10 Steps to Implement a Successful Inbound Marketing Strategy

If you are looking forward to crushing the 2020 growth goals and setting new records in 2021, it is time to go for the killer inbound marketing plan. Precisely, you have to help potential customers find your company. It is a powerful strategy to generate leads and increase conversions.  However, the most challenging aspect of implementing the inbound marketing plan is knowing the right steps to proceed. When you own a business, you already know that there are a few things that will draw the attention of potential clients, like

• Topical blogs
• Attractive website design
• Social media campaigns (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest)
• Viral videos
• Webinars
• eBooks

Here, you will learn about the 10 steps of executing the strategies for a better impact on the business. 

• Set your goals

While building the 2021 inbound marketing plan, it is essential to define your goals for the program. It is important for a few good reasons.

• Putting the goals on pen and paper ensures that all the stakeholders are on the same page. You get the liberty to set and manage the expectations. 
• Unless the team knows what you expect as the planning outcome, it is impossible to implement the strategies. It would be best if you communicated what’s the inbound marketing definition and process for your company.

For instance, if you want to increase the website traffic by 50%, you will need much more robust planning than a company whose aim is to increase the traffic by 10% only.  Also, it will inform the team how much effective content you need to ensure the proposed growth in the number of visitors to the website. 

• Crafting personas

Once you have set the marketing goals, it is time to identify the target audience. 

• Which category of buyers is purchasing your product the most?
• What is the average age and sex of the buyers?
• Who’s taking an interest in checking out the products? 

Answering these questions will help you to identify the target market. Also, you can now think about how to connect to more people of the same category. To figure this out, you have to make target personas that are semi-fictitious representations of the ideal customers. Target personas don’t have to be complex.  Think for half an hour, and collect information on

• Age range
• Job functions
• Defining characteristics
• Professional background

It will be enough to create an effective message and connect to them.

• Mapping the buyer’s journey

Now, this is a tricky stretch, where you need to find out the path following which a potential customer becomes a customer of your company. Inbound marketing ideas categorize the buyer’s journey in three phases:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision

In the awareness stretch, a customer gathers information about a product or service in general.  Once aware, the customer will start looking for all the content available on the service or product to know about companies like yours and the closest competitors.  The final stage is all about evaluating your company and deciding why the company will be the best choice.  The contents should be strong enough to convince and motivate customers, mostly during the second and third phases. 

• Research on the competitors

Conduct some high-level competitive research to understand what are the factors possibly contributing to the awe-inspiring growth of the other companies

1. How big is the website
2. The activity level on social media
3. Quality of blogs
4. What content offers are there
5. What’s their message
6. What makes them unique

Once you understand these points about the competitors, you can make informed decisions regarding inbound marketing strategies and create unique content for prospective buyers. 

• Extensive keyword research

This year also, the inbound marketing will depend mostly on traffic and lead generation from organic searches. So, intelligent keyword research will be a huge responsibility. It would help if you organized the keyword research into clusters of topics. Also, evaluate the potential keywords considering four chief factors:

• Relevance
• Difficulty level
• Monthly search volume
• Current ranking

Once you analyze the use of keywords, it is possible to understand the intent behind the traffic-driving queries. Now provide the corresponding exact answers through the contents. 

• Weaving content strategy

If you have completed identifying the target audience and diagnosing what drives them, you have to link the research result with mapping the buyer’s journey. Cross-relating the results will help to confirm the potential buyers and determine their general line of conversion. It is time to put the strategy now into a central plan and start implementation on practical ground.  You must include the following in the content strategy:

1. Blogging calendar
2. Content offers are applicable to all stages of the buyer’s journey
3. Email marketing schedule

Audio-video assets will be the most potent tool for effective inbound marketing.

• Website designing

The inbound marketing plan won’t work in a silo. You need to integrate it with the website and all the main marketing channels. It is not an easy task to incorporate elements in each page to enhance the curiosity of the potential visitors. 

• Keep the landing page simple and reflective of your product or service
• The call to action button should be prominent
• Map relevant content offers to the content pages
• Maintain easy navigation process

A curious visitor will stay for more than one minute on your page if all the elements suit the needs and requirements of the visitor. 

• Being social

The social media arm of the company is the mandatory and most functional unit of inbound marketing planning and execution. Since the pandemic, consumers have been more and more active on social media, and it is the truth on the global platform. So, it is imperative to establish a strong social media presence if you aim to establish your brand. You can also refer to the top social media marketing growth tips from various high-quality sources and apply them to connect to the potential audience across social media platforms. You have to learn the unique set of rules, best practices, and guidelines for marketing across individual platforms. 

• Accurate implementation

You have to build bulletproof accountability to the plan so that nothing can go wrong during the execution. Otherwise, the strategies will be in the waiting zone of virtual shelves for months. The active procedure includes

• making a list of the tasks that must happen in the initial phase of the inbound program
• assigning primary and secondary owners of the task
• setting the deadlines.

• Optimization is ultimate

Without optimizing the contents, you will lag behind the competitors, even if you develop unique content every alternate day. Ensure the following checks every time.

• Improvement in conversion rates on the home page and other important web pages.
• Update historical contents for SEO, relevancy, and CRO
• upgrade email marketing performance metrics like click-through rates and open rates.
• Add a chat element on the website for better conversion.

Prioritization of the framework and the strategy will help in sequential implementation. If the execution path is correct, you can expect to get better results quickly. Being more popular on social media will definitely increase the conversion rate. Your business can grow exponentially by following the above ten steps during the implementation of the inbound marketing strategies.