Your online marketing is something that is crucial to the success of your brand and shouldn’t be skimped on – ensuring excellence in your strategy and execution can make or break your future success. Getting ahead of your competitors is the key goal here, so taking care to make sure each aspect of your inbound marketing strategy is as strong and potent as it could be will pay dividends in the long run.
The buyer’s journey that your customers will take to eventually purchase your product or service needs to be as painless and helpful to them as possible. Providing value all the way down the funnel is the only way to keep a lead warm and consistently down the path of purchasing.
How In-Depth is Your Strategy?
A strategy is a simple plan of action to achieve an expected goal. Sounds straightforward enough, right? Your strategy is the backbone and foundation that will help you achieve your marketing goals that you’ve set up. It should be clear what the A to B points the strategy recommends and be in-depth enough to cover all the basis.
Because online marketing is so extensive in itself, the chosen proponents used in the strategy needs to work in tandem to successfully hit all performance points and moving prospects down the buyer’s journey. The inbound marketing services you choose should represent this degree of depth in a way that compliments your marketing needs.
Competitor Analysis
An important step that should precede any worth inbound marketing strategy is the competitor analysis. Not only does this give you ideas of where your audiences are located and how to frame your online marketing. But finding the gaps that your competitors aren’t meeting in their buyer’s journey is another key aspect to take advantage of.
Objectives/Goals
The definition of a strategy clearly states that its intended purpose is to achieve an expected goal. With this in mind, we need to craft what goals we’re hoping our online marketing is going to achieve for us. The possibilities are endless here, which is why it’s good to have some sort of framework to help you create the best goals possible for your inbound marketing strategy.
SMART goals has been the standard goal setting technique and has no doubt fuelled many successful campaigns due to its simply and clear process.
Each letter of SMART corresponds to a part of the formula for setting campaign goals. Any good strategy will need to be following this structure as having vague goals from the start is often a large part of campaign failures.
- Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
- Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
- Achievable (agreed, attainable).
- Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
- Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).
An example of a SMART goal would be: increasing website traffic by 25% in six weeks.
Buyer Personas
Knowing who exactly your audience is will help you craft the rest of the strategy with a much lower degree of risk. When it comes to drilling down on your audience for the buyer’s journey as well, you’ll be attracting the right qualified leads for your business as opposed to casting a much wider net and bringing in traffic from uninterested parties.
This is where buyer personas come into play in your online marketing. A persona is the ticking clock behind your buyer journey and brings to life real examples of the ideal customer you have in mind. By creating a fictional character, along with full demographics and a backstory detailing their problems, hesitations, and what engages them in the context of your product/service you’ll have a crystal clear picture of how to proceed and execute your inbound marketing strategy.
Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s journey is the process that a customer goes through as they become aware of a product or service, evaluate it, and eventually purchase. Having a thorough understanding of how your customers behave during this journey is critical to your online marketing success.
- Awareness Stage: The buyer realises they have a problem.
- Consideration Stage: The buyer begins researching options to solve it.
- Decision Stage: The buyer chooses a solution.
Automating Your Marketing
Marketing automation is the process that begins once you start collecting the details of interested leads in the content marketing phase. By using lead magnets we can entice leads to give us their information in exchange for a piece of quality content. Once we have this information we can use marketing automation tools like ActiveCampaign to manage our flow of communication and marketing to these leads that are now in the consideration stage and then work our way down to converting them into making a purchasing decision.
Conclusion
We hope this article has given you something to think about with regards to your online marketing and whether or not it is performing to the best of its ability.
We’ve developed a great inbound marketing assessment tool that will help you quickly benchmark your campaign and see if it’s going to provide you o
