10 Tips for a Successful Inbound Marketing Strategy.

The changed use of media has heralded a change in strategy in digital marketing. Put simply, the result is: Inbound is in, outbound is out. We show you why Inbound marketing on the Internet is becoming more and more relevant and how you can establish a successful inbound marketing strategy in your company.

What is Inbound marketing?

“The Internet is new territory for all of us” – this much-quoted and often ridiculed sentence by Angela Merkel is certainly worth discussing, but when it comes to the world of marketing it hits a nerve. Because, of course, marketers have identified the network as a relevant marketing channel since the early 2000s at the latest. All too often, however, people still think in the tradition of classic channels such as radio, TV or print.

Banner advertisements, pop-up windows, or videos – traditional push marketing measures are increasingly coming to nothing on the Internet, are ignored, clicked away, or even preventively circumvented by ad-resistant users. Above all, there is a lack of recognition that not only has the media landscape fundamentally changed with the Internet, but also the customer and his behavior with it: Internet users are actively looking for information and do not want to be disturbed by outbound marketing, but rather content gets offered with added value. Finally, marketers also have to adapt to these changing modes of communication and user demands.

Appearance: Inbound Marketing. The core of this approach is to support the user with helpful, relevant content in his search for information and to address it in every phase of his purchase process. Your company should be found by the customer – and not the other way around. No cold calling, mass emails or random advertisements, instead of informative, advisory or entertaining content that is geared towards the needs of your ideal customers – mainly via blogs, search engines and social media. This is how you reach qualified, potential customers, create trust and secure a high ROI in the long term.

How does the process have to be designed?

The linchpin in inbound marketing is the inbound methodology. It is based on four phases that go through when a stranger becomes an advocate for your company. Different marketing instruments are available for each phase:

• Attract (strangers to visitors): blog, content strategy, social media
• Convert (visitors to leads): forms, meetings, messages (live chats), CRM
• Closing (leads to customers): pipeline management, lead nurturing, email marketing, automatic lead scoring
• Inspire (customers to promoters): Customer Hub, Smart Content, Conversations

Content marketing plays an important role in all phases of the inbound methodology, be it the creation and distribution of blog articles, emails or customer service. The last station of the inbound principle shows another special feature compared to classic push measures: the process does not end with the purchase. Instead, they rely on sustainably satisfied customers who, as promoters, recommend the company and in this way add to your ROI.

10 tips to help your inbound marketing strategy succeed

You should proceed systematically in order to establish an effective inbound marketing strategy in your company that will sustainably generate more customers and advocates. Our ten tips should serve as step-by-step instructions.

1. Identify buyer personas

In order to be able to produce relevant content, you should first define who it should be aimed at. It is not just a matter of performing a classic target group analysis, but rather creating a profile of the prototypical buyer: the buyer persona. It includes demographic characteristics, behaviors and concerns that you can then precisely address with your content and marketing messages. The profile contains information about:

• Surname
• Age
• job
• income
• origin
• Hobbies
• Problems
• Expectations of the product

You will ideally get information about your buyer personas from market research data or from your existing customers, for example through interviews or surveys. Depending on the company and product, you can create one or 20 buyer personas.

2. Set goals according to the SMART principle

In the beginning, set the long-term goals that you want to achieve with inbound marketing – in order to formulate goals that are as specific as possible, you can use the SMART goal approach:

3. Create content with added value for the target group

The principle in inbound marketing is: The focus is on the customer, not your own product. You should take this into account when choosing a topic for your content. The point is not to showcase your own product as prominently as possible, but to entertain, inform and support potential customers – depending on their previously identified needs, problems and expectations.

Our tip: When planning and creating content, keep asking yourself: Does this content create added value for the specific buyer persona?

4. Adapt content to the buyer’s journey

Content marketing has to pick up the user where he is in his decision-making process. There are three stages in the buyer’s journey in which different content offers make sense:

Awareness Stage: The user becomes aware of a problem or recognizes the symptoms of a problem.

• Suitable content: e-books, white papers, editorial content
• Attention: Your own product should not be in the foreground here.

Consideration Stage: The user has identified the problem and is looking for a concrete solution

• Suitable content: podcasts, videos, expert guides

Decision Stage: The user makes the decision for a solution

• Suitable content: product comparisons, case studies, free trials
• Attention: Only at this point should your own product be the focus

5. Determine a concrete strategy for implementation

Instead of randomly producing content for different buyer personas at different stages of their buyer’s journey, you should define a clearly feasible strategy :

• Which content elements should be used?
• Which channels should be used?
• In which order and frequency should the contributions be published?
• Who does what when?

You should then combine your content planning in an editorial plan so that all employees involved can see when which post is being created and published by whom and for which buyer persona in which stage it is being created. This is the only way to reliably implement an inbound strategy over the long term.

6. Multi-channel promotion and seeding

In order for the unknown user to become aware of the company at all, the seeding of content via various channels is crucial, such as your own blog, your own social media channels or email marketing. With regular publications on your owned media (e.g. blog) and earned media channels (e.g. shared social media posts), you will build up organic reach and visibility in search engines in the long term. Paid media measures (e.g. promoted posts on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter) ensure short-term gains in reach.

7. Select channels that match the content and buyer persona

Select the social media platform on which you want to distribute your content according to buyer persona: Where is my buyer persona going? Example: You tend to reach young people on Facebook or Snapchat, XING and LinkedIn, on the other hand, are also used by older age groups and especially in a business context.

You also need to consider the type of content to be played: B. Instagram is more suitable for visual content, Twitter only for very short posts, but the integration of videos is possible.

8. Establish the landing page as the linchpin

All roads lead – in the case of inbound marketing – to a landing page. Here a visitor to the page is converted to a lead. A landing page is a website on which a visitor’s data is recorded using a lead form – in return the user receives, for example, an e-book, a case study, a webinar or other exclusive content offer.

The page should be kept simple because the goal is conversion. You should therefore refrain from navigation, different calls-to-action or other elements that could distract your visitor. Instead, a landing page should answer the following questions:

• What exactly is offered?
• What are the advantages of the offer?
• Why is the offer relevant for the visitor?
• How does the visitor get the offer?

When you have recorded the contact details of your visitors, the lead is in the next phase of the inbound methodology. Now you can convince the lead with tailor-made content via lead nurturing or email marketing and convert it to a customer.

9. Collect and evaluate relevant data

One advantage of digital marketing and big data: almost everything can be measured, compared and evaluated. Various marketing automation tools allow you to collect data that can provide information about the performance of your content:

• Who has seen, liked, and commented on which post and how often?
• How often was a video clicked and how long was it viewed?
• How many times was a particular email opened and clicked?
• Which gender, which age group, and which geographic region interacts most with my content?

The danger, however, is: In view of the flood of data, the numbers are often incorrectly evaluated or arbitrarily set in relation to one another, and thus wrong conclusions are drawn. Therefore, always refer to your previously defined goals and examine the key figures that are relevant with regard to the goal-setting and allow conclusions to be drawn about the progress of the measures.

10. Optimize and reuse

After production, distribution and performance analysis, the decisive step is still to be done: optimization. Maybe a blog article’s low number of clicks can be increased with a more appealing cover photo? Could the subject of an email be made more appropriate to increase the open rate? The users themselves may also provide constructive suggestions for improvement in their comments. Never regard your individual content pieces as completed works, rather use your findings from the analysis to make optimizations and to constantly better align your existing and future content to the addressed users.

Our tip: Once published, your content does not lose its value. An existing blog article can be promoted again via social media after a few months or z. B. serve as a template for a podcast.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing has become indispensable in modern digital marketing. Because classic push measures on the Internet are increasingly bouncing off users, companies can only build successful customer relationships if they create content that is highly relevant to the user. This can also be statistically proven: the amount of advertisements that a person is confronted with on a daily basis increased by 150 percent between 1984 and 2014, and the trend is rising.

As a result, individual advertisements are no longer consciously perceived or actively blocked. The spread of ad blockers increased by 30 percent between 2016 and 2017 alone. In case of doubt, advertisements are no longer seen at all. In contrast, 60 percent of users research a product after consuming content about it. For every dollar spent, content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing. This confirms the change of perspective that is being made in inbound marketing and which is: A shift away from the product and towards the interests of the user.

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