January Resolutions: Building Your Inbound Strategy

Building Your Business Starts With Inbound Marketing

2018 has come and regardless of how you feel your business finished last year, it is time to look forward.

January resolutions are a trend individuals use to focus on the areas of their life they wish to— there is always something you can do better, right?

Learning from our mistakes and falling forward is the only way to achieve better results.

A resolution must start with a goal. Creating SMART goals is a great way to set yourself, and your team, up for success.

Establish SMART Goals:

• Specific – Clearly defined and detailed goals—avoiding statements like, “I want more leads,” or “we need to increase the quality of the traffic to our site.” Create clear deliverables with defined metrics attached to them, and determine who is involved and accountable for each deliverable.
• Measurable – Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in order to the track progress you are making towards your goal(s).
• Attainable – Set yourself up for success. Look back at the growth of your business in the recent past and set goals that you are able to reach!
• Relevant – The goals you set should reflect the model the you’ve built your business around. Your mission, your vision and your values.
• Timely – Create long-term and short-term goals. Each goal you set needs to have a completion date attached to it.

Commit to Content:

Content marketing is the process of creating valuable, relevant and high-quality content that speaks to the needs and pain points of your target audience. Whether this is written or video content, your goal should be to inform, attract and engage with your audience while also promoting your brand and the solutions you offer.

Content mapping is the first step in achieving this goal.

According to Hubspot, a content map is a plan to deliver the right content, to the right people, at the right time. Content mapping takes into account the characteristics of the person who will be consuming the content and their lifecycle stage.

This technique helps you to focus on the audience you want to connect with and position your business as an industry thought leader.

Lastly, make sure your content has a healthy injection of keywords. Using the specific search terms as phrases that you have researched will ensure that those searching for the content you are creating, are able to find it!

Perform a Marketing Audit:

A marketing audit is an assessment of the data you have collected. It is always important to learn from the information you have available to you and reassess your strategy. Data-driven decision making will help you form new goals and decide what activities are needed to reach them, ultimately delivering the results you desire.

Perform a SWOT analysis. You may already have this completed, but how long ago did you do it? Going through this exercise every few months or so cannot hurt. Trends can change, competitors can emerge, so make sure that you are always at the top of your game. No one likes surprises.

Build Your Strategy:

Now that you have gone through each of the steps above, you can begin to build your strategy and put action behind these initiatives.

Develop Buyer Personas – this is your target audience(s). You need to establish who you are speaking to, and what they are looking for. More than likely you will flush out a few different personas, and you will need to create content that caters to their needs, and at what stage they are at in the buyer’s journey.

Create a Channel Strategy – how will your content make its way into the hands of your personas? Here are a few examples to consider when building out your channel strategy.

Organic Search

• Keyword-based content creation
• Link building/ PR tactics
• Expansive keyword targeting in content strategy and SEO initiatives

Paid Search

• Search and remarketing campaigns using keywords organized by services, brand name, and competitors sending traffic to site pages and landing pages

Social Media

• Publishing blog posts, industry news, video
• Utilize lookalike audience approach for testing

Email

• Lead nurturing emails, moving leads along the buyer’s journey
• Sequences templates utilizing content resources and video with journey mapping

Sales & Marketing Alignment

• Lead Scoring
• Sales enablement

Building Community Relationships

• Hosting meetups, seminars, events
• Establish and engage with local key influencers

Work smarter not harder — use the data you have collected, and you will be able to accomplish twice as much in half the time, with half the effort.

If you are interested in learning more about these processes or digging into how you can better set yourself up for success in 2018, please do not hesitate to reach out.

-Alex Butz