Inbound marketing reaches audience organically with SEO, blogs, and social media to attract, engage and convert visitors to customers. With captivating content, Inbound Marketing answers customers queries by solving a real problem, turning them from prospects into customers. It is proven to work, with Inbound marketing delivering 54 percent more leads than traditional marketing at much lower costs.

Set Objectives and Develop Personas

Start With your goals

Start with setting your goals that are achievable and realistic. Look at where your competitors are and what the industry is doing to arrive at realistic and measurable goals. You can define the goals for different stages of the buyer journey and build in KPIs for each stage of the buyer journey in your plan.

Identify your Audiences and Assess Content Needs

It is important to do a complete analysis of your visitors, identify your audiences and develop Buyer Personas for each of your audience segments. Define your Brand proposition and highlight how your Brand proposition answers your customer’s requirements better than that of the competition . A quick check could be to prepare an Elevator Pitch and identify the areas that your Brand is better than that of the Competition.

Assess Content Needs for the identified audience to see how your existing content answers their existing needs. In case there are any changes that are required in your content strategy build the same into your content marketing plan.

Develop a Content Marketing Plan

Content Marketing Plan for your brand will be based on your audience insight and their concerns as well as pain points. Once you have identified your strengths you can effectively customize your content with Keyword rich phrases for better Search Ranking. Forums and Online Communities can provide useful insight into key concerns and pain points of your audience and provide you insights on the keywords and phrases that resonate with the audience so that your site can be optimized for Search.

“Content audits are a great way to see how well you’re covering the topics that are important to your audience, and whether you’re maintaining a good mix of content types. Auditing your existing content also helps you find holes that you can fill with new content pieces, or identify great pieces of content that can be repurposed into other formats to reach even more prospects.”

Source – HubSpot

Keyword Research

Identify how the audiences are searching for your content through keyword research. This allows you to see the estimated global and local search volume, ranking difficulty, and also predicts the cost of running paid campaigns. Through this research, you can decipher which terms and phrases to target in order to attract the right visitors to your website.

Onsite SEO

This consists of all the factors on a website page that influence search engine ranking. In order to get found for the keywords that are chosen in your keyword strategy, it’s important to optimize every page that is created on your website. All pages should include the appropriate keyword within the content, page properties, and the image tags. Performing onsite SEO for all current and future pages that you build out for your website is very important.
As the entire approach revolves around providing answers to your customer’s key concerns it is important that your website or pages are optimized to be found with keywords and the content is shared on channels and formats where the customers are searching for the same.

Focus On Lead Generation

Promote premium content such as whitepapers, eBooks, webinars and Case studies to convert your visitors to leads. For B2C content, New products can be introduced at the time when the customers are more likely to be looking for purchases such as during the Holiday Season. Any special offers such as free gifts can be advertised to get more traffic and leads.

Landing Page Design

Landing pages designed to capture the user’s attention to generate leads are designed to capture the interest with eye-catching visuals. A good landing page is properly designed to attract new leads. A good design is meant to bring about the desired user action.

Create Be-Spoke Landing Pages for the offer

Landing Pages are the focal point for your visitors and need to be optimized with Keywords for Search Engine ranking and also answer the key concerns of your audience. Critical elements are Headline,Meta Description, a brief description of the offer, an Image, social sharing links,supporting elements such as Meta Tags, Apps.

Call-to-Action Creation

Call-To-Action button on your site is critical for increasing acquisition rate and lead generation. CTA’s direct visitors to your landing pages. To understand the best CTA you can test the CTAs to see which one performs better and position them on various pages.

Leads Nurturing

Nurture your leads with automated workflows which allow you to trigger emails based on the action taken by the lead. With a process in place for nurturing leads, you can move the audiences through the sales funnel. Assess the performance through the sales funnel with KPIs for each of the stages in the sales cycle.

Share your Content

Promoting your Content in Social Media not only helps to get more visitors to the site but also improves your search rank . A company blog is important for Lead and Demand generation, updates with newer developments and topics that they may be seeking information on.

Engage your Audiences

Engaging your Audience with Offers, Contests, and Visual content has been found to be most effective. It has also been proven by a study that customers tend to trust recommendations from friends over advertisements.

Build your Community

Brands’ outreach strategy to build a network of customers. prospects and peers to establish a brand connect and enable conversions,conversations and endorsements to nurture Brand Loyalty and Advocacy. Effectively engaging audiences with offers and content with relevance to the Brand Community leads to social sharing and humanizes the brand.

Pay Per Click

PPC campaigns give you an opportunity to put your message in front of an audience that is seeking your product or service. Through keyword research, strategic bidding, and a compelling advertisement you can get the results you want. PPC is no longer limited to search engines, you can also run PPC campaigns on various social media platforms.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is the platform for sharing content and odds are your audience is engaging on at least one social media platform. Sharing content on your social media accounts allows you to reach your audience on multiple channels- Facebook, Twitter,Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn. Social media acts as a gateway for potential prospects to find your website so it is important to be relevant, active and engaging in this sphere.

Localize your Content

Inbound Marketing Plan requires a Location Based Strategy for the Brand to reflect the local presence and the offers and content for the Location should factor in services or products offered for the location as well as local pages should be based on the customized to the demographics and search results as well as social media preference for the area. This should be built into the Landing pages and Location based Brand Pages for the offers.

Earn your Customers Trust

Analyse the core Brand attributes that you are communicating and if your Brand content and Brand Experience can help you earn customers trust.
“Accuracy, Transparency, Expertise, Choice, Awareness, Relevance, Fairness, Format, Relatability, and Exclusivity are Ten Trust elements that every Brand needs.”
To create a credible brand it is important to link your physical address to a listing on the web, over and above Branding elements, such as Google My Business, Four Square that would help your customers know your location and at the same time help you with Search engine rankings.

Measure and Course Correct

Use the right tools to understand the impact of your efforts and work on the areas that are yielding results. In case there is a certain type of Content, that works better, prioritize posts and initiatives for the same. In case there are certain Keywords that are most searched and bring in the results, the pages need to be optimized for the same. Social Media Metrics need to be customized for each channel and results for the same can be used to generate insights for future campaigns.

Some of the metrics that can be used are the ratio of Customer Acquisition Cost and Customer value to understand payback. Measure the conversions and implement a segment based strategy based on life-cycle stages, segments and user history.