As tempted as I am to use analogies involving rolling snowballs or Olympic marathon runners, neither of these things adequately describes the way that an inbound marketing strategy builds momentum. While a snowball does grow exponentially in much the same way as an inbound audience, and a runner might start slow and then pick up the pace at a strategic point, neither of these phenomena involves the careful planning that goes into a well developed marketing strategy. Effective inbound campaigns deliver results only because they are engineered to drive aggregation across a broad range of complementary channels – thereby involving a degree of complexity unseen in the worlds of snowballs and running.
If I had to use a metaphor, I would liken an inbound marketing strategy to the blueprint of a building - more specifically, to that of a tall bell tower.
If this analogy was extended, then the brick and mortar tower would be your marketing campaign – the actual operations of a marketing department – while the blueprint would be your inbound strategy – the plan that needs to be in place before construction can even start.
The best strategies are built on solid groundwork
In this comparison, your buyer personas are the tower’s foundation. They’re the elements that determine the solidity and soundness of everything else you do, and they’re the very first thing you develop. Without these advanced audience profiles, you can’t even begin to plan messages that will engage your audience. To deliver marketing messages that will get your audience’s attention, you need to know two things about your customers:
- What topics they find interesting
- What channels they use
Once you know these, flesh your personas out with the many other little details that will make them as lifelike as they are useful.
Produce content with real value
Topic, format, and channel are only three of the factors you need to take into account when designing a content strategy. You also have to design content around the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Here, it helps to think of the selling and buying process as both a sales funnel and a train of thought. For each point in a persona’s life cycle, you need to develop valuable content that will answer their questions.
Here, it helps to look at the content your competition is producing. What topics are they writing on? Where are they falling short? How can you improve on what has already been said? Can you provide any insights of your own? Your readers don’t have to read what you’ve written. You need to give them a reason. Your content has to be better. Once you’ve established yourself as a trustworthy authority, you’ll have a much easier time directing readers to other content you’ve produced.
They’ll already know that they can expect something of value, so they shouldn’t need much convincing. Still, you should learn to prompt questions that you can then answer in other content. Each subsequent blog article or eBook should be designed to take your prospects one step closer to a purchase decision.
Cast a wide net with top of funnel content
Many businesses make the mistake of focussing on content that deals specifically with their products, when it’s actually top of funnel content that represents the most opportunities to be found. To spread the widest net, you need to ensure that most of your content appeals to your customers’ broader interests. To understand how content can be used to guide a visitor to a purchase decision, consider the strategy I used with this blog (revealed here for the world to see).
If you are reading this, it’s either because you followed a link here from a social post or because you searched for a term that included the words ‘inbound marketing strategy’. Now, you may have no interest in reading any further (and if you don’t, that’s great – hopefully it means that you’ve learned all you need to know from this blog).
But, there’s also a chance that you’ll click on the link to our blog on how to prepare your team for inbound marketing. There, you’d find even more advice on how to make inbound marketing work for you. And you’d read the paragraph that explains how it’s sometimes better to outsource your inbound marketing (particularly advantageous if you’re just starting to do inbound).
If you were someone with a real need for an outsourced inbound marketing solution, you’d probably be interested enough to download the free eBook on inbound marketing, which explains the pros and cons of both in-house and outsourced solutions. With this information, you could then decide if outsourced inbound is the right solution for you and whether our service might be of any interest to you.
But now, back to that bell tower.
Ring that bell
Once you have a content strategy (second level of your bell tower) in place, you can decide how you are going to promote your content. In our analogy, your social strategy is most analogous to the belfry (with bells) and the tier supporting them. Like these instruments of public dissemination, your social media networks serve to make the world aware of your message.
And, just like your content, your social media networks need to be chosen according to the preferences of your personas. These will tell you which channels to use, when to post, and how to interact with your followers on those platforms. Get these right and your fans will promote your business for you. Get them wrong, and you will remain as obscure as those businesses on the second page of a Google search.
Given the very important role that social media plays in drawing traffic in your network, you may start to think of social media as your most important means of attracting business. Just remember this: without content, you have nothing to direct your visitors to; and without personas, you wouldn’t even know what to say.
Integration and function are key
Inbound marketing strategies work because their constituent parts work together. Again, think of the bell tower. It’s the bell that draws people’s attention, but if it weren’t for the tower that holds it aloft, its sound wouldn’t travel very far. It takes a strong foundation (personas) to support a tower (content) that will put that bell (social media) at a height where its sound can travel far and wide.
My point? Think of each element in your inbound marketing strategy as a brick in your bell tower. Each persona document, blog, and social post needs to be designed with a purpose in mind, and each piece needs to interlink, puzzle-like, with the next.
If you follow this plan, you’ll produce a strategy a lot more solid than a soggy snowball or a runner’s wobbly legs, and the rewards derived from it will last a lot longer. You can learn more about the benefits of such strategies by downloading our inbound marketing guide (already mentioned above). Happy reading.
Image Credit:startribune.com
