In the past, social media, public relations, content marketing, website development, and brand marketing were all separate disciplines. Inbound marketing is driving their convergence. By integrating these areas into a single inbound marketing business plan, new levels of consistency, efficiency, and effectiveness can be achieved.
However, to achieve these heightened levels of success, you must create an inbound marketing business plan that is strategic and uniquely based on your goals and business needs or you won’t see the results you hope for. When it comes to inbound marketing, you can’t just wing it. You must strategize.
Here’s how to create your inbound marketing business plan that works, either for your business as a whole or for specific marketing campaigns.
To create an inbound campaign that really resonates, you must identify the core demographic that is most likely to be interested in what you’re offering. If not, your generic message, targeted to no one in particular, will fall flat. It’ll fall on deaf ears.
To identify your audience, start by creating a buyer persona profile. It should include demographics, values, identified problems or challenges as well as their solutions, current perceptions, and common objections.
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What do you want to achieve through your online marketing campaign? Your business plan must clearly identify a goal, which might be to generate more website traffic, convert more visitors into leads, and get more newsletter subscribers, or something else entirely. Your goal should be specific, achievable, relevant, and measurable, and time sensitive.
Now that you know your audience and have identified your goal, you must perform keyword research to find keywords and phrases that are relevant to your specific goal and that your audience will be most likely to use when performing search engine queries. Then, optimize the content of your inbound marketing strategy to add in those keywords. This will increase your search engine ranking, which in turn will increase awareness and visibility.
No inbound campaign is going to be effective without the use of fresh, original content. To make sure you keep your content consistent and relevant, plan it out ahead of time. Develop offers, calls-to-action, landing pages, blog posts, and other content that will help you attract and convert potential customers. Make sure you add in your identified keywords to all of this content, including in your headlines and meta descriptions.
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Once your enticing content has reeled in leads, you have to nurture them to move them down the sales funnel. You must turn those leads into customers, so ensure that your business plan includes a section on lead nurturing that will consist of following up with tailored, relevant emails that nudge them a step further in their purchasing decisions.
You’ve completed your business plan. Everything’s in place and your campaign is up and running. Although the hard part—the strategizing—is over, your work isn’t done yet. Throughout the campaign, you’ll need to examine your web analytics and marketing analytics every month to ensure that everything is on track. The easiest way to measure your efforts is to create a tracking URL ahead of time.
If something’s amiss, it’s time to figure out what you’ve done wrong and how to remedy the situation before it’s too late. If you let a poor campaign continue without any adjustments, you’re just wasting money and resources. Make sure you’re measuring your level of success and altering tactics when needed to improve your results.
That’s it! If you follow these six steps, you can create a successful inbound marketing business plan.
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