how to run an inbound marketing campaign?

If you are thinking of carrying out your first inbound marketing campaign, it is normal that you are not sure where to start. You need to be clear about what resources you have, have the right technology and enough budget to be able to execute it.

what is inbound marketing?

If you are still a bit lost and want to see if it is worth embarking on an inbound marketing strategy, in this post we will solve all your doubts, when you finish reading you will know both inbound marketing and its creator.

Inbound marketing is a non-intrusive marketing methodology that accompanies the user from the beginning of the buying process until the end of the transaction. It attracts potential customers, after having defined the buyer persona to the same brand by offering them valuable content. The purpose of this methodology is to find people who are at the beginning of this process, in order to accompany them through the different phases until the final transaction.

Advantages of inbound marketing

1. Increases MQLs: Inbound marketing gets leads, but thanks to its segmentation strategies, a large number of the leads it gets are qualified, i.e. MQLs. The fact that a large part of the brand's leads are qualified means that there is a greater chance that they will end up becoming customers of the brand, and if the inbound strategy has been well applied, you will be able to make them loyal.
   
   
2. Increases visits to the page: Traffic to your page will increase with this strategy, as the main objective is to capture leads, so users will appear on your landing page to become leads.
   
   
3. Visibility: Since the boom of new technologies, it is easy for even the smallest companies to make themselves known. Thanks to the production of quality content in your inbound strategy, you will increase your visibility because if the public likes your content, they will share it. And this will mean that more and more people will get to know you.
   
   
4. Trust and credibility: The public no longer wants to see advertising or read banal emails that are of no use to them, the public wants to receive information that they really need. Therefore, providing valuable content in our inbound strategy, makes customers trust us and gives credibility to the brand that others who are not committed to providing valuable content, do not have.
   
   
5. Profitability: It has a much lower cost than outbound marketing, as you have to study your target audience very well, what they want and where they are. But in the long run what this achieves is to always address who you should, your buyer persona, so you get more quality leads. Not like outbound strategies in which you shoot information to any user without investigating whether it is a potential customer or if it is the opposite. With inbound marketing, you have your segmented audience and you can classify and serve them better than in outbound marketing.

how to run an inbound marketing campaign?

Now that we know what inbound marketing is and the advantages of creating an inbound marketing strategy, we will explain step by step how to create an inbound marketing campaign.

1. Define your audience
   The first step always has to be to identify who your target audience is. If you have a product or service you want to offer, the first thing to do is to know who you are going to offer it to. Therefore, it is time to define your buyer persona, which would be, by analysing it in depth, the perfect customer for your company. For this you have to analyse what topics arouse their interests, with this you can even treat those contents in your blog, from which you can redirect your target audience to the landing page, where they will become leads. The success of your inbound marketing campaign will depend on how well you define your ideal customer, as it will allow you to have clear objectives and gradually refine the profile you have created of your ideal customer.
   
   
2. Set goals
   

   Once you are clear about who your ideal customer is, and how you can target them, the next step is to set the objectives we want to achieve in our inbound strategy. It is recommended that these objectives are measurable, this will help us much more when it comes to knowing where we are failing and why.

   To define your objectives, it is best to follow the SMART strategy:

   Specific: The objectives we set ourselves cannot be general, you need to know in your strategy what objectives you are pursuing, explained in detail, in order to clearly obtain the desired result.

   Measurable: The objectives must be measurable, i.e. if you can quantify an objective, you will be able to achieve it as you will know where you are failing and by how much.

   Attainable: If you set goals for your company that you cannot achieve, and that are not realistic, the only thing you will achieve is to discourage yourself and your team. Be objective and you will succeed.

   Relevant: They must be objectives that have to do with your marketing campaign, do not go outside the general objectives that usually exist in marketing and sales.

   Timely: Every objective should have a specific time frame. To know if you are achieving your objectives, you have to set time goals. It is not the same to achieve an objective in 3 months than in 1 week. We will be achieving much more if we achieve in a week what others achieve in 3 months.

3. Create an offer
   Every inbound marketing strategy is based on the acquisition of leads, it consists of the user giving us part of their data for something in exchange, a content that they consider valuable. This is why the first point was so important, if we have already set our buyer persona and we know what our potential customers want, it will be very easy to offer them the content they want. We will know what offer, whether a discount or additional information, to offer them so that they decide to leave their data in our form. For this, you must make the user feel attracted by the call to action that we leave in our blog, this must be attractive to him, both in design and content.
   
   
4. Landing page
   

   To get your offer to your potential customers, what you have to do is create a landing page, which is specifically designed to encourage users to perform the specific action you want them to perform.

   For your landing page to be effective, it must contain the following:

   • A call to action that is placed at the top of the page, this should be for users who do not scroll down the page.
   • A form in which users leave their details so that we have a method of contacting them.
   • There must be a very clear offer, that is to say, it must focus on the benefits that the user is going to obtain and not on how good the product is or the characteristics it has.

5. Content
   Quality content is the basis of inbound marketing, without it, we will not be able to attract our potential customers to our website, so it must be very careful and we must be very clear about what content to provide, it must be of quality, this feature must always be above the quantity, it is useless to have a lot of information that does not matter to our users. To find this content, we must also be very clear that we must optimize it to the maximum in terms of SEO, the better positioning, the more users we will reach.
   
   
6. Lead nurturing
   With lead nurturing we make sure to accompany our lead throughout the process until they become a customer of our brand. We do this by sending a series of messages that will help them to complete their path to conversion. This is usually done automatically, so as not to waste time sending these emails or not sending them at the right time.
   
   
7. Measuring results
   Finally, and most importantly, we must measure the results obtained in order to check if the plan we have executed has worked or not, so you will quickly realise if your inbound marketing campaigns are effective or not.

As we said at the beginning, you already know everything you need to know about inbound marketing, even how to carry out a campaign step by step, are you going to miss its benefits?