The success of any marketing campaign – even one that uses automation – depends on the carefully coordinated activities of people who believe in what they are doing. Without that conviction, their efforts will lack both the drive and focus needed to achieve their common goals, and their campaigns will flop in the fashion of so many who have failed to grasp inbound.
We see it time and time again: new inbound practitioners failing because they have learnt the basics of implementation but not the logic that guides sound strategy. To make inbound work for your business, your people need to know the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’. Think of your team’s knowledge in terms of these four areas:
Skills
Values
Processes
Objectives
These six steps will make sure that your team has them.
Get everyone certified
First, the basics. Make sure that your whole team is certified in inbound marketing. You don’t need to have HubSpot to take advantage of their inbound marketing certification, as it’s free. This will give your team a solid grounding in the inbound methodology and put everyone on the same page. If you are going to use the Hubspot platform, you will also want to have some of your people do the HubSpot certification, a course that goes deeper into the nitty gritty of HubSpot processes.Encourage a shift in approach
One of the biggest problems that businesses have when adopting inbound is the shift in approach. Inbound marketing is not about your product – it’s about your customers and their challenges. If this idea causes confusion, make sure that your team really understands the buyer’s journey. Your product should only feature prominently in your messaging and content right at the very end of their journey, when your customers start to compare the different solutions. You’re playing the long game now.Explain your new website layout
Unless your website was designed with inbound in mind, your site will need to be overhauled before it can be used for effective lead generation. HubSpot’s blog on web design can give you an idea of what a great website looks like. User experience is a big part of their winning formula – a point of focus that will make perfect sense to your team if they have grasped the importance of putting their customers at the center of everything they do.
Develop and refine your processes
To ensure consistency in your operations and make the training of new staff smoother, you need to have solid processes in place. Design them around these three things:
Your buyer journeys
Your team structure
Your automation software
From strategy development to analysis and reporting, everything your team does should be guided by processes designed around these elements. Get these down, and you’ll achieve a system that can scale up easily when the opportunities present themselves.
Create a culture for inbound
For people to do something properly, they must want to do it. That’s why it’s so important that you instill the right values in your team. If, up until now, you have only practiced traditional marketing, you’re going to have to teach your marketing and sales teams the principles of delayed gratification (inbound marketing takes time) and instill values that encourage good communication and transparency. If your team never had to rely on or use analytics in the past, you are going to have to emphasise and demonstrate the value it can bring to your campaigns. Show them how data can drive efficiency in both sales and marketing, and they will learn to love metrics.
Set SMART goals and incentivise
In addition to your team’s common goals, your team members need to be given individual goals to shoot for. Like your larger goals, these should be SMART and should include key performance indicators that will give your team a means of assessing their achievements. Make sure to include your staff in the goal-setting process and then incentivise them so that they have a reason to go the extra mile. And if goals and KPI’s change mid campaign, make sure that your team is still rewarded for the hard work they’ve already put in.
You don’t have to do it alone
It takes some time for inbound marketing to start delivering results. If you cannot dedicate resources to an inbound marketing strategy, which won’t generate any revenue for at least three or four months, you might want to enlist the help of an inbound marketing agency. Such a company will already have the tried and tested processes in place and can deliver results faster. To learn more about how we use inbound to generate greater ROI for our clients, download our inbound marketing guide.
Image Credit:http://inboundauthority.com
