The Basics of Onboarding an Inbound Marketing Client

Onboarding an Inbound Marketing Client to An Agency is Easy!

Just five simple steps! We’ll start by establishing goals and getting your tools and technology in order, then finish up by get getting approvals on the first month of content topics! Keep reading for details on each step in the inbound marketing onboarding process.

Here’s the scoop: getting started with inbound marketing doesn’t have to be difficult! Working with an agency means less work on you, because we take on all the heavy lifting. We make it as simple as possible to get you onboarded, and when we launch your inbound marketing campaign, we can get to the fun part: watching the leads roll in!

Maybe you’re already signed on to get started with inbound marketing, or maybe you’re just wondering how the onboarding process works to find out if working with an agency is right for you. Either way, we are here to help and show you the simple basics of onboarding.

Five easy steps, and your inbound marketing campaign will be live!

Step One: Fill out a strategic onboarding questionnaire! 

The purpose of an inbound marketing strategic onboarding questionnaire is to get a deeper understanding of your business, align our strategy moving forward, and begin to workshop ideas and strategies for your projects. Here are a few questions you can expect to answer when you are filling out a strategic drill:

• How do you think your brand is currently perceived? 
• What does your sales process look like and how are you tracking leads?
• What does your target audiences look like in terms of budget, company size and type, and industry?
• How will you measure success with this campaign?

If you can’t answer every questions, that’s okay! We’ll just ask you to take your best shot and answer what you can. The more information the better, even if it isn’t perfect.

We’ll use the strategic onboarding questionnaire to make sure each member of our team who will be working on your marketing projects is on the same page about your business. Once we have a firm understanding of who your business is, we can start crafting a marketing plan. 

Step Two: Tell us what your goals are for your business.

Maybe you want to see the traffic on your website double? Perhaps you need a very specific number of leads to achieve your yearly revenue goal? Whatever the goal is, it is crucial to tell your agency so all parties are rowing in the same direction.

If you don’t know where to start with creating goals, we can help! We created a tool for that very purpose. Check out our inbound revenue calculator to see what kind of conversion rate, website traffic, and lead flow you’ll need to generate revenue that will take your business to the next level.

Step Three: Provide access to marketing tools.

It’s quite difficult to run a social media campaign without access to a company’s LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram or post blogs and content offers without a company’s HubSpot login! That’s why the next step is both obvious and crucial. Provide your marketing agency with access to your social media accounts and any tools relevant to marketing for an audit.

Some tools that we can audit for you are marketing CRMs like HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot, or email tools like MailChimp, Drip, or Constant Contact. If you have a marketing CRM and you want us to take a look, let us know and we can perform a free in depth marketing CRM audit to give you insights into where you stand. Since inbound marketing is built on the premise of automation, tools and technology are vital!

Step Four: Attend a kickoff meeting!

Within the marketing kickoff meeting, we’ll have the chance to establish roles and responsibilities, review the project timeline, and discuss the details of all deliverables we will be providing. The kickoff is a great time to ask a ton of questions and make sure everyone is on the same page about how our teams will work together. 

Step Five (this is a big one): Review the Inbound Marketing Blueprint.

So what the heck is an Inbound Marketing Blueprint? It’s a marketing guide tailor specifically to your company to serve as a solid foundation for future marketing efforts.

We start with research, interviewing stakeholders at your business  and unpacking what you’re all about. We analyze your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as they relate to your specific industry.

What do we need from you in this step of the onboarding phase? We’ll need you to help us get stakeholder interviews set up and to be available to answer follow up questions from time to time. We want to make sure our team is on the right track so we can put together an effective marketing strategy. 

Why is this step such a big deal? We base all of our initial marketing decisions on the research completed in this process. Once we have a firm foundation of research to back us up, we move on to the marketing strategy.

Within the marketing strategy, you’ll find ideal buyer personas, channel mix recommendations, and content mapping examples. These key pieces (and much more) are the elements of the Inbound Marketing Blueprint that will position your business to run successful inbound marketing campaigns.

Inbound Marketing Blueprints have a lot to them, so if you’re interested in more details, check out our blog on How an Inbound Marketing Blueprint Will Set You Up For Success.

Step Six: Approve content mapping.

Once the inbound marketing plan is in place, it’s time to jump into action! The last step in the onboarding process is to approve the topics that we plan out for the upcoming month. The content we map out for your business will be in line with the buyer personas and keyword strategy outlined in the Inbound Marketing Blueprint. We handle everything from creating the blog and content offer topics and all of the writing, all we need from you is feedback and approvals.

Answering some questions, providing access to tools, and approving topics and content, not too bad right? Like I promised, we’ll take care of the hard stuff so you can focus on what you’re good at, keeping things running smoothly at your company!

Now that you know what the onboarding process looks like, take the next step by checking out the behind the scene steps of setting up an inbound marketing campaign with our Marketing 101 Checklist!