Calculating Inbound Route: At the Next Blog Post, Turn Right

Planning a road trip these days has become pretty easy. When we’re looking to travel from A to B, we can just open an app, enter our destination, and the fastest route is laid out in front of us. Those days of poring over road atlases and searching for service stations only to miss a junction hidden in the fold of the page are long gone.

That simplicity doesn’t (yet) apply to laying out a route for inbound marketing.

An effective inbound marketing strategy has to be planned and formulated. It needs to be more than the publication of blog posts, highlighted on social media, in the vague hope of “raising awareness” or “brand-building” — terms that often mask a lack of vision of the final result. Inbound marketing should have a strategy, a plan and attractions that pull in audiences, interest them and excite them, and turn them into customers and evangelists.

A key element in that strategy will be the creation of marketing personas. These are character profiles that allow us to understand our target audience. We know who they are and what they want, what they need and what inspires them. The more accurate we can make those personas, the more effective our content will be at attracting them towards the brand.

But we’ll need more than one persona, in part because we’ll often be appealing to different people but also because we’ll also be trying to attract different people at different points on their way towards becoming customers.

So another essential element in an inbound marketing strategy will be the formulation of a customer buying cycle.

We’ll need to create content that can appeal (and be found) by people with a problem or a need, who are looking for solutions but don’t yet know what sort of solutions they can use. That content may take the form of blog posts and autoresponders. How-to guides can work well here too. We need to plan multiple touch points on the client’s journey from interested passer-by to loyal customer. Whether they need general information about a product, a quote for a service or are ready to be closed or upsold, we need to be ready and know how to attract them, pull them in and engage with them.

We’ll also need content that can delve deeper and answer questions that a lead earlier in the buying cycle wouldn’t know to ask, and perhaps shows the complexity of the problem as a whole —a complexity so deep that it requires the brand’s paid intervention to fix.

Pulling Audiences Into The Sales Funnel

And as we add different content to the inbound marketing strategy, we also need to consider the final stages. What actions would the customer take that would enable a sale? What do we need to include on the landing page to create a conversion, and what content do we need on different landing pages that can appeal to different personas at different stages of the buying cycle.

The formulation of an inbound marketing strategy has much in common with the creation of a traditional sales funnel but one in which the force sucking the leads through pipe is the pull of attractive, relevant and enticing content. The top of the funnel might be made up of content that appeals to as many relevant personas as possible but as the funnel narrows, it filters out irrelevant audience members and streams different personas to the right content and the most effective landing pages.

And the funnel isn’t made of plastic. It’s a multi-access information structure that connects distribution channels to communication devices, creating multiple touch points and a rich customer experience.

Inbound marketing sounds complicated but it’s straightforward. Produce the right content for the right personas and distribute that content in the right places, and as long as that content is relevant and effective it will pull audiences in and build a market. Turning that market into customers and influencers though, requires a plan, a strategy and tools for a long-term relationship.

It requires a roadmap, a pencil, and a list of service stations to suit every driver.

To learn more about inbound marketing and to understand what it can do for your business, contact us at contact@astelo.com.

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