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I’M SENSING A CHANGESomething’s different. You’re pushing out banner ads and trying all-things-

traditional marketing, and yet—practically, out of nowhere—your sales funnel has

dried up (or else it’s filled with a plethora of weak leads that are sapping time and

resources to unqualify). You’re breathing down your sales and marketing teams’

necks, wondering: what’s the problem? Where’s my new business?

Sounds like you have an inbound marketing problem. But—do you have an inbound

marketing strategy? In this white paper, we discuss inbound marketing and how to

drive inbound leads. This is the first in a series on this topic, and to begin—we’re

going to talk content and the need to be agile.

Do you have an inbound marketing plan in place? Do you have the team and the

resources needed to create and implement a sound inbound strategy?

It’s okay if you don’t. We know a thing or two about pushing high-volume, relevant

content that drives qualified leads to your always-hungry sales team. So let’s dig in.

INBOUND MARKETING AND THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTENTFirst things first: what is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is about creating and sharing attractive content

with your target demographic in an effort to drive the most qualified

traffic back to your brand with the hope that, once there—they’ll

convert. Gone are the days of buying lists, creating ads and tossing

a marketing-Hail-Mary for the ever-sought-after qualified lead.

Inbound marketing, now in its promising prime, has replaced these

“traditional” (read: old) methods of pushing out in favor of pulling in —and attracting prospects to your brand.

It’s not necessarily a volume play, but the truth is: the higher the

number of touches (i.e., the more content you have out there and

available), the higher the likelihood of conversion—that key metric in

your world that indicates your users are doing what you want them

to (be that downloading a whitepaper, requesting a proposal, asking

to speak with your sales team, etc.) with the end goal being revenue.

OF CONSUMERS ARE MORE LIKELY TO BUY FROM A COMPANY THAT DELIVERS CUSTOM CONTENT

Custom Content Council Roper Finds Majority of Consumers

Value Custom Media

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So—what’s key to any inbound marketing plan? A marketing persona and content.

Content, content, content. Be it blog posts, infographics, whitepapers, e-books, banner ad copy, website copy—whatever it is that boils your brand down to some digestible, shareable, tangible form and is—in all cases—relevant and useful to your target audience.

So—this requires two things: knowing your target audience and creating content geared towards that target audience. For the sake of this being the first in a series on inbound marketing—let’s assume you know your target audience and let’s get down

to brass tacks on how to get your content marketing house in order.

HAVE YOUR HOUSE IN ORDERDo not simply create content for content’s sake. Content creation is not easy and

(in the final analysis of your marketing efforts), it’s not cheap. Before you start any

initiative, know why you are creating a particular piece of content and how you

intend to measure that piece’s effectiveness (whether it is working or not). So:

1. Determine the campaign goals—if your leads are drying up, you want to drive

a higher volume of leads. If you have a lot of weak leads coming in, you want

to drive more qualified leads.

2. Define what a Qualified Lead looks like to your business. Don’t be afraid to

involve other stakeholders in your business. Get with your sales team, talk

to your project managers. Determine which leads are converting more and

which leads bring in more revenue share than others.

3. Determine where your qualified leads spend their time. Where are they finding

your brand? Where should they be finding your brand? What is their typical

sales cycle?

4. Identify and/or create points of conversion.

5. Implement a closed loop marketing system using automated marketing

software and a dedicated customer relationships management service.*

*Need help with this one? It’s more complicated than you might think—but we

wrote a white paper on that topic, too, and we encourage you to check it out:

Closed Loop Marketing Whitepaper.

With your house in order, it’s time to rev up your content creation and curation machine.

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REVVING UP YOUR CONTENT CURATION MACHINEA steady stream of useful, relevant content is the key to any inbound marketing

strategy. Armed with that, you’ll want to ramp up your content output, but not so

much that the quality suffers. We recommend:

1. An agile (discussed below) curation and creation strategy. It’s time to make a plan, Stan—and it needs to be comprehensive and detailed. Now, we don’t suggest mapping out every piece of content for the next year. Given how quickly things change, you’ll run the risk of having a content calendar that is irrelevant next week. Instead, plan your attack in two or three week intervals. Describe what piece of content needs to be created (a blog post, an infographic, a white paper), where it needs to live (gated by a landing page, accessible in your social channels, etc.), who the content is for, what its call to action is and why it’s relevant. Think about your target audience: What is it they want to know from you? What are their pain points?

2. A plan for repurposing content. The last thing you need is for your content to dry up. Inbound marketing requires you to have big back pockets stuffed with content, waiting to be delivered. This means making a plan for repurposing, remixing or reformatting existing content (if it’s still relevant and useful) and the content you create. An e-book can turn into a series of blog posts. A section of your last white paper can become an infographic. An infographic can become a video and a video can become a presentation. Each repurposed piece of content will keep your content arsenal fully locked and stocked.

3. Create a “backlog bucket.” You’re going to run out of bandwidth—that’s normal. But rather than lose those ideas or that content, create a backlog bucket, which is a great resource for brainstorming new content with the content marketing team.

4. Be smarter with social. Because users now consume information in a variety of visual and text based formats, you can tailor your existing content to work smarter for your social channels.

5. Identify extra collateral needed to support your content. A blog post promoting your latest white paper needs your latest white paper to be done, after all. Know ahead of time what content and collateral you need to support other pieces

of content.

SOCIAL MEDIA SITES AND BLOGS REACH

(THAT’S OVER 196 MILLION PEOPLE)OF ALL U.S INTERNET USERS

8 OUT OF 10ExactTarget

50 Awesome Content

Marketing Stats

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6. Communicate. Communication is key. Keep the team informed on where

each piece of content is in your strategy. Maintain a feedback loop for how

content is performing: What content went live? What is the click through

rate? How many whitepaper downloads or RFP requests did it generate?

What was the referral site? Was it organic or paid?

THE LAY OF THE LAND: BEING AGILEWe’ve talked content and revving up a content machine—now it’s time to talk about

how you keep that machine running in good order. It requires one very important

thing: agility.

You may hear the term “pivot.” Pivot and agility go hand-in-hand. You must be agile

enough—and aware enough—to recognize the need to pivot (change direction or

change strategy) quickly, without too much collateral damage (and ideally—with no

collateral damage). Consider the adage: “Life is what happens while you are busy

making other plans.” You cannot do it all, but must be able to do the important

things—no matter when those important things happen to pop up.

You do that by being agile and pivoting when the time comes.

Agile development is a concept that has been around software development agencies

for a long time now. It is an iterative way of tackling a project with a team that deals

with bite-size chunks. Agile development is equally applicable—and important—to

an inbound marketing strategy.

Here’s a common example: You have a particular project/campaign, and a short

deadline—30 days, maybe. This is known as a sprint. To sprint your way from start

to finish, hold an initial kickoff meeting, where tasks are assigned and the team is

made of key players across departments. Everyone is accountable for something

and everyone is accountable to each other. After tasks are assigned, roles defined

and lines of accountability drawn—it’s time to get down to it. Check-in regularly

to keep the team on task. Digital marketing is an ever evolving medium—an agile

approach is a must. Of course, because marketing is a lot like the weather—or life—

there will be times where you’ll need to change course and to pivot.

Here is how you stay agile:

1. Develop a process. Collaborate with your team and define a set of “To Dos,”

“Ongoing Tasks,” “Completed Tasks,” and a summation of the project’s

progress in general.

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2. Prepare yourself for requirements churn. This is a fact: during a project,

the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (a

phenomenon known as “requirements churn”), and those unpredicted

challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned

manner. Don’t let this fact stop you; don’t let this fact throw a wrench in

the machine.

3. Work together and rely on one another. Teamwork makes the dream work—

check in often with your project teams (but avoid micro-managing or

unproductive interruptions) to make sure everyone is still on the same page.

Review the numbers and deploy. The frequency will depend on the needs

of the project—we suggest weekly check-ins, but daily reviews of progress

will help you stem off potential problems.

4. Cross train the skill sets. To remain agile, it is necessary to have a team with

a balanced skill set. The individual skills and abilities should overlap. Because

this is a high volume effort, you never want just one team member to house

the know-how to accomplish as task, otherwise you’ll be scrambling if that

one person is out of the office or, god forbid, leaves your team mid-sprint.

Bandwidth is too limited to have to train a new member on the fly. Plus—it

never hurts to have a cross-trained team, as they’ll be able to provide insights

others may have missed.

THE FEEDBACK LOOP: ALWAYS BE MEASURINGKnow the metrics. Measure your progress against the metrics. But keep in mind:

Change is the only constant. If you are not changing, you are being left behind.

One of the biggest advantages to digital marketing is the ability to quantify marketing

efforts relative to traditional offline initiatives. Analytics are inherent to this space

and not using them to guide and inform future efforts must be remedied.

INBOUND MARKETING DELIVERS MORE LEADS THAN TRADITIONAL OUTBOUND MARKETING

WebDAM 2014

20 Captivating Marketing

Statistics

INBOUND MARKETINGOUTBOUND MARKETING

54% MORE LEADS

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Share performance metrics. Ask hard questions. Don’t be afraid to take hard looks

at the entire funnel—not just your content. Be transparent with your organization

and answer: How are leads converting? How is this trending? How are these leads

being followed up on? Is this being appropriately tracked? How many touches are the

cold leads getting? How about the warmer leads? Are some touches working better

than others? What is the ratio of connecting to all leads generated? Do you break this

out by industry? By channel? By category? These are all considerations for making

your inbound marketing efforts a veritable monster truck of marketing.

Agility and content are only part of the inbound marketing puzzle, however. You’ll

also need to examine your sales funnel. Your conversion points. The percentage of

leads against the percentage of opportunities.

But that’s a bigger conversation. For now, take the time to analyze your content

and your overall agility as an organization. In the next part in our series on inbound

marketing, we’ll dive deeper into the sales funnel, your work environment, knowing

the right conversion metrics and more.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for the next series to come out—our inbound

marketing experts are standing by and we’re ready to build and maintain your

content machine, help you become more agile and generally improve your digital

marketing efforts across all channels. So what are you waiting for? Give us a call.

Let’s turn your marketing dollars into company revenue.

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ABOUT ONEUPWEBOneupweb is nearly a 20-year innovator in digital marketing—creating integrated

online marketing plans that incorporate search, social, design and mobile services.

Heralded by an independent research firm for their leadership team, work ethic and

solid experience in optimizing complicated sites, Oneupweb has been named a Top

20 Search Marketing Agency by Advertising Age for five consecutive years, and CEO

Lisa Wehr is recognized as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

Oneupweb is a privately held company located in Traverse City, Michigan. For more

information on Oneupweb, please call 1.877.568.7477, or visit OneUpWeb.com.