Building An Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy In A Few Hours!

Saffron Edge

Apr 16, 2016

4 min read

The clock is ticking and businesses have got a very less time to actually analyze their marketing plans and optimize it according to the response they get from their prospects or existing customers. In a short time they can still get a team to do the job of Inbound marketing or outsource it to the Inbound Marketing agency, but the problem is they don’t know where to start and how long is it going to take them.

For building an effective marketing strategy regardless of Inbound or Outbound marketing, it is important to know that what exactly a goal a marketing team of a company has in order to design a strategy. So for this we need the help of the sales team, and let’s say hypothetically that we need to generate 40 to 50 qualified leads per month for the sales team. The goal might be different for your company and it is upto your marketing team what goal threshold they set for themselves. After the time when we know exactly what is our goal now comes the strategy part for which following steps will be taken.

Identifying the Target Audience

Let’s say we are a social media management automation tool provider company and our target audience is freelance marketers, or an online e-commerce firm that needs such tools for its marketing team. The sales team says that if they get a demo request, they consider it a quality lead. So now we know who are target audience is and how they come under the category of quality lead. So your next plan of action is to identify the target audience for your company and how they can be categorized under quality lead. So Time estimated for this little activity of identifying our target audience is approx. 2 Hours.

Where Does Your Target Audience Lives Online

Inbound marketing is a vast superset of online platforms where you can perform your activity but limiting your efforts to where your target audience is present the most, is where you should make your first move. Inbound marketing includes platforms like social media sites, blog sites, search engines, or your own website. As soon as you make a big list out where you can find your prospects, like if you are a B2B company and will find clients on LinkedIn, so you should head there first. This activity will require the most time and effort and since it is going to be the bloodline of the overall strategy then we recommend that you spend time on this, let’s say approx. 4 hours should do

Identifying Pains, Problems, and Questions

Inbound Marketing in 2016 is all about building content around the questions, comments, problems or issues your prospects are expressing and then answering to these queries in the form of content. So in order to help ourselves that what exactly our audience is looking for on the web, we need to research over social review sites what kind of problems the audience is facing. You can also ask for help from your sales team to ask them about what is the most common problem prospects face or ask question about from them. At the conclusion of this activity you will be able to know that what frustrations, comments on blogs and things like that audience is facing. As you will have to visit at least 10-20 websites and copy-pasting the audience responses on them to your own master list this will take you another 2 hours. Now when you have got hold of the responses, you want to create content around it. So content that enticed most of the prospects or generated most responses is the first one you should look at creating it. Let’s say if it was blogs then create blogs with a frequency of 2-3 blog posts per week. Activities that need to be done:

Brainstorming blog topics, ebooks, or webinar topics.
Mapping out your content calendar for frequency of posts.

This activity will take another 2 hours. Time estimated for this entire research activity is another 4 hours approx.

Promoting the content

Promoting the content that we just created is as important as creating it. We need the public to reach to our posts and in order to that content writers or marketers need to share it with them in maximum way possible. For this purpose, they might need to optimize it for search engines, or share it on the social media sites or blog sites. But this process can be made easier now since we know where our audience lives over the web. So share the content where you bound to catch the maximum eyeballs. For example if for a B2B company find most of it’s clientele on LinkedIn then share your content there. Times estimated for this activity is let’s one hour which should be enough since now you knew already where to promote your content.

Your Strategy is Ready!

We listed out a lot of work there but if done efficiently will help you in growing your business over the web and get qualified as well as quality leads. The total time spent or listed by us is approx. 11 hours and we suggest if you do work in a 8 to 9 hours a day shift then you should think of stretching a few hours more so that the from the next day you know where to start your work and where to finish it. This should set you up for months and if done efficiently we believe you can achieve wonders with Inbound Marketing. Good Luck!