When you create a plan for inbound marketing, it serves as the foundation for your inbound marketing strategy. The planning process towards inbound marketing strategy focuses on the step-by-step activities that will drive the interest of the audience towards your business. It focuses on delivering informative and valuable contents to your prospects and providing answers to some of their most important questions while building trust in the process.
Below are some of the steps for creating an inbound marketing plan for a successful business.
Know Your Audience
The first step towards creating an inbound marketing plan is to build an audience persona. An audience persona is a fictional representation of your audience you wish to address. To develop an audience persona, you need to know some information about their location, job title, monthly or annual income, behaviour, gender and age bracket. This information will help you to cater to your customer’s needs better.
With your audience persona created, you can tailor your contents to suit their requirements. This way you can publish audience specific contents, convert more customers and close more deals.
Do Your Keyword Research
One of the key tools for inbound marketing is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For your contents to be optimised, you need to do proper keyword research. With the appropriate keywords, your contents will pop up on search engines when your targeted audiences are searching for answers online. This strategy enables you to know some of the challenges that your audience is facing and also improve your chances of ranking higher in the search results of search engines.
Define Your Core Objectives
A good inbound marketing plan should also include what it wishes to achieve at the end of the day. All businesses that practice inbound marketing have a common objective of more audience following your brand and interacting with it. This process can be monitored by tracking your website, those who fill you lead forms, blog, social media followers and YouTube channel. You want your audience to grow subsequently as you continue to publish and post valuable and informative contents.
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Develop a Content Strategy
This is also an important aspect as it relates to the inbound marketing plan. It includes the content you wish to publish, the format and channels to be used, and how often you will be publishing. This stage is more accessible when you have built your audience persona, and use the right keywords that will provide solutions to their problems. Now, you will need to create a guideline that you will work with to ensure that you achieve your inbound marketing objectives. Ensure that all your published contents are educational and capture the attention of your audience. Another essential content strategy is implementing videos into your contents, as the video format has become a rave in these modern times.
Implement the Right Technology
When practising inbound marketing, it is essential to use a platform that will provide you with recent technological tools. Some of these platforms like Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo and many others. When deciding what platform to use, compare the pricing and features on each platform and decide which one suits your business requirements. Depending on the size and budget of your business, you will choose the best platform that suits your needs. For a small business, you need a platform that has a combination of email marketing tool and CRM tool.
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Measure and Analyze
After following all the above steps, you cannot know for certain if it is producing results until you measure it. To measure the results of inbound marketing on your business, you need to have meetings with your team to discuss the outcome and compare them to the expected results.
It is also essential to monitor your competitor’s campaigns, keyword ranking and social media progress. It will help your business to have a different way of viewing things and observe and improve upon your shortcomings. A comprehensive analysis of each of your content piece will encourage you to put in more effort into your work. A process needs to be created that will periodically measure the results of your inbound marketing plan.
Creating an inbound marketing plan is not enough to see results in your business. Implementing these plans, however, is a sure way to get customers not only to view your contents but also to develop trust for your business. It gives you the tools to target audience, provide answers to their questions. It is also an advantage to your business to include videos and images among your published content. This is because these days, people are drawn to pictures and videos more than they are attracted to texts.