What Does Inbound Marketing Include

What Does Inbound Marketing Include:

from Business 2 Community by Nic Windley


Ever wondered what does inblund marketing include ? Well waht better perspective to tell it from an inbound marketing company that help companies get found and maximise their return from digital marketing.
Traditional outbound marketing agencies have relied on broadcasting message to individuals or companies that represent a certain target profile or market segment using mainstream media.
However, there is no guarantee with this approach that members of these audiences are actually in a position to buy or even consider your product or service in the first place.
On the other hand people that are actively seeking your product or service or wishing to learn about their situation or problem in order to understand what product or service they may need are potential customers that you should be engaging.
The Internet is the arena where Inbound Marketing comes to life as its where potential customers seek out knowledge and potential suppliers. The Internet however is a complex and fragmented marketing arena which is why specialist agencies and technologies have developed to assist companies looking to engage audiences online more effectively.
Whilst the right technology will certainly help to improve your results, by itself its not enough, so here is an overview of 8 steps that an Inbound Marketing agency would perform in order to make a significant difference on your online marketing results and help answer the question what does inbound marketing include.

Positioning You And Your Business In The Market

• Clearly define and differentiated your business.
• Understand where its going and how you’re going to get there.
• Define who your business specifically appeals to and why.
• Detail what triggers will be used to get your business found online.
• Be clear about why people should buy from you.
• Describe how its going to be explained.
• Nail down your sustainable advantage and the value you bring to the market
• Explain what you need to do to be seen as the leader in your market.

Developing Your Core Online Presence

• Establish a website with the systems for lead generation and content publishing.
• Produce key content that connects with visitors to your website.
• Develop landing pages and offers that convert visitors into leads.
• Build in on-site SEO to improve the chances of being found.

Defining Your Key Audiences & Personas

• Who is your customer and what challenges do they face.
• Determine who beyond your immediate customers your marketing should influence.
• What stand or issue can you champion to polarise your positioning.

Setting Objectives & Goals

• Establish how you will define success.
• Which keywords, what levels of traffic and the splits between paid and organic traffic.
• Number of conversions and resulting sales.
• Positioning in search engines and referrals from social media.
• Media enquiries, subscribers, downloads and inbound links.
• Retention and on-going engagement from current and future customers.

Developing Campaigns

Search Marketing – How will you get found in local search, paid search and organic (SEO) search and for what keywords and how will you measure it, what landing pages will you need and how will link building be done to increase your sites authority.
Social Marketing – Listening, learning and engaging through blogging, crowdsourcing, forums, conversation monitoring, bookmarking, networking and surveys.
Content Marketing – What content will you produce to establish your competitive advantages such as articles, blog posts, case studies, eBooks, images and vidoes, webinars and ebooks.
Public Relations – Sharing your unique story, creating connections, gaining influence, building loyalty without being solely reliant on main stream media. Connect with market influencers at all levels from analysts to employees.

Helping You Allocate Budgets

• Switching budgets from paying for exposure to paying for engagement.
• What needs to be done to improve your current online marketing
• The content that will need to be created to engage audiences.
• Transitioning from paid to organic search marketing
• How goals will be reached given current skill levels, competition and commitment.

Project Managing

• Set realistic milestones and activity to reach goals.
• Establish customer training for participation and involvement.
• Set out key editorial calendars and alignment.
• Launch company blog.
• Distribute SEO press releases.
• Engage paid marketing campaigns.
• Broadcast videos.
• Complete competitive analysis for benchmarking.
• Set monthly campaign.
• Monitor social media stream.
• Publish case studies.

Setting Up Analytics & Performing Analysis

• Define meaningful metrics that can be monitored and evaluated.
• Tracking core metrics like leads, sales and loyalty.
• Monitor key events and triggers to understand their impact on marketing outcomes.
• Feeding back results into the plan so that it can be updated and improved.

A platform is key to performing this activity reliably and consistently which is why various inbound marketing software applications exist to help with this endeavour.