Inbound marketing guide: step by step

If you are thinking about creating an inbound marketing strategy but don't know where to start or what steps you should follow, keep reading! We will teach you how to create your strategy step by step, and we will tell you everything you need to know about inbound marketing.

what is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is basically falling in love with your customers after attracting them. To achieve this within marketing, you have to listen to users, and offer them what they want, you should not just talk about yourself endlessly, users have to know what we are offering them, but we should not bombard them with information, we must focus on their needs and personalise the content for each of them.

Steps to follow in an inbound marketing strategy

1. Define your buyer persona
   

   The main basis of any inbound marketing strategy is the buyer persona, you must make a representation of your ideal customer with all possible details, this will help you to know your target audience, and having clear who you are addressing, you will have clear what content to create to attract them.

   For your brand, it is normal to have several segmented profiles, at first it is not advisable to go overboard, go little by little to be able to plan your strategy smoothly based on the figure of your buyer persona.

   Defining your buyer persona is not a simple task, so there are several points that can help you define it in the best possible way:

   -Name them: To begin with, one of the most important points is to name the different buyer personas that you will have within your brand and your business.

   -Situation: It is important to know what their work and family situation is, as it will influence a lot when it comes to making decisions and having certain needs.

   -Demographic data: We must know where our users live in order to offer them one information or another.

   -Profile: In order to be able to analyse our buyer persona well, we will have to be very clear about how they behave, if we analyse their behaviour, we will know how to persuade them.

   -Objectives of the buyer persona: It will help us a lot to know what dreams and goals the buyer persona has, this will help us enormously to know what their concerns are and what can convince them to buy a product, apart from knowing what products they will be more willing to buy.

   -Needs: Not only are important the dreams of the buyer persona, they are much more their needs, because a dream can be fulfilled or not, but a need will have to cover it for sure, take advantage of the knowledge of these needs will help us to persuade him to get our products or services.

   -Concerns: We could say that this point helps us even more than the needs, since the concerns of a person make them act differently, it is much more common to convince them of this.

2. Define objectives
   This is the most important step in any marketing strategy, but not just any objective, for a good inbound marketing strategy we must focus on SMART objectives, we need objectives that are specific, quantifiable, measurable, achievable and defined in time. If you need to know how to write these SMART objectives, here is this post in which we detail it.
   
   
3. Web strategy
   

   Once we have set the objectives and our buyer persona, we have to analyse their behaviour, and not only in their daily life as in the first point, but their behaviour on the web, if we analyse how our buyer persona searches for products or services on the internet, the words they use and the exact terms they use to find our products specifically, it will be very easy to appear in their searches.

   A good idea is to analyse the keywords that our competitors use, once we know that, we will be able to compare our own keywords with theirs and it will help us within our SEO practices.

4. Content
   Once we know who our buyer persona is and how to direct them to our website, we will start with our content strategy. This point is very important because we must create content that brings value to our buyer persona.

The buying process is similar to a funnel in which there are three stages:

1. The first part of the funnel we will call ToFu (Top of the Funnel). At this stage the customer has hardly any knowledge of our company, therefore, what we must do in this phase is to create content for that user to become our audience. Since they may not yet know that our company can meet their need.
2. The next part is the MoFu (Middle of the Funnel), in this part the user already knows the company, so the task is to guide the user to discover that our company can provide the solution to their problem.
3. Finally we have the last part of the funnel, which is the BoFu (Bottom of the Funnel) which is the closing stage. At this point the customer is about to complete their purchase decision, and we guide them to end up hiring our services or buying our products.

We have to think about content for each of the stages of the conversion process of the user to customer, since at each stage we need to provide different information. Normally the content we generate in the last 2 stages, will be through the keywords that we get from the traffic obtained in the first stage of the funnel.

5. Offers

During the different stages of the funnel, we have to add offers to activate visitors and achieve a conversion from user to lead and from lead to customer. What we need is to create an offer that is attractive to each of our buyer personas. As the resources we have are not infinite, what we will do is segment our buyer personas and prioritise those that are most important. Then we will create the first offers and we will be able to capture traffic and convert.

6. Lead qualification

The next step in this process is to qualify the leads we have obtained based on a series of criteria. To achieve this, we will have to establish a scoring system in order to optimise our sales resources and close the sales process at the right time.

7. Email marketing automation

Once we have qualified leads, it's time to catch them, and this will be achieved through a series of emails that we will program to go to our leads and thus get to be turning them into customers of the brand.

8. Measurement plan

We have to measure very well each action to succeed in the strategy, we will set the KPIs that are necessary to measure the effectiveness of the strategy and if it is working. To do this we previously set some objectives, so that at this point we can check that we are achieving them or where we are failing to improve and optimize our strategy.

9. Technology to use

We have to use a technology that contains tools that allow us to be more efficient in our marketing processes. For this there are multiple platforms such as Hubspot or Marketo, which help in different processes, such as google analytics that helps in the metrics.

Making an inbound marketing strategy is a simple process but involves effort and dedication, with this guide, it will be easy to start and be able to make a good inbound marketing strategy so do not wait any longer and get to work.