Beginners guide to inbound

www.marketingmattersinbound.com

The Beginner’s Guide

To Inbound Marketing

Table of Contents www.marketingmattersinbound.com

What is Inbound Marketing?....................................1-5

How Does Inbound Marketing Work?.....................6-8

How Do You Know it’s Working?.................................9

What’s All This About Content?............................10-15

Content Management Software…………………16-18

Inbound Marketing: The Plan and Process.…….19-23

What is Inbound Marketing?

What is Inbound Marketing?

Y ou’ve heard plenty of buzz about it. You’re pretty sure you should be doing it.

But what—exactly– is inbound marketing?

It’s a holistic, fully integrated approach to building your business via the

internet, based on the Law of Attraction—the belief that like attracts like.

Using this principle, your marketing is specifically aimed at potential customers who are

already attracted to you. You have something they want or need—something they’re

searching for online. And your marketing speaks directly to that, to draw them in.

1 www.marketingmattersinbound.com

Research

Shop

Purchase

Re-Purchase


Inbound Marketing is all about connections

It’s a mosaic of techniques that use your website, blogging, social media and

email to generate and nurture leads and, of course, close sales. Everything is

interwoven, just like it is in the “real world”.

With traditional—or outbound– marketing, you’re advertising products or services

in a somewhat-targeted way — hoping someone takes notice and follows up to

connect with you.

With inbound marketing you don’t waste effort or money

“selling” your products or services to audiences that aren’t

interested.

Instead, you can specifically tailor your messages and delivery formats to reach

different segments of your audience, whether they’re in the very beginning

stages of their search for information or they’re on the verge of a final purchasing

decision. That buying cycle—sometimes called a sales funnel—follows a

predictable course with four stages:

Researching

Shopping

Purchasing

Re-Purchasing


Why are the four stages important?

Someone at the first stage needs different information than someone who’s farther

along in their decision-making process. Because inbound techniques allow you to

tightly target your marketing, you can provide the information your audience wants,

when they want it.

“Inbound marketing techniques help coordinate your internal sales and

marketing efforts, but more importantly, they connect your business with

prospective clients or customers.”

You can establish and develop ongoing relationships that retain customers and turn

them into active promoters of your business. You can even use those connections

to improve your customer services or product research/development.

The engagement process establishes your company as an authoritative, go-to

resource, far more than just a sales outlet. That reinforces your overall branding and

builds the trust that gives prospects confidence to buy.

You can sell more, more often, rather than waiting for them to

come to you.


Inbound Marketing Works. Period.

It works for B2B and B2C businesses.

It works whether you’re a global enterprise or neighborhood gem.

It works no matter what you sell or do.

According to industry giant HubSpot,

statistics show more than 92% of

companies that use inbound techniques

improve lead generation. Of those, 40%

improved lead generation by at least

75%.

And those aren’t just any leads. Thanks to

the Law of Attraction, they’re people

already interested in your products and

services. People can engage, and get to

know your business. You can use your arsenal of inbound marketing tools to connect and

converse with them, converting them into not just customers, but customers-for–life.

40% Of companies that use inbound

techniques improved lead

generation

$100

$150

$200

$250

$300

$350

Inbound Outbound

$135

$346

Inbound vs Outbound Cost Per Lead


Inbound Marketing Works. Period.

89% Of marketers are maintaining or

increasing inbound budgets

$0

57% of marketers acquired

customers from blogging


customers from Twitter


customers from Facebook


customers from Linkedin


customers from their blog

Source: HubSpot “120 Awesome Marketing Stats, Charts & Graphs”

With inbound marketing you don’t waste effort

or money “selling” your products or services to

audiences that aren’t interested.

Marketers are shifting their budgets away from

“interruption” advertising

Inbound Marketing tactics don’t just generate

leads. They generate revenue

How Does Inbound Marketing Work?

T R U S T


How Does Inbound Marketing Work?

There are two things for certain:

People don’t like to be pestered. They want to gather

information when they want it, rather than having sales

messages pushed at them, as is generally the case with

traditional marketing.

Whopping numbers of people now ignore TV and print

ads, and are on the “do not call” list.

Inbound marketing attracts prospects because it meets

them at their point of interest, on their schedule. It puts

them in control, where they’re more comfortable.

The other reason is trust.

People won’t buy from you unless they believe you’re a respectable business with reliable

products or service.


Inbound helps you systematically establish a comfortable, trust-based relationship with your

target audience, to build traffic and generate sales. Here’s how:

It attracts online users, drawing them to your website—

usually via search results. Effective content strategy and

well-researched SEO techniques ensure your business

shows up as close to the top of the page as possible in

search rankings.

Just like any marketing, you can use those calls-to-

action (CTAs) to encourage visitors to take the next

step—”sign up here” or “click here” — encourages

visitors to take the next step. They share their contact

data and become a lead — a warm one at that.

You’ll convert each lead from shopper to buyer by giving

them what they want in the form of relevant, timely,

context-appropriate content. You can nurture leads and

convert them to buyers entirely online or pass qualified

leads to your sales reps at the right time.


Building loyalty is the key to profitability.

Attracting new customers is important. But where inbound marketing really shines is its

ability to create ongoing conversations with existing customers that build strong, lasting

relationships and drive additional sales (both repeat purchases and value-added products

and services).

You re-attract and retain interest by providing continuing relevant content via your blog, e-

newsletter, emails, etc.—all of it personalized, just the way your audience wants it.

Inbound marketing needn’t be an entirely-internet-based process. Millions of businesses use

it to drive traffic into their stores and offices. And you can very effectively use inbound to

cross-sell with your in-store promotions or traditional print or broadcast advertising.

It’s the definition of “versatility”.

Relationships! Sales!

How Do You Know it’s Working?


How do you know it’s working?

How do you know it’s working? Inbound marketing gives you highly detailed

analytics you can use to track how people respond to your online marketing. You

can see the different sources:

You can also see how long they’re there, which pages they visit after, and so on.

You can see exactly what’s working for you and what isn’t, based on your specific

goals. Not driving traffic from social media? Try posting a few times a day or posting

a new article multiple times...

And you can see all this information in real-time, to quickly make alterations that

drive even more traffic and attract people farther into your sales pipeline. Inbound

gives you agility you can’t get anywhere else.

Social Media

Search Results Page

Referrals

Your blog

What’s All This About Content?


What’s all this about “Content”?

Shopping is actually an information-gathering process, whether someone’s looking

for a new outfit, a new accountant or parts suppliers for their manufacturing facility.

“Content” is the material you make available online to provide shopping information

your prospects want.

The most important thing to remember is that content value is in the minds of your

prospects and customers. It’s not about what you want to say or sell. You have to

think like your audience to provide delicious, timely content that’s exactly what

they’re hungry for.

And you have to put that content where they’re looking, so it’s literally just a click

away when they’re ready for it.

http://www.marketingmattersinbound.com/four-es-of-content-marketing/


How do you know what they want?

A popular trend is to create a “persona” for each of your key types of customers.

Personas are imaginary individuals who represent each customer’s relevant attributes.

To create a persona, ask yourself:

Who they are—typical age, gender, where they live, pertinent lifestyle or work-

related functional details

How they consume information—written work, pictures, video, or all three

How they’re searching—from their desktop, from mobile devices?

You also want to consider where they are

in the purchasing funnel. Using your

personas as a guide, you can formulate

content that educates, to satisfy their

initial research. You can engage

prospects with ongoing conversation and

participation, guiding them through their

decision-making stages toward a point of

sale.

And once they buy, you can continue to

embrace them with personalized

engagement, so they become repeat

customers.


Website

You have to provide a comfortable user-friendly experience

for visitors, or they’ll quickly leave. Make sure your website’s

navigation is easy to find and follow, without visual clutter.

Include obvious links to your blog and social media sites.

SEO

If people can’t easily find you when they’re searching online,

you’re out of luck. That’s where search engine optimization, or

SEO, comes in. When you type something into your browser,

search engines like Google scour the internet almost instantly,

using a complicated algorithm to find citations that best

match whatever you type. That’s why keywords are so critical.

If your online content doesn’t include the words people use to

search for your products or services, you’ll never show up in

the results. End of story.

There are different types of content delivery channels


Blog

Blogging is widely considered the single-most valuable

inbound marketing technique, beyond having a good

website. You can use your blog to discuss news about your

company or industry, provide useful tips and how-to

information about your products and services. You’ll want to

include links leading to and from your blog content. Once you

“humanize” your company you will find more customers and

social media contacts who are willing to share your story.

Social Media

Social media interactions are great for sharing snippets of

information and links. Your posts should be things people can’t

resist sharing. Social media interactions also help build

ongoing engagement with prospects and customers. You can

learn more about them, conduct surveys, collect content

topic ideas, etc.

Email

You can utilize mass emails to broadcast your message to a

certain list of your customers and prospects. You can also

create nurturing campaigns leading them down the funnel to

the next stage and ultimately to a purchase.


Aside from your blog, popular content options are:

While original content is important, you don’t have to create everything

yourself:

Curation—re-sharing someone else's content– creates links to other thought-

leaders and authority sites, which reflects well on you.

Repurposing your own original content is another smart way to get more

mileage from good material. Turn a series of related blog articles into

whitepaper or e-book or webinar content into an infor-graphic. Curation saves

time and builds relationships with other content producers.

Content success comes from diversity and balance. Changing it up with

different formats keeps things interesting.

There are different types of content formats

Webinars Photos Videos eBooks


For all the marketing you do yourself, third-party

recommendations always carry more influence with shoppers.

After all, people expect you to say good things about your

company and products, but an “outsider” appears unbiased.

The reviews and referrals you attract online are a tremendous

selling tool.

You don’t have to do it all at once.

You don’t even want to. Content marketing is an ongoing

process, so it’s constantly evolving. And there is so much

opportunity, it can be overwhelming when you’re new to it. The

key to success and sanity is to start small and work your way up.

Start a blog. And pick a major social media platform—Google+,

Facebook or Linkedin—that reflects your customer profile. Set up

a publishing schedule that’s not over ambitious, so you can stick

to it.

Content helps other people sell for you

92% Of companies that use

inbound improve lead

generation

Of those companies,

40% improved lead

generation by 75%

75%

Quality and consistency trump quality and randomness.

Content Management Software


Content management software is your new best friend

Thankfully, some savvy techies have created content management software that

can make your online marketing life so much easier. These applications are

comprehensive and fully integrated,. They allow you to create great content,

target it and publish it when and where it will be most attractive to and engaging

to prospects in those all-important conversations (that ultimately lead to sales

and lasting loyalty).

Content management software is automated and

coordinated, making your online and in-person

marketing efforts more efficient and more

effective.

But the best part is analytics—the critical area

where traditional advertising falls woefully short but

inbound marketing truly stands out.

Automation

Content

Analytics


Your software choices

You can see what’s working and what isn’t. If you

pay attention, you can’t go wrong. You can gather

detailed, useful information, right away. Use it to

keep refining your marketing content and delivery

choices. Ditch what’s not working and do more of

what’s producing tangible results.

There are several content management software

packages available. To varying degrees, they all

include components that help you improve SEO, create

content, build landing pages and contact forms and

nurture leads using email. And they all have extensive

measurement tools.

Top-notch,

customizable software

can keep your online

marketing organized

and on-track to save

you time.

HubSpot is widely used by both B2B and B2C

marketers. It includes blogging and social media

components.

Marketo is a popular program that includes a social

media component, along with a tool that helps

market your events.

Pardot and Eloqua are strong B2B oriented programs

with components that focus more on scoring leads

and managing online marketing campaigns


“29.8% of companies using

HubSpot have increased the traffic

to their site more than 100%”

Source: HubSpot 2013

The platform you choose for your inbound marketing must be open-source

and dynamic. Requirements include:

Internal access

Ease of internal updating

Analytics and CRM integration

We recommend HubSpot for inbound marketing software. For comparison

articles:

HubSpot vs Eloqua

HubSpot vs Pardot

HubSpot vs Marketo

http://www.marketingmattersinbound.com/internet-marketing-systems/inbound-marketing-solutions-hubspot-vs-eloqua/

http://www.marketingmattersinbound.com/internet-marketing-systems/inbound-marketing-solutions-hubspot-vs-pardot/

http://www.marketingmattersinbound.com/internet-marketing-systems/inbound-marketing-solutions-hubspot-vs-marketo/

Inbound Marketing:

The Plan and The Process


You Need a Plan

Remember Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat? He wisely informed Alice that if she

didn’t know where she was going, any road would do. If he were here today, he

would tell you that a strategic plan can do more to improve your marketing than

any amount of clever content.

Why?

Because your content can’t be effective without being strategically focused. And

you can’t take advantage of inbound marketing’s outstanding targeting

opportunities unless you know who you’re trying to reach.

You need a plan that’s tailored to your needs and scaled to fit your business. Scale

matters because you have to work your plan to see the results. So, implementing it

has to be manageable based on the time and personnel commitment you’re able

to make.


Start with your goals in mind

What are your overall business goals? Increased sales? Expansion, either in terms of

products or services you offer or in terms of geographic distribution? The point of

marketing is to achieve those goals, so your marketing plan has to be aligned with

company priorities.

Remember that inbound marketing is based on relationship-building,

not just racking up immediate sales. Remember, too, that you have

several different customer segments, based on your various personas

as well as where they are in their buying cycle. Your marketing plan

should reflect that, so you’re working to build ongoing engagement

and long-term customer loyalty that will drive future sales.

Most importantly, your objectives have to be actionable and

measureable so you can evaluate your progress. Whether you call

them benchmarks, key performance indicators or something else,

you need specifics against which you can compare your marketing

results. Inbound Marketing provides you with a wealth of information,

but all analytical data in the world won’t help you if you don’t know

what success looks like.


Inbound marketing is a process

Armed with your strategic plan and implementation tactics,

you’re ready to put inbound marketing to work. The key to

success is creating great content and regularly reviewing and

analyzing how that content is performing for you, based on the

metrics you’ve chosen.

Because you can see this information almost immediately,

you’ll quickly know if you need to make changes. Over time,

you can learn a great deal about your target audiences—

information that will help you further refine your marketing

and even your products.

So, while you can see right away if you’re attracting and

engaging the right people, the greatest value will come from

the long-term relationships you create with customers. This is

where inbound marketing succeeds and traditional

marketing falls off.


You don’t have to go in alone

You probably don’t do your own legal or accounting work. In the

same way, teaming up with an inbound marketing professional can

bring you better results, fast. Digital marketing is a highly complex field,

one that’s constantly evolving and understanding the nuances takes

time.

With an expert at your side you can focus on your own core business

responsibilities, confident that you’re getting sound advice—and any

amount of assistance you need—to build a productive inbound

marketing program.

Even if you have an in-house sales and marketing team, an outside

expert can work with them to devise an online plan that strategically

supports the rest of your marketing, ensure everything you do online is

exactly on target, and evaluate the results. They can help you avoid

common mistakes and make the most productive use of your time.


It’s essential for success in today’s marketplace. Any marketplace,

whether your prospects and customers are very local or they encircle

the globe.

It’s a building process, so you can expect to make incremental

progress—attracting friends and fans, engaging them with your

content and getting to know them better—as you guide them to buy.

As time goes on, you’ll be able to turn those customers into dedicated fans who

not only continue to buy, but become a new sort of marketing team, sharing their

excitement about your content, your company and products with their own

networks of friends.

There’s no need to feel overwhelmed. You can start small and expand your

inbound marketing program as you become comfortable with the process. But be

consistent.

And have fun with it.

Inbound marketing is not just useful…

www.marketingmattersinbound.com

Scott A. Miller

314-442-4444

Scott Miller is an Inbound Marketing

Author, Strategist and Consultant.

He founded Marketing Matters in 1996

and leads a team of Inbound

Marketers.

He invented the Einstein Inbound

Assessment & AGI Pyramid.

His clients realize unusually high,

measurable ROI.

@Tuxmiller

@M2Inbound

[email protected]

http://www.marketingmattersinbound.com/website-audit/

http://www.marketingmattersinbound.com/website-audit/

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