Whether you're tweaking your existing inbound marketing plan or creating next year's plan to present to the big boss, be sure you've considered these 5 essential ingredients for your inbound marketing plan:
- Blog Content - blogs get customers. That's a fact. Mapping blog content to customer segments and weaving themes into your overall blog content are helpful tactics. Is your product or service seasonal? Have a fall theme or a back to school theme that you can center your blogs around B2B? You may want to focus on quarterly content themes.
- Advanced Content - think of advanced content as your sales funnel content. Capture leads at the top and nurture them to the bottom. Content mapping comes into play here, too. An FAQ download may serve a top of the funnel tire-kicker. A detailed implementation guide or playbook may be well suited for a middle to bottom of the funnel lead.
- Nurturing Mechanisms - when a visitor becomes a lead, you can do a number of things. Email nurturing is valuable as is event-triggered lead nurturing. Don't forget a good old-fashioned phone call. If someone is interested enough in your company or ebook to provide a phone number - it's worth a call to start a conversation or at least a voicemail encouraging a return visit to your website.
- Social - sharing content from your website through various social platforms is imperative. You never know when a tweet or a Facebook share can become popular. It's also important to share landing pages. Have a free consultation page on your site? Tweet it out. Give people a reason to come to your site (content) and a good place to land like a 'Free Consultation' landing page or offer them additional valuable content.
- Integration - If you're going to be a marketing rock star you'll need to make sure you pass on your good leads to your sales team through a CRM integration. Your sales team can then create custom reports in their CRM to track conversions and other types of buying behavior.
Start with these core ingredients and you'll ultimately have a tasty inbound marketing plan the big boss can feast his eyes on.
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