Tech-savvy enterprises know that customers drive website design. How customers interact with the website, how they arrive, how they navigate, what they search for, the time they spend on a landing page, and if that page converts, all help to determine how the website is laid out. It’s the same with your inbound marketing strategy. Your customers drive that strategy and it’s essential that your company not get stuck with outdated concepts and redundant approaches that don’t service the needs of your customers.
You must use more than one inbound marketing strategy. Paid traffic by itself doesn’t work. Organic traffic by itself doesn’t work. You need a multi-faceted approach that’s focused on who your buyer personas are, how they make decisions, and how they move from interested prospect to brand evangelist.
The internet is constantly changing as are the ways in which consumers use it. We are in a world where mobile searches are increasing at lightning speed and leaving conventional laptop searches far behind. Your digital strategies must be able to respond in kind and they must be able to reach customers in real-time.
Commit Yourself to Understanding Your Audience
Defining your buyer personas is never a one-time event. Their likes and dislikes are always in flux. What they use as online resources, how they make decisions, and how they interact with each other online is constantly changing. Brand-loyal customers aren’t guaranteed to stay if your competition is always upping the ante in their digital marketing strategies. Customers want companies that are engaged and involved. They value partnerships and adhere to brands with a like-minded message, one that resonates with them personally. A single inbound strategy can’t build your brand.
Your marketing and sales team have to continually interact with your audience. This means increasing customer engagement within your digital funnel. Having a static inbound marketing strategy doesn’t cut it. Understanding your buyer personas means knowing how and when to review what makes them tick. Keeping abreast of who your buyer personas are can help to align your digital strategies while ensuring each of your digital channels are optimized.
Identifying Marketing Goals and Objectives
Yes, you want more revenue. Yes, you want more customers. These are given. However, how you get more revenue and more customers through your digital strategies must be planned in advance. Your marketing goals and objectives should be intrinsically tied to your organization’s goals. While you may want to win more customers and generate more sales, not defining the role your digital strategies will play in achieving these goals is a recipe for disaster.
Be sure to outline your marketing goals. It can be as simple as stating that you want to increase paid traffic by 25%, organic traffic by 30%, and click-through-rates (CTR) on calls-to-action (CTAs) for each landing page by 10%. You can then outline other goals like increasing customer retention by 5% over a given quarter or year. Defining your marketing goals will make upgrading your inbound marketing strategy a much easier pursuit.
Look to the Past
A good strategy is to use historical indicators to define your future actions. You can start by reviewing past marketing campaigns and defining what the increase in traffic meant to your business. Did you increase traffic but not see an increase in CTR and conversions? Better yet, do you know what your costs per conversion were on each of your previous campaigns and how that compares with the industry average? Understanding the costs and returns of previous campaigns will help you narrow down what must change moving forward. It does no good to drive more traffic to your website if that traffic isn’t made up of your target audience.
Evaluate Performance of Existing Strategies and Identify Your Gap
Let’s assume you’re not a company with a single inbound marketing strategy. You’re leveraging several. How are they doing? Are you able to attain your marketing goals with the digital strategies you have in place? Do you need to revamp them for different buyer personas or do you have to add to them with new approaches? Evaluating the performance of your existing strategies is key to identifying your digital marketing gap.
It may simply be a matter of increasing touchpoints along your buyer’s journey by providing after-sales email marketing campaigns and newsletters highlighting new offers, new products or auxiliary support products. You might decide to use retarget marketing to capture interrupted online searches. You might decide to rethink your content marketing strategy, put together a plan to proactively manage your online reputation, or come up with a more aggressive and time-sensitive social media strategy.
Companies nowadays are investing in their own apps and are even venturing into the world of virtual reality (VR) advertising. You may have a customer base that’s starting to veer towards visual platforms like Snapchat or Instagram. Other times it’s merely a question of leveraging well-established social platforms like using Facebook Messenger for Business. In the end, it’s about understanding your buyer personas and identifying the tools you need to reach them.
A Systematic Approach
By no means are we implying that creating and managing an inbound marketing strategy is easy. It isn’t. It’s not something you put on autopilot. It’s about having multiple coordinated strategies that help you generate high-quality leads and proactive approaches that help you nurture those leads with engaging content and incentivizing offers.
Outline who your buyer personas are and define periods of review to identify how they’ve changed. Define your marketing goals and agree upon key performance indicators (KPI) that help you stay on track. Define the strength of your digital strategies and decide whether an upgrade or change in direction is required. Next, identify the gap in your inbound marketing strategy and itemize new digital marketing strategies that will help you convert more leads. Pursue those strategies, measure your performance and adjust your plan if you’re not meeting your marketing goals.
For some companies, coming up with a digital strategy is easy. It’s the follow-through that becomes problematic. Our approach is to create a seamless digital strategy that works for your business, meets the needs of your market and one that is structured around the tools and online resources your buyer personas rely on. The goal is to generate and nurture leads so your business is the first one customers look to.
If you're looking for that all-important partner to help you develop a better inbound marketing strategy, then contact Connection Model and request an assessment.
Written By: Doug Milnor
