The Ultimate Guide To Inbound Marketing In 2020

Inbound Marketing may seem like a huge topic, with loads of areas to study up on, but at its core is a very simple idea: meeting your customers only when they want to be found.

The Inbound methodology is a circular one, which we’ll dive into in detail throughout this post. However, to sum it up in a nutshell, you can think of it as three steps:

1. Instead of disrupting people with scatter-gun advertising, Inbound Marketing focuses all your efforts on attracting only those who are most likely to become a customer. You do this by producing content that provides value and inspires trust.
2. Once you’ve gained visibility with the right audience, you then engage them by bringing value at every stage of their buyer’s journey.
3. For those prospects that become customers, you continue to delight them so that they eventually become an advocate. Advocates will, as the name suggests, organically advocate for your business. Ultimately this attracts new potential leads, who you’ll then engage until they too become customers. As before, you delight these new customers and the cycle continues.

This attract, engage and delight cycle is the core fundamental principle of Inbound Marketing, and it’s the secret to marketing investment that continually delivers results and returns.

We browse blogs and websites, social media channels and watch videos online, meaning there are countless potential touch points for brands to reach us.

Smart Inbound Marketing is about understanding and capitalizing on these touch points to provide value and inspire trust.

Yet Inbound Marketing doesn’t end with creating excellent content that enables customers to find you. It is also the holistic and strategic management of the customer journey up to and beyond the point of sale. It is the use of automation tactics to deliver the content at the right time. It is the nurturing of relationships across the communication channels that your buyer personas find most practical. It is the constant build of value and trust, and making your brand feel human so that they can connect with you

Put simply: it is a human and helpful approach to marketing, that is ultimately more efficient and effective at improving your bottom line.

This guide will cover the basic principles of Inbound Marketing, so you can begin your journey to attract, engage and delight your customers, starting now.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

1. How Does Blogging Help Inbound Marketing?
2. What Are The Fundamentals of Social Media Promotion?
3. Understanding Lead Nurturing in Inbound Marketing
4. Applying a Customer Centric Approach

1. How Do You Plan A Long Term Content Strategy?

Content plays a fundamental role in Inbound Marketing. Its function is to educate and entertain your potential customers, so that you can build trust and, eventually, convert prospects into customers.

However, writing the odd blog post when you find yourself at a loose end will never suffice.

But, I hear you. Creating that strategic plan can be overwhelming, so let’s break it down.

Remember, the function of your content is to help you be found by people who have a problem that your business solves. So focus your key message around these themes.

In Inbound Marketing, matching the buyer’s journey with the marketing funnel is known as the ‘Marketing Machine’.

Understanding where and how people interact with your business, and what they will need to know at each stage to help them progress, is a challenging process. It is not something you’ll be able to develop overnight. It takes in-depth planning that you continually test and iterate.

So don’t rush this part. Bring all parts of your team into the mix and get both customer and product facing insights, and then just start mapping it out (here’s a guide if you need a hand).

Now let’s get to writing down your plan:

1. Set Marketing Goals

Marketing goals give you long term vision and short term motivation. Each piece of content should be tied to an overarching goal of your organisation.

For example, a goal may be number of page visitors, post shares or newsletter sign ups.

Remember: before you set a goal, ask yourself why this specific metric matters to your business, otherwise it’s just data for data’s sake.

When setting goals, make sure they are data driven, and make them S.M.A.R.T.

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

2. Audit and Assess Your Current Initiatives or Assets

Log existing assets: Each organisation will naturally have a set of materials you’ve already created. Assess where (or if) they fit in your buyer’s journey and repurpose them for future use.

Review your events calendar: Events act as gold mines for future content. What could be created? Could a future conference provide video material, instagram stories or a webinar opportunity?

3. Identify The Buyer’s Journey For Your Buyer Personas

Understand your buyer personas and their progression through the buyer journey.

What kind of people are your potential customers? Think about their age, their social and demographic profile, their age, if they have kids, are college educated, what they like to do online and how they spend their free time. This will help you to start to think of your buyers as real people, cause… well, they are.

Questions it helps to consider during this phase are:

• What is your buyer’s key problem?
• What could help them?
• What are their core goals and needs?
• What content do they need to help them meet their goals or needs?
• What is their internet behavior like?
• What do they do in their spare time?
• What motivates them? What turns them off?

4. Map and Plan the Relevant Pieces of Content.

Now you have an understanding of your buyer personas, existing assets and marketing objectives, it’s time to think about what you need to create to meet your goals.

To do this, think about what your personas need at different stages of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness Phase: Educational material such as e-books, blog posts or video content that helps them define and understand their problem.
• Engagement Phase: Touch points that help them get to know you as a business, such as webinars, Q&A’s, or Facebook Live streams.
• Delight Phase: Exclusive content or invites to events that only customers can receive.

To explore in further detail how to create your plan, and to look at some examples, check out my eBook — 32 Enviable Inbound Marketing Examples. (Coming soon with 2020 update!)

2. How Does Blogging Help Inbound Marketing?

Blog posts will likely make up the bulk of your content strategy. That’s because publishing regular blogs provides the dual function of both enabling search engines to find your website, and also providing educational value to your customers. As we’ve already discussed, Inbound Marketing is all about establishing trust by providing value, which is why this is so important.

A search engine like Google has one simple goal: to take the user to the best, most relevant answer to their query.

To do that, you need to show a depth and breadth of quality information, delivered in a way that is optimized for how Google’s algorithm determines how useful your content is.

This means not only writing amazing content, but also having it optimized for search results. This is, at its most basic level, all that SEO really is.

Your blog provides an opportunity for you to step away from talking about yourself as a business, and to discuss, reflect on, or applaud activities or actions that are going on in your customer’s world.

If this feels counter intuitive, think about what the main function of your blog is: you want people to find you that have never heard of you before. As such, sharing internally focused information about your latest office renovation, or even your latest product release, is not going to help with those efforts. Nobody will ever search for these things.

However, publishing blog posts that are about wider topics that your competitor might equally have a view on, gives you the opportunity to become the thought leader and voice of authority in your industry — instead of your competitor. Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.

3. What Are Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages and Why Do I Need Them?

Today, simply writing blogs that include multiple references to your target keywords is no longer enough to get found online.

Search engines are forcing us to get smarter. With Google’s updates, we have moved to thinking about phrases rather queries, and from keywords to organisation. Hummingbird and Rankbrain

We’re very much in an era of writing for humans, not machines ( Amen to that!) .

Google also looks at historical user engagement with your content in order to understand its value, rewarding those sites that keep visitors within their site for longer. What this means is that your content needs to be structured in a way that encourages people to stay on your site for as long as possible, by providing levels of value that visitors can explore in their own way.

Think about how many times you’ve gotten lost on Wikipedia going from one interesting topic to another. With the right strategy in place, your blog can have exactly the same effect.

This is the ‘Topic Cluster and Pillar Page’ strategy.

Once you have defined your core topic, break that down into subtopics to create a cluster. This will be made of short phrases or statements that relate to the overarching theme of your core topic.

For example, if your core topic is ‘Sales Qualification’, then your subtopics can be things such as ‘What is a qualified prospect’, ‘When to disqualify a prospect’ or ‘Qualification frameworks’.

Real people will be engaging with your site, and if the experience is frustrating or meaningless, they will quickly leave your site (remember: we want people to stay for as long as possible as this helps your ranking).

So whilst it’s important to optimise your content for search engines, first and foremost we have to keep people at the centre of everything you do.

4. What Are The Fundamentals Of Social Media Promotion?

When developing your strategy, you must first understand who you are trying to reach. The starting point to this (as we saw already with content marketing) is to establish a persona, with as much texture, richness and detail that you can.

As I mentioned before: a persona is a semi-fictional representation of the type of person that is most likely to buy your product. You give them a name, age, marital status, educational background, likes, dislikes, beliefs, habits; namely anything that can build a picture of who they are and what they do, so that can speculate where they will be and what they want to hear when we connect with them.

Different channels serve different audiences: Snapchat is skewed young, Pinterest is skewed female; Facebook’s demographics are ageing and Instagram is having huge growth with under 35s.

Consider carefully the drawbacks and limitations of each channel during this process. For example, Instagram is a platform to share images and stories, and so if you have a powerful piece of blog content, decide whether it is the right channel to share it.

5. How Do Conversations Work With Inbound Marketing?

The growth of social media means there are now multiple ways in which a customer can have a conversation with your business.

Beyond phone and email, your customers can now tweet you, leave a comment on your Instagram posts, share a review on Facebook or send you a direct message on Snapchat.

It can be as simple as engaging with people who comment on your posts on Instagram, right through to offering customer support through Facebook Messenger. No matter the medium, the important thing is that your tailor your communication style to fit the audience and channel, and that you make it meaningful, valuable and trustworthy.

6. Why Are Conversions Important For Inbound Marketing?

Conversions are intrinsically tied with data. When you are trying to decide on the placement of newsletter sign up box, the color of your call to action buttons or the layout of your blog posts data on user behavior will help you to make better, more objective decisions.

Google analytics will give you a comprehensive overview of how and where conversions are happening, while tools such as Hotjar provide the type of behavioral heat maps that can show you precisely how users are behaving while on your site. These types of tools help you take speculation out of the equation, and remove biases you may have.

We think of conversions as being ‘paths’, because the idea is similar to walking down an unknown path in real life.

You begin at the start, not knowing where you’re going to end, but if the route ahead of you is clear and safe, and you are enticed down for some reason, you will likely continue to follow all the way to the end. So to create a beautifully safe and encouraging conversion path, you must:

Step 1. Create a visual awareness

This can take the form of buttons, icons or pop-ups and should be placed where a visitor is likely to find it. They need to know where the path starts!

Step 2. Determine your end point

Where is your conversion path attempting to guide the visitor? You have to know where you’re going, in order to best get them there.

Step 3. What is the best way to tie the flow together?

Landing pages are often a great way to build the conversion path, but you can also consider messaging apps or live chat. Think about what information they might need to receive on their journey, to keep them engaged throughout the engagement path.

Step 4. Analyze

Get a health check on how conversion path is working, using data to understand what is happening. Is it aligned with expectations? Where do users tend to leave? Can you think why?

7. How Do You Create A Conversion Optimization Strategy?

Every time that we create a conversion path, we do so with an inherent set of assumptions. We use our previous experience, competitor assessment, or educated speculation, to build what we hope will be a successful route to conversion.

Experimenting enables you to learn and understand what your visitors actually like and respond to, rather than just your best theory of what they will like.

This constant iteration and improvement keeps your website like a well-oiled machine, constantly widening every stage of your sales funnel, increasing the numbers that convert to sales and help the bottom line of your business.

1. Define Your Objective

With that in mind, you are ready to start setting up conversion optimization experiments using the following methodology:

2. Establish Your Baseline

Where will this experiment fit in your overall company goals? What are you trying to change, and why? Step into the shoes of your persona and ask what problem of theirs you are trying to solve. Remember, only test one element at a time, otherwise you won’t know which variable impacted your results.

3. Form a Testable Hypothesis

Understand where you are today. What are your current click-through-rates, downloads or bounce rates? Write these down so that you can compare against them later on.

4. Design Your Tests

Six factors typically affect conversion: value proposition, relevance, clarity, anxiety, distraction and urgency. Pick only one area, and only one element to test a time, so that you accurately assess the impact of that change.

5. Analyse Your Data

Take a look at your numbers before and now with you changes, are the differences significant? It’s a huge thrill to see a hypothesis proved to be correct, but always be critical of your data. We naturally want to see signs that we were correct, but make sure you are objective in your analysis. Don’t just see what you want to.

8. Understanding Lead Nurturing in Inbound Marketing

Websites that are well optimized will bring you a constant flow of new leads. What you choose to do with those leads is called Lead Nurturing.

Lead Nurturing primarily sits in the ‘engage’ stage of the ‘attract, engage and delight’ methodology of Inbound Marketing. And, as we’ve already discussed, the timeliness and relevance of your communications is critical here.

Delivering the right content at the right time is what will make your contact either continue to engage with you, or become disenchanted and leave.

Luckily, there are some powerful marketing automation tools that can do the heavy lifting for you. Repetitive tasks such as emails, social media or follow ups can be automated so that the contact feels engaged, in a helpful, human and holistic way.

Before you create your Lead Nurturing plan, you need to be able to define the following elements:

Contact management (CRM)

How do you understand who your contacts are, what their needs are and where they are at in the buyer’s journey? Importantly, how do you then share this information across your marketing, sales and operational functions?

Segmentation

How do you group your contacts, based on their needs? If you are a pet store, do you know what type of pets your customers have? If you are a travel agency, do you know your frequent flyers, ski trip enthusiasts or luxury travellers?

The Buyer’s Journey

This is awareness, consideration and decision. When your visitor exhibits a specific behaviour on your site, where can we infer that they are on the buyer’s journey?

With these key elements defined, you are now ready to establish a Lead Nurturing strategy.

9. Aligning Your Marketing With Your Sales

This needs to be a team effort, where you decide collectively on how to categorize your leads. Remember that this is a model, and models require inputs, around which you can learn and improve. If you feel you are losing potentially strong leads because of a problem with your definitions, make changes. It is not static.

It enables your sales team to act more like consultants than sellers , because by the time contacts arrive to the sales team, your marketing efforts have already established a wealth of information that enables problem solving consultation.

So when leads move in your matrix from being defined as unqualified to qualified, the sales team is primed to succeed.

The SLA should contain real targets that commit both your sales and marketing teams to objective levels of achievement.

For example, if your business needs 15 sales per month to be profitable, and you know that you convert 30% of leads to sales, then marketing must commit to providing 50 qualified leads per month.

The SLA must contain targets that are achievable, but that are also based in the reality of what your business needs to be profitable. To do this, you should know the average time it takes to turn a lead into an opportunity, and an opportunity into a sale. You should also know the average value of that sale. With this time and value limited information to hand, you can set about making an SLA that sets everyone up for success.

10. Applying a Customer Centric Approach

The final piece in the Inbound Marketing strategy exists beyond the point of sale, and is why the Inbound Marketing strategy is represented as cyclical in nature.

This can take the form of amazing customer service, online surveys, follow-up calls or direct conversations. Responses you receive must be followed up with genuine action..

Customers are likely to not remember a specific problem or issue, but an overall feeling that they get from interacting with your company. Always ensure that you have their feelings and emotional response to you in mind, so that they go on to spread that to other potential customers when they talk about you.

This guide has provided an overview of how Inbound Marketing can work for your business. There is a world of information out there that you can find on my blog, where I delve deep into each area. Make sure you look around to get a better understanding of how each element of Inbound Marketing functions to attract, engage and delight your customers. Want to implement an inbound marketing approach in your business? Click here to schedule a 15 minute marketing audit with me — FREE!