Inbound Marketing Checklist

Inbound Marketing strategy set up:

• Understand your buyer’s persona

  Take the time to learn about your target market and buyer personas. It’s critical to understand your target audience and the types of content they’re most likely to consume. Each buyer persona should include demographics, interests, and job information.

• Make a list of your goals and benchmarks

  When developing inbound marketing strategies and plans, you should always aim to define SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely).

  Before you go on with your inbound marketing journey, take a deep breath and assess your company’s current state. How can you figure out how to improve or get to a better place if you don’t know what position you’re in right now?

  Consider the following:

  1. What marketing efforts have you already undertaken?
  2. Aside from cold calling, what other activities does your sales team engage in?
  3. What methods do you use to keep track of your progress?
  4. What kind of results have you seen thus far?

  For your website, consider the following:

  1. How much traffic do you get?
  2. What kind of content can you find on the site?
  3. How many leads do you generate from your website?
  4. How many of those leads do you manage to convert into paying customers?

  With this knowledge, you can better predict what resources your new inbound marketing activities will require. The more focused and specific you can get with your Inbound Marketing goals the better.

• Conduct keyword research

  You should spend a few hours researching keywords before creating any content. When possible, use keywords with low to medium competition and high search volume. To begin, you’ll need anything from 20 to 50 target keywords, depending on the size of your company. When it comes to search engine rankings and getting seen, focusing on fewer keywords can yield better results.

• Create your offers and landing pages

  Remember to optimize your landing page for SEO, include a clear value proposition, and a clear call to action (usually a form for the user to complete.)

  Here are the components of a good landing page:
  1. Short & clear headline – Your landing page’s headline is the first thing visitors will see, and it may be the deciding factor in whether or not they stay on the page. Give it some thought. It’s also prime keyword real estate, so make sure you add it here to boost SEO. The title should be short and to the point, emphasizing the value of your offer rather than bragging about how amazing your offer or product is.

  2. Persuasive copy – Whether your content is a product sheet or a whitepaper, the copy on your landing page should convey to the visitor, in a few words, what they will learn or gain by downloading it. Of course, your keyword should be included as well.

  3. Appealing image – You might not think that an image can make a significant impact, but it can. We are visual creatures. Including an image increases the chances of conversion. Don’t overlook this design aspect, whether it’s an image of the downloaded offer or an image related to the subject of your article. You can A/B test your imagery once your landing page is up and running to discover what works best/leads to higher conversions.

  4. Form settings – A form is a vital aspect of every landing page. It’s where readers enter their information and, in some way or another, receive their offer. Place your form above the fold of your landing page if possible- the more scrolling customers have to do, the less likely they are to fill it out.

  5. Clear CTA – This refers not only to the call-to-action that brought the visitor to the landing page, but also to the CTA that they must click in order to download the content. It must be bold, stand out, and include action-oriented wording that tells the reader what you want them to do, such as Download, Register, Click, or Subscribe.

  6. Thank you page – What happens after your visitor has completed your form and clicked on your CTA? How are they going to get what they’ve been promised? The best thing you can do is send them to a page called “Thank You.” The fundamental goal of this is to send them the offer they requested. This can be sent through email or made available for download right on the thank you page.

• Develop a content strategy & plan

  Make sure your content speaks to your buyer personas, spans the whole sales funnel, and is relevant to your service or product offerings. Without a strategy and plan in place, there’s no way to guarantee you’ll produce content for all of your audience segments and for the different stages of your sales funnel.

• A keyword strategy and best practices should be implemented

  Concentrate on one keyword per page and use that term in the following:

  1. On-page content
  2. Page title 
  3. URL
  4. Meta keywords 
  5. Meta description 
  6. Image alt text
  7. Categories/tags (for blogs) 

• Produce original-unique content

  At least once a week, add new original content to your website (a blog post, a web page, or a landing page.) Your information should be valuable and educational. In your content, avoid being overly salesy or aggressive. Cover all stages of the sales funnel, and avoid using duplicate content.

• Include links

  Internal and external links on your website can improve user experience by linking to similar valuable content and encouraging inbound links from any external websites that are referenced. Add one or two links to your content. When possible, employ keyword-focused anchor text and internal relative links.

• Insert images

  Images can improve the aesthetics of a web page and the user experience. Avoid using exclusive images on a page, however, because search engines can’t interpret them. On each page, try to have at least one image and update the file name to include a keyword.

• Use CTAs on your website

  Calls-to-Action make it simple for your visitors to figure out what they should do next. In your CTA, use an action verb (for example, learn, download, or speak). Also, when possible, provide an image of the deliverable (eBook, checklist, template), and use contrasting colors against the web page background.

• Distribute on social media

  Inbound links to your website can be encouraged by sharing your content on popular social media platforms, which can benefit your SEO efforts. Remember that you don’t have to distribute only new content; if it’s still relevant, you can share previous blog posts, landing pages, and web pages. Make sure you also share other relevant material that isn’t your own. Don’t make the mistake of attempting to share on every available social media platform. Share on the channels where your content will be most relevant to the target audience.

• Build your automation and nurturing processes

  Lead nurturing is crucial to inbound marketing because it allows you to deliver value to your leads and customers, while also assisting them in growing with your company. How do you engage with your prospects and transform them into customers in the most helpful way? Nurturing leads is the solution. How will you use lead nurturing to help you achieve your objectives? Create a lead nurturing strategy that will help you build long-term relationships with your customers. The first step is to match content to each stage of the buyer’s journey. Then, make sure you have content that will entice people to your site, as well as content that will nurture them along the way. Remember, decision-makers seek information before contacting sales.

  Furthermore, automation has become a must for efficient lead nurturing nowadays.

  While websites and extensions such as social media accounts are vital in lead nurturing, email does the bulk of the work. Even when you’re first qualifying a lead, you want to get as much information as possible, such as what company the lead works for, what role they have, and what topics they’re interested in. This information can be utilized to start a nurturing process via email, which can then be reinforced by retargeting and other methods in search and social. This is where automation comes into play. The necessity of workflows, and other nurturing and engagement approaches only increases from here.

• Consider paid search and other channels

  Other channels can be used as part of your inbound strategy as well- just make sure you track their effectiveness.

  Paid search can help you extend the reach of landing pages and offers that have shown to be successful through inbound marketing. Begin a paid search campaign using keywords that revolve around your offer, or the subject of your blog post. If done properly, these efforts can generate additional leads and sales.

  Creating a paid search campaign that targets the terms you want to rank for SEO, and which directs people to landing pages, will also assist you in gathering data. In a matter of weeks, you’ll have a wealth of information on how popular the keywords are (impressions,) how relevant your product or service is to those terms (click-through-rate,) and how well your copy and offer are aligned with people searching for that keyword (conversion rate.)

• Produce a report on your findings

  You’ve set goals from the very beginning- now it’s time to organize and present your results at the end of the campaign.

  To help you determine how well you’re doing with your inbound marketing efforts, we’ve prepared a list of metrics to Analyze each month.

  1. Overall Traffic – examine the origin of your traffic sources (to your website and specific landing pages) to see if there are any areas where you can improve. It can also help determine long-term trends and isolate seasonal or short-term problems.
  2. Traffic by source – finding the answers to each monthly swing can help you make sure you’re on the right track. Reduced traffic is frequently followed by a reduction in content production (posting fewer blog articles) or other predictable reasons for most inbound activities during that month. If you send out a quarterly email newsletter to your marketing database, you should observe an uptick in email traffic during the month you send it out. You can factor in the influence on traffic and leads each month when analyzing your performance after you know how much it affects them.
  3. Number of leads – is the number of leads increasing or decreasing compared to previous months? To figure out why this is happening, go back to your source reports and see if you get enough traffic, then look at your conversion rates. If you get the same amount of traffic month after month and your conversion rate remains constant, you should get the same number of leads. So something has to have changed in one of those two areas to have an effect on the total number of leads. Examining your traffic and conversion rates by source can help you figure out what’s going on.
  4. Conversion rate – It’s critical to examine each lead’s source and evaluate the performance of each landing page. If you have a number of underperforming landing pages (based on your own performance or industry benchmarks), this is where you should concentrate your conversion-boosting efforts. It’s also critical that you identify the best-performing landing pages and continue to promote them. If these are your strongest sources of leads, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting consistent traffic from new campaigns. You want to improve the conversion rate of your underperforming landing pages and attract more people to your high-converting pages.
  5. Page performance – On a regular basis, you should look into the content that your visitors find most useful or interesting on your website. You may review each of your top 10 visited pages to ensure that they are optimized for SEO and the keywords you are targeting, and check that they have some type of call to action. One of the most common mistakes we find is startups failing to include a visible call to action on high-performing pages of their websites.

   

   

  If you have any other questions don’t hesitate to contact us.

   

  For more checklists, you can visit our resources page.