Have you ever been frustrated with the results (or lack thereof) your inbound marketing efforts have yielded?
The key to succeeding with your inbound marketing efforts are to ensure that you have clear goals, KPIs, and you’re continually testing. In this blog post, I’ll provide succinct tips on how to jump start your inbound marketing efforts to gain traction and begin filling your sales/marketing funnel with the right traffic, leads and sales.
Don’t Try Everything At Once
Here’s the thing, inbound marketing can be broken down into a multitude of tactical executions, e.g. SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), retargeting, social media advertising, online advertising, content marketing, community building, email marketing and much more. Because of this very reason, getting started can feel daunting and stressful without a clear direction to head towards.
I recommend breaking out each of the tactics out by funnel phase and only pushing for at the very most (depending on the resources you have) 2-3 executions. For example, SEO and PPC are generally paired together. Each tactic requires attention to keyword research, competitive analysis, ad copy writing, and copywriting. A few tools I use are:
- Raven Tools – A paid tool that allows you to create campaigns for separate URLs and diagnose all of the current SEO issues that exist.
- Google Keyword Tool – Leverage this tool to research keywords, the search volumes and the CPC for each.
- Wordtracker – This tool makes it easy to view high-performing keywords within minutes.
- BuiltWith – Gain competitive intelligence with this tool by seeing what types of technology your competitors are using to market their products/services.
- Screaming Frog – Quickly see which pages on your website have duplicate, missing, exceeded meta-data characters.
Once you’ve decided on the tactics you want to implement first, fit them into your funnel so you can start tracking and measuring KPIs as well as results. From there, you can then begin plotting the other executions to see which ones are performing the best, providing a positive return on investment.
High-Quality and Tailored Content Wins
I’m sure you’ve heard over and over again, “Content is King!” More specifically, creating high-quality content that’s tailored to your customers value is the key to generating sales and retaining customers. Moz does a great job of depicting each funnel phase with the different types of content that can be served. See below.
Additionally, in a previous blog post I highlighted reasons why content marketing is crucial to business success and the following stats:
- Brands who post 15 blog posts per month will average out to generating 1,200 new leads per month. (Source: HubSpot)
- Per dollar spent, content marketing generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.
- Content marketing cost 62% less than traditional marketing
Holistically Integrate and Manage Technologies
With the massive amounts of technologies that currently exist out there, it’s important that you nail down tools that work best for your business. These tools should help you not only track results, but also help you execute more efficiently (e.g. automating workflows, scheduling out social media updates, etc.).
A recent study done by the CMO Council showed that 42 percent of the CMOs who manage and integrate technology into their overall marketing strategy are experiencing tangible business results. (Note: This study is based on surveying 150 senior marketing executives)
Here are a few more results from this study:
- CMOs who manage and integrate technology are achieving measurable business and operational gains. Nearly one-third (30 percent) of CMOs who say they manage and integrate technology extremely well or pretty well are seeing tangible business value, with 51 percent of those achieving greater revenue contributions.
- Those who integrate a technology strategy within their overall marketing strategy are able to achieve more personalized customer interactions across channels. Fifty-nine (59) percent of those who have integrated this strategy report achieving more targeted, efficient and relevant customer engagements.
- The most successful companies extend their marketing technology beyond marketing to include sales, product development, etc., and they generate a significantly higher business impact.
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