What should be included in your inbound marketing plan?

1. Goals, Objectives & Metrics. If you’ve been following this blog series, you know goals, objectives and metrics is the most important part of a plan. Not only does it give you a path forward but it also sets up the parameters for monitoring and analyzing regular performance. If we’ve done our job so far, you should be ready to tackle this section already! Typically, your plan will have qualitative goals, quantitative objectives and the KPIs you’ll use to measure your performance.

2. Competitive Benchmarking. Understanding where you stand against your competition will give you perspective on how much activity you may need to execute to maintain or gain ground. If you’re the early adopter of inbound in your market, you have an opportunity to make early inroads with your best prospects. If you’re organization is a bit late to the game, you may have a bit more work to do. One of the best tools to get an understanding of your competitive situation is marketing.grader.com. This free tool gives you a fantastic overview of your online impact and straightforward guidance on where additional improvements may be needed. This same tool lets you enter the URLs of your top competitors and compare your standing against theirs.

3. Target Personas. In traditional outbound marketing, the focus is on target audiences en masse. In inbound marketing, the focus shifts to the very best prospects within those audiences. Target personas paint a picture of the exact “person” you want to talk to along with their goals, challenges, pain points, needs and even questions they may be asking that you can answer for him/her.
For example, if you’re a commercial insurance company targeting the construction industry, your persona may be “Contractor Cal,” owner or GM of a general contracting company. He likely has a degree in construction management, engineering or architecture; is 35-45 years old, married and has tweens in the home; household income is $150-200,000 with a home in the suburbs; he’s rugged, enjoys working with his hands, loves outdoor sports and likes active vacations.His business has between 5-50 employees; he’s heavily involved in the day-to-day activities of his company; goals are to minimize revenue/expense fluctuations and grow the business sustainably. Pain points include keeping enough projects in the pipeline, meeting deadlines, managing expenses, keeping workers safe and managing the mix of permanent and temporary employees.

By thoroughly understanding exactly who you’re “talking to,” your inbound marketing content becomes much more finessed and relevant. You won’t attract every prospect, you’ll attract the best leads.

4. Content Strategy. Feeling good so far? Good, hang on to that good feeling because this is where the core of your inbound marketing plan takes shape! You know what you want to accomplish, you know your competitive situation and you know exactly whom you need to talk to. Now…what are you going to say? Your content strategy needs to clearly identify your company’s positioning, competitive advantage and why your prospects should listen to you over all of the other choices on the Internet. Once that takes shape, the next step is messaging. What products, services, guidance, etc. will you share? Remember, your content should be designed to demonstrate benefits specific to your personas, not to act as a sales pitch expounding features of your “widget.” Your content strategy will outline the topics to be created and their corresponding formats – will they be tip sheets, white papers, videos, case studies, checklists, audits, consultations, etc.? Identifying the right forms for each topic is as much art as science but you’ll quickly learn what your best prospects convert on most regularly. When you’re thinking about content, don’t limit your plan to in-depth advanced content. A well-considered content strategy will include ongoing top-of-the-funnel content like blogs and social media keeping all of your messaging consistent and sharing the right information with your personas.

5. Editorial Calendar. The second biggest mind shift in inbound marketing is thinking about distributing and sharing your content like a publisher. Any organization that’s taken the leap into inbound marketing learns quickly that attracting leads is directly correlated to a regular editorial calendar. A well-coordinated schedule tying your blog posts to your promotional emails, advanced content, nurturing campaigns as social media sharing along with specific creation and distribution responsibilities by each member of your team is the absolute best way to get the most out of your inbound marketing.

6. Nurturing Plans. In a perfect world, every lead you generate would be ready to buy. Unfortunately, while some need your product or service immediately, the majority of your leads will need at least a little nurturing. Think of it like dating: once you find out what the “other” is interested in, you talk a lot more often and more in-depth about those interests. The same goes for inbound marketing. When a prospect raises his hand and identifies himself as interested in what you have to say about a specific challenge, he’s giving you what you need to know to strengthen your connection. Based on your typical sales cycle, plan to reach out to those leads in your funnel regularly with more information. The goal here is to become invaluable on the subject and ultimately guide the prospect through the funnel into a customer! If you’ve identified your goals, objectives and metrics upfront, monitoring the performance of your nurturing and adjusting as needed becomes a more natural and logical process. Ultimately, tying your lead generation and conversion rates to the customers generated by the end of your nurturing will give you the calculations you need to realistically project your performance against your stated objectives by the end of the year.

7. Roles and Responsibilities. In our recent post, What Capabilities Does Your Organization Need To Execute Inbound Marketing?, we outlined the unique team makeup a business will need to execute its inbound plan whether from internal resources or help from an experienced inbound marketing firm. Because the success of your inbound marketing efforts depends heavily on the participation and execution from that team, the specific roles and responsibilities of each key contributor should be outlined in the 2015 plan. Don’t make the mistake of thinking one department, or worse, one person, can successfully satisfy all of the necessary skillset requirements.

8. Budget. As part of our planning series, we also talked a lot about all of the budget considerations for your inbound marketing program. This includes everything from your team resources to tools like your website, automation tools, CRM and outside support. The best part about an inbound marketing program is it has a calculable ROI so it’s really important to make sure all costs return expectations are identified.

9. Service Level Agreement (SLA). The SLA should be a separate organizational activity but, because of its importance and relevance to performance, we’ve included it as part of the planning process.

Historically, sales and marketing have not always had a great relationship. In fact, according to a Corporate Executive Board study, 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative. Generally speaking, sales views marketing as the irrelevant pretty picture department and marketing views sales as simple-minded, lazy, and incompetent. Ouch!  Developing an SLA that outlines roles, commitments and responsibilities to and from both departments lets the teams work together with clear expectations. The SLA outlines the quantifiable activities and metrics expected along with reasonable engagement timing and closed-loop reporting.

Whew! That’s quite a process. I’m not going to lie: your first inbound marketing plan will be a challenge but the rewards more than make up for it. Keep following our 2015 planning series for guidance and feel free to peruse our resources page and blog library; there’s a lot of great free information in both to help you get started. And, of course, we’re always here to help if you need a little one-on-one.

http://www.weidert.com/whole_brain_marketing_blog/9-key-components-to-your-2015-inbound-marketing-plan