5 Steps to Inbound Marketing Campaign Success

If you want to attract traffic, convert visitors, and close sales for your business, then you need of a five-star inbound marketing campaign.

An inbound marketing campaign will promote your business through many different outlets, including blogs, SEO, and social media marketing, just to name a few. Your campaign will ultimately attract potential customers to your company’s website and allow you to begin relationships that can turn into conversions for your company.

It might sound difficult, but with these 5 steps, your inbound marketing campaign is sure to yield successful results.

Step 1: Outlining your campaign

It’s difficult to get anywhere without a roadmap and an inbound marketing campaign is no exception.

Do yourself a favor and create a map of your campaign before you start. That way, all of your expectations, limitations, personas, and keywords will already be established before you even begin.

Expectations

By outlining your expectations for your campaign, you will have specific goals to work toward. Establishing goals is important in order to have clear benchmarks to work toward and know exactly what you have to do to get there.

Limitations

Outline your limitations and make a plan B for things that might not work the first time. For example, if you know that you might have a challenging budget, outline that element as a limitation. Ask yourself how you can change the rest of your campaign to work within your limitations.

By doing so, you won’t be disappointed because you’ve already thought about potential road blocks.

Personas

Forming personas is all about figuring out the target audience for your campaign, and knowing how to communicate with them. In order to create a list of personas, it is helpful to collect information about how your product or service connects with your audience.

Try interviewing current customers to see what they like most about your brand, what your company did to win them over, and what they would change about your product.

Another way to collect information is to take a poll of either interested prospective clients or clients that you lost. Ask your interested clients what drew them to your company and ask lost clients what caused them to leave.

Knowing exactly what current customers love and what future customers need is the key to creating the perfect personas for your campaign outreach.

Keywords

Making a list of keywords will help you put together the perfect inbound marketing campaign because they will be the things that your present and future customers are interested in when it comes to your business.

When interviewing to gain insight on personas, you can also gain insight into what keywords would be of most value to your campaign.

For example, if a current customer said they came to your cabinet company for the granite countertops, you’ll want to target keywords related to granite countertops. Finding out exactly what customers want is the key to finding the perfect keywords for your campaign.

Step 2: Creating content that is geared toward your target audience

Content is the most important aspect of creating a successful inbound marketing campaign. Of course it’s important to actually market your product or service, but informational content can help you reach potential customers in the first place.

In order to use content effectively, you need to provide up to date and accurate information that your customers want to read. It should also utilize the target keywords that you listed in step one, which will ensure that you are marketing to your target audience.

Your inbound marketing campaign is all about satisfying your customers and it has no chance of surviving or thriving if it isn’t directly relevant to them.

Step 3: Knowing your competition

Whether we like it or not, competition will always be out there. Instead of ignoring your competitors, it’s important to acknowledge and analyze their strategies.

Analyzing your competitors’ tactics will help you make sure you don’t fall behind, and possibly give you new ideas for your own strategy. Compare your campaign details with theirs, like the keywords they are targeting, the social media platforms they utilize, and any other methods they are using to attract traffic.

By paying attention to what your competition is doing, you’ll be better equipped to make sure you’re not falling behind on your inbound marketing campaign.

Step 4: Marketing your company

We mentioned content marketing above as an effective way to bring qualified traffic to your site, but isn’t the only inbound marketing strategy you should use. Here’s what to consider when putting together your strategy:

SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the most important ways to ensure that your potential customers can find your company.

SEO involves optimizing your site for specific words and phrases, building links to increase domain authority, and making sure your website’s code is clean and accurate.

All of these factors are extremely important if you want your site to show up in search engine results for the searches related to your industry.

Social media marketing

Social media is one of the best marketing channels available for connecting with potential customers.

Not only will you be able to share your content with followers on your own page, but link shares and likes by people that follow you can ensure that your content is seen by many more users than just your inside circle.

Social media marketing includes numerous platforms and they all have their own benefits.

Facebook- Facebook is a great marketing platform for any business. You can post statuses with company updates, special offers and events, and even share videos that show a behind-the-scenes look at your company’s culture.
Twitter- Using Twitter to market your business also has great benefits, but it differs greatly from Facebook. For example, the lifespan of a tweet, which is about 18 minutes, is much less than the lifespan of a status update on Facebook, which is about 5 hours. You are also limited to 140 characters when using twitter, where as a Facebook status can have as many as 63,206 characters.
Instagram- Though Instagram isn’t a text-heavy social media site, it can be a great platform to post images of new products or services, before-and-after shots of projects, and short video clips pertaining to your company.
LinkedIn- LinkedIn is the only major social media platforms that caters specifically to professionals. If you operate on a B2B model, this is the place to connect and market your company and services to potential clients.

Email marketing

Email marketing is your chance to stay in contact with visitors that converted on your site by filling out a contact form or signing up for a newsletter. Not only does email marketing allow you to reach your target audience directly, but it’s a way to build relationships with those visitors that want to know more about your company.

One of the best email marketing tactics is to send a monthly newsletter that lets your customers know about any changes within your company, new services you plan to offer, awards you receive, or events you are hosting. It’s also a place to promote special offers or deals to your loyal customers.

PPC ads

Though using pay-per-click ads isn’t completely necessary, it definitely gives you a leg up in the world of inbound marketing.

PPC ads work great for businesses on a budget because they allow you to decide just how much you want to spend, down to the day. When you choose your budget for an ad that will run for a week, the ad platform won’t allow you to go over that budget.

PPC works like this:

Customer types search query in Google
Google provides sponsored results (at the very top of the page) and organic results (below the sponsored results)
If a customer clicks a sponsored result, they are taken to a landing page or the homepage that offers the product they searched for
The company that placed the ad will be charged for each click

The last bullet is one of the reasons PPC is such a great option. You don’t have to pay for ad space, since you only get charged when your ad brings you traffic.

CTAs

When a potential customer lands on your website and reads through your content, you want to have a clear call to ensure that they know what to do next.

A call-to-action is a way of leading your website visitors to a step towards converting, like filling out a contact form. This allows you to stay in contact with them about new promotions, new products and changes within your company.

Another example of a call-to-action would be a mobile button with your company’s phone number that prompts visitors to “call now.”

Step 5: Tracking your success

Your results will have far less value if you aren’t tracking how you achieve them.

Tracking your success is one of the most important steps in the inbound marketing campaign process. It is crucial in order to analyze which tactics are working and which tactics aren’t worth your time. This data will also allow you to decide if you should be spending more money or time in any specific area of marketing to increase results.

Are you ready for your own inbound marketing campaign?

If you’re ready for all the awesome results that an inbound marketing campaign can bring to your company, but aren’t sure how to get started, we can help!