop you; don’t let this fact throw a wrench in
the machine.
3. Work together and rely on one another. Teamwork makes the dream work—
check in often with your project teams (but avoid micro-managing or
unproductive interruptions) to make sure everyone is still on the same page.
Review the numbers and deploy. The frequency will depend on the needs
of the project—we suggest weekly check-ins, but daily reviews of progress
will help you stem off potential problems.
4. Cross train the skill sets. To remain agile, it is necessary to have a team with
a balanced skill set. The individual skills and abilities should overlap. Because
this is a high volume effort, you never want just one team member to house
the know-how to accomplish as task, otherwise you’ll be scrambling if that
one person is out of the office or, god forbid, leaves your team mid-sprint.
Bandwidth is too limited to have to train a new member on the fly. Plus—it
never hurts to have a cross-trained team, as they’ll be able to provide insights
others may have missed.
THE FEEDBACK LOOP: ALWAYS BE MEASURING
Know the metrics. Measure your progress against the metrics. But keep in mind:
Change is the only constant. If you are not changing, you are being left behind.
One of the biggest advantages to digital marketing is the ability to quantify marketing
efforts relative to traditional offline initiatives. Analytics are inherent to this space
and not using them to guide and inform future efforts must be remedied.
INBOUND MARKETING
DELIVERS MORE LEADS THAN
TRADITIONAL OUTBOUND MARKETING
WebDAM 2014
20 Captivating Marketing
Statistics
INBOUND MARKETING
OUTBOUND MARKETING
54% MORE LEADS

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Share performance metrics. Ask hard questions. Don’t be afraid to take hard looks
at the entire funnel—not just your content. Be transparent with your organization
and answer: How are leads converting? How is this trending? How are these leads
being followed up on? Is this being appropriately tracked? How many touches are the
cold leads getting? How about the warmer leads? Are some touches working better
than others? What is the ratio of connecting to all leads generated? Do you break this
out by industry? By channel? By category? These are all considerations for making
your inbound marketing efforts a veritable monster truck of marketing.
Agility and content are only part of the inbound marketing puzzle, however. You’ll
also need to examine your sales funnel. Your conversion points. The percentage of
leads against the percentage of opportunities.
But that’s a bigger conversation. For now, take the time to analyze your content
and your overall agility as an organization. In the next part in our series on inbound
marketing, we’ll dive deeper into the sales funnel, your work environment, knowing
the right conversion metrics and more.
Of course, you don’t have to wait for the next series to come out—our inbound
marketing experts are standing by and we’re ready to build and maintain your
content machine, help you become more agile and generally improve your digital
marketing efforts across all channels. So what are you waiting for? Give us a call.
Let’s turn your marketing dollars into company revenue.

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ABOUT ONEUPWEB
Oneupweb is nearly a 20-year innovator in digital marketing—creating integrated
online marketing plans that incorporate search, social, design and mobile services.
Heralded by an independent research firm for their leadership team, work ethic and
solid experience in optimizing complicated sites, Oneupweb has been named a Top
20 Search Marketing Agency by Advertising Age for five consecutive years, and CEO
Lisa Wehr is recognized as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.
Oneupweb is a privately held company located in Traverse City, Michigan. For more
information on Oneupweb, please call 1.877.568.7477, or visit OneUpWeb.com.

Download the Totally Free White Paper “Driving Inbound Leads Part 1”

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Download the Totally Free White Paper “Driving Inbound Leads Part 1”