Marketing Blog

Inbound marketing is a strategy that yields great returns. For a large industrial company, we were able to increase leads by over 1,200%. That is called serious ROI.

But how do you start an inbound marketing campaign? It can seem a bit intimidating, right?

That’s why we are going to do a series of blogs talking about inbound marketing and detailing how to start your own campaigns.

The first steps of your inbound marketing campaign are to select your audience and build a buyer persona.

Let’s take a look at selecting your audience.

For this exercise, let’s create a scenario. Let’s say you have an insurance company, and you are offering a whole life insurance product for people under 25.

Note: That while we are using a financial services scenario for our example, the same tenets hold true for construction or industrial or material handling, or whatever. As long as your audience meets some caveats.

Inbound marketing works best when there is:

A large investment(s) (over 2-5k+) LTV (Lifetime Value)
A longer buying timeline

For this example, people don’t rush into buying insurance (usually). You need the time to be able to show them that you are the best option and walk them through your sales funnel.

And while they may only be paying a few hundred dollars a year they are paying it for an extended period which meets our lifetime value or LTV of $2,000.

Now back to our example. Since this is an insurance product geared towards a particular demographic, you wouldn’t want to broadcast this to all of your audience and possible clients.

It is only applicable to a specific demographic. Mainly people under 25. It is also only relevant to people under 25 who need or want the security of a whole life policy.

So the first part is to frame your audience.

We already have some demographic information. Under 25. They have the need or want to make sure that their spouse or children that they want to see protected.

They also need to have the financial means to purchase this product.

We also are only probably going to target people in a certain geographic region.

All of this information is going into your buyer personae. We are going to gear our campaign to an “actual” person. Let’s call this person Whole Life Wally.

We want to know as much about Wally as we can.

• Where does he live?
• What is Wally’s occupation?
• What is his spouse’s name?
• How much does he make a year?
• Where did he go to school?
• What does he value?

Reason to Create Buyer Personas for our Inbound Marketing Campaign:

Any details that we can fill in about Wally to make him more “real” will help when we frame the message for Wally (and the rest of the audience that he represents). If we know exactly whom we are talking to we can more quickly write to their needs and express the benefits of what we are offering.

Our next top will be next week when we discuss goal setting.

Do you want to learn more about inbound marketing? You can download our checklist for your own inbound marketing campaign here.

PART 2 

What is SEO? How does it differ from inbound marketing? I get this request from prospects on occasion.

“We want better SEO.”

“Ok, great! What does that mean to you?”

“Um, better, SEO?”

In essence, SEO helps more people find your site and get exposed to your solution.

SEO is just a tactic. A powerful tactic, but a tactic nonetheless. So if we want to use this tactic we approach it the same way we approach every other one.

We start with our goals. If we want more visitors to our site and more leads SEO can help. Better SEO helps prospects find you if they are searching for a solution similar to yours.

However, SEO is less efficient without the rest of the inbound strategy.

Remember, inbound marketing is an overall strategy, but SEO is only a tactic. Granted if you do it right it is a very useful tactic, but bringing more people to your website is not the end all be all.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you want to increase your leads. You currently get a 100 visitors a month, and your conversion rate (how many people give you their contact information) is 1%.

So for every 100 visitors, you get one contact. Right now let’s not look at how valuable your leads are or how qualified they are, let’s just look at the raw numbers.

Now if we increase visitors to 200, we can double our conversions. That is what we can accomplish with SEO. We get more visitors and get more conversions.

However, wouldn’t it be easier to just get one more conversion out of your 100 visitors? If we double our conversion rate to 2%, we can have the same amount of visitors and get more leads.

If we use lead nurturing and other inbound marketing tactics, we should be able to increase your conversions even more.

The ideal would be to use SEO in concert with the rest of your inbound marketing strategy.

Want to learn more about SEO and Inbound marketing? Download our guide to inbound marketing.

Recently I was discussing accounting website design with a client and we talked about using a great Call to Action to get more marketing leads. Whether you are using inbound marketing, content marketing or just starting small and simply have a website, one of the earliest keys to conversion are powerful CTA’s.

Many companies use CTA’s that are too aggressive. For instance, most websites start with a “Contact Us.” This is great to start out with, but soon you will need to develop something a little more subtle. You need to design a CTA that offers value to your visitors. A “Contact Us” CTA only adds value for you, right?

A great CTA is the beginning of developing a content marketing, or inbound marketing strategy.

Offer: So first you need to design your offer. What can you offer visitors that they will find:

• Valuable
• Relevant
• Powerful

Putting together a valuable piece of content for your visitors sounds intimidating, but you can make it as simple as you like. For a material handling site, we made a comparison between automated and manual material handling. It was a simple excel sheet where you could plug in different variables to see if automation made sense for your company.

It probably took about 8 hours to develop with one of the engineers. It also generated seven new leads in 60 days. Since our qualified lead value was north of $15,000, it was well worth our time.

Design: Your CTA needs to tie into the overall design of your site. The use of color is imperative. Whether your CTA buttons are a contrasting color or a complementary color on a white background, it needs to stand out and call attention to itself.

The text on your CTA button needs to look enticing. It should be well formatted and look clickable.

“Many sites use CTA’s that are too aggressive.”

Also, give your CTA some room to breathe. White space is your friend. It helps your button stand out and makes it more inviting resulting in more clicks.

Placement: There are some traditional places that you can put a CTA.

A good place to add a Call to Action would be above the fold on your front page.

An alternative to that is a slide in CTA that appears on your front page. It gives a bit of action to make it more noticeable and increases the chance of clickability.

Another great place for a CTA is in your blog articles. Traditionally they come at the end. However, newer research is showing that having a CTA a couple of times on your blog article is more effective. Try adding one near the top and a repeat towards the bottom.

Want to learn more about tactics that can improve your website’s effectiveness? Download our guide to inbound marketing.

I would like to dispel a huge rumor about outside marketing agencies. We are not there to replace the current marketing staff.

Can an outside agency work as the marketing department of a small company? Yes, but usually if there is already a marketing team in place, they are not going to be replaced. The internal person is managing tasks that would be inefficient for an outside marketing agency to complete.

When I was a young marketing exec, I didn’t understand that. I thought, well if I can’t do it and have to go outside for help that makes me look weak. Yeah, I know I was dumb.

“My job was the big picture, the overall messaging and goals. Overseeing the efforts of others. Managing.”

Companies constantly go outside to get expertise. If you are working as a marketing director or marketing manager, guess what the CEO wants you to do?

Direct and manage the marketing department. That means you don’t need to do every little thing by yourself.

No one knows how to do everything. And even if a marketing person does he/she usually don’t have the time to do everything.

So this is why you, as the marketing manager, should use an outside marketing agency.

First: Let the outside agency focus on what you don’t want to do. When I was a marketing director for  large industrial companies, I loved trade shows and live events. However, the part I didn’t like about trade show and live events was setting up the PPC.

You know what I did? I farmed it out to someone who did enjoy it. In fact, I still do that on occasion.

My job was the big picture, the overall messaging and goals. Overseeing the efforts of others. Managing.

Second: Let the outside agency do what you don’t do well. There is a difference in tasks you don’t like and those you at which you don’t excel.

For instance, I love doing design, but at a certain point, I know I am not the best person to do that task anymore. So you know what I do? I have an outside agency help me. Figure out what you are not great at and sub that out.

Third: Be efficient:

I can shoot video. I enjoy it. I am pretty good at it. So why does 366 use a freelance videographer for some projects? Because sometimes I am not the best option. When I use our freelancer, I know he can handle more complicated projects and dig into the details. It is just more efficient

Also, he has access to the latest and greatest software and equipment that I might not.

Sometimes it makes more sense for me to use the resources that I have access to instead of doing everything myself. This strategy also makes sense to industrial marketing directors as well.

Think about it why use a person making a 75K salary to update a brochure? That doesn’t seem like the best use of resources.

The goal of an outside agency working for an internal marketing department is this; Make the person signing the checks look good.

That’s it.

If you hire me, that is my primary goal. I don’t want your job; I don’t want the credit. I want you to keep using my services.

Want to get an outside opinion of your company, see through a fresh set of eyes? Contact us and arrange a free consultation.