What skills does a team need for a successful Inbound Marketing program?

Marketers and industry leaders often come to us when considering adopting Inbound Marketing. They are the first to embrace the significant changes Inbound brings but frequently struggle to successfully implement and sustain efforts that may seem ambitious given the capabilities of their current internal team.

Most of the time, small and medium-sized organizations do not have all the necessary capabilities to be self-sufficient from the start. They find that there is too much work to do, often beyond their team's core competencies. To launch and sustain an Inbound program, support is needed with:

• Planning, creating, and curating engaging and valuable content.

• Developing and executing an SEO strategy.

• Creating an effective user experience (UX) on the website.

• Optimizing the website for conversions.

• Publishing timely and engaging content on social media.

• Planning, building, and executing lead nurturing campaigns.

• Continuously analyzing and implementing improvements.

• Planning and analyzing different versions of landing pages, CTAs, etc., through A/B Testing, which involves developing and launching two versions of the same element to measure which one performs better. This test helps optimize any strategy.

• Media buying for campaign publication, advertisements, posts, etc.

• Calculating and minimizing customer acquisition costs (CAC) for final conversion.

• Analyzing and increasing customer lifetime value (CLTV) as a predictive tool to estimate the future revenue a customer will generate throughout their relationship with the company.

• Analyzing the data received daily from campaigns, CTAs, ads, and other sources is crucial. Data Science can help transform this vast amount of information into valuable insights for your business.

• Using software to automate marketing actions, such as email marketing and SMS.

The above list represents a significant workload, but it must be carried out effectively to achieve success.

This is where we remind you why we are here. This is what we do for you, and because we do it daily, we can deliver results far beyond your expectations. However, there is a fundamental question in all of this: what roles and responsibilities should an organization take on from the beginning to master the Inbound program and achieve favorable results?

Align Sales and Marketing with Your Business Goals

As surprising as it may seem, many companies do not have clearly articulated business growth objectives. Like anyone, they know they want and need to increase revenue and profitability, but they struggle with determining how much, how fast, and how they will achieve it. Marketing goals are often the least well-defined.

Business and marketing objectives must be interconnected so that everyone involved understands the importance of their contributions. For example, consider an $8 million food delivery company aiming to grow 20% ($2.4 million) in two years. Its two primary revenue sources are school meal deliveries and banquet services, averaging $1.3 million over two years, along with supplier service contracts that bring in about $23,000 per month. By analyzing the numbers, various growth combinations in each area could help achieve the goal. The next step is to evaluate conversion rates and estimate how many potential customers are needed to acquire new clients and how much traffic is required to generate the necessary sales. At this point, we are defining significant marketing objectives that can be monitored weekly to track progress.

Define Your Target Customer

The top of the Inbound Marketing funnel focuses on attracting the best prospects with valuable content. To do this effectively, you must truly understand your potential customers so that your content and messaging speak directly to them. This means being specific about your ideal buyer considering company type, industry, geography, and the key decision-makers or influencers within those companies. If you can define your target with this level of detail, you are already 70% of the way to achieving your goal by turning that description into a prototype of the perfect customer.

Think Like an Editor

You don’t have to be a professional writer to launch a successful Inbound program. There are countless ways to create valuable content with external help, but you must think like an editor. This means regularly stepping into your prospects’ mindset to understand what and how to share content that will be engaging for them. By thinking like your prospects, you will begin to see content differently sharing insights on a new study, evaluating emerging technology and its impact on your industry, and explaining how these changes affect your customers will all be meaningful content strategies. When your entire organization adopts this mindset, they will begin contributing exceptional content ideas.

Effectively Manage Leads

A successful Inbound Marketing strategy will significantly transform your sales funnel, primarily by bringing in more potential customers or leads. However, not all leads are equal, and not all are worth pursuing. Your team must evaluate and prioritize these leads to optimize time and resources. Some leads may be disqualified immediately, while others will appear more promising as they fit the ideal buyer profile and have shown genuine interest in your product or service.

Commit to Understanding Analytics

Our Inbound Marketing tools provide a vast amount of real-time data every day, helping us determine what is working, what is not, and what we can do differently to improve program performance and results.

These analytics are highly valuable when reviewed immediately. Understanding how to interpret this data may require training, but developing this skill will lead to better marketing programs in the future. Having this analytical knowledge embedded in your team through an Inbound agency like Next Level will benefit everyone and drive faster, more effective business results.

Quickly responding to questions such as "What is the best traffic source?", "Where do the highest-quality referrals come from?", and "What trending blog topics can provide better support for our prospects?" means you can accelerate the pace of change and drive stronger results for both your business and your Inbound Marketing efforts.