Getting Your House In Order: A Primer for Inbound Marketing

The days of interruption marketing are nearly over—inbound marketing is quickly replacing the outmoded outbound marketing days of yore. For years now, new technologies have been developed solely for weeding out your outbound marketing efforts (caller id, robust spam filters, and streaming subscription services to name a few). As quickly as new modes of advertising have evolved, their anti-marketing doppelgangers have kept pace—and have been winning.

We are in the dawn of a very savvy age of consumers and business decision makers, and something interesting is happening—inbound marketing is priming a new kind of consumer expectation. When we find content that is meaningful and personally engaging (i.e. relevant), we are much more likely to consume it, share it and attach to the brand serving it.

Users will listen if your content is highly personal and not pushy. Compelling content – through a mix of visual and text based mediums – can create a gravitational pull to your brand. Perhaps you’ve noticed a drop in leads in your sales funnel. Or perhaps you’ve noticed a spike in weak leads that have your sales team spending precious time disqualifying them instead of landing your next big account. Maybe you are not talking to the right audience or you haven’t developed good personas. Maybe it’s something else.

In our new whitepaper, Driving Inbound Leads: Part One Agility, we tell you how to get your house in order so that you can rev the motor on your content curation machine. Here’s an excerpt:

Have your house in order

Do not simply create content for content’s sake. Content creation is not easy and (in the final analysis of your marketing efforts), it’s not cheap. Before you start any initiative, know why you are creating a particular piece of content and how you intend to measure that piece’s effectiveness (whether it is working or not). So:

1. Determine the campaign goals—if your leads are drying up, you want to drive a higher volume of leads. If you have a lot of weak leads coming in, you want to drive more qualified leads.

2. Define what a Qualified Lead looks like to your business. Don’t be afraid to involve other stakeholders in your business. Get with your sales team, talk to your project managers. Determine which leads are converting more and which leads bring in more revenue share than others.

3. Determine where your qualified leads spend their time. Where are they finding your brand? Where should they be finding your brand? What is their typical sales cycle?

4. Identify and/or create points of conversion.

5. Implement a closed loop marketing system using automated marketing software and a dedicated customer relationships management service.

With your house in order, it’s time to rev up your content creation and curation machine. Take some time to read our thoughts on getting your content machine on the road and driving quality leads to your business.