How To Set Up An Inbound Marketing Strategy?

Why Set Up An Inbound Marketing Strategy?

The implementation of an Inbound Marketing strategy is indeed on the agenda of the digital marketer. Little known, Inbound Marketing suffers from definitions of all kinds, even from hazardous misinterpretations.

Marketing Managers who want to implement an Inbound Marketing strategy must be patient and above all surround themselves with good resources, because they venture into a tedious technique, moving against Google algorithms and difficult to tame.

The implementation of an Inbound Marketing strategy requires the orchestration of a set of techniques bringing together the SEO, the SMO (Social Media Optimization), the

Marketing Content, and the Marketing Automation around clearly defined objectives.

Inbound Marketing has been a popular marketing term for the past few years, but nothing new. It consists in increasing the visibility of a brand on the Internet via the content it disseminates in order to generate more traffic on its website and thus convert its audience into prospects through a commitment cycle (Usually via an email nurturing/follow-up sequence).

Here’s how to implement your Inbound Marketing strategy in 11 steps.

1 – Establish the profile of your people.

Personas are segmentations of your target prospects, supplemented by behavioral data which allow you to target your potential buyers more precisely according to their client background, their social networks, their expectations, and their areas of interest.

The study of personas thus helps you to discover more precisely the standard profile of your potential customers, their needs, their motivations but especially the information and content that they seek throughout their conversion tunnel.

Indeed, an Inbound Marketing strategy based on its ability to be found on the Internet and to interest its audience, the study of personas will help you define the most relevant content subjects to attract, seduce, convince and convert your potential customers.

To do this, cut your target into several key segments depending on your market and determine the following for each of them:

• What information are they looking for regarding your solution?
• What questions do they ask themselves?
• What sources of information do they consult?
• What are their favorite media?
• When do they consult these media?
• What special needs does your solution meet and how do you help your customers get better?
• What are the key success factors for each of your people?
• What are the obstacles to purchasing?

2 – Do an SEO Audit of your website vs your objectives and your competition.

First of all, there is no point in getting into Inbound Marketing if you have not analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of your website with regard to your objectives and your competition. You should be able to analyze the client route of your visitors on your website and understand to what extent you are accompanying them in their research in order to convert them into a prospect.

A fundamental step in an Inbound Marketing strategy, auditing your website will allow you to understand whether your website has technical or semantic errors impacting your natural referencing.

Which keywords stand out naturally on Google ? Is your website well structured or does it show technical failures to be well referenced ? What are your content already available and usable ? How many quality backlinks do you have, or are you impacted by toxic links?

An audit of your website will provide you with a full point on the areas for improving your digital strategy, both from a purely technical and semantic point of view. A website audit should take into account the following points:

• Analysis of all the pages of your website, their semantic and technical structure (Securities tags, metadata),
• Technical problem blocking site and page indexing,
• Site architecture and internal links (mesh),
• Structure of themes and menus (semantic cocoons)
• Management of web redirects (301 and 404),
• Analysis of incoming links (Netlinking) necessary for the correct positioning of your pages on Google
• Relevance and performance of the keywords listed,
• Analysis of your competitors on your keywords,
• Editorial content (texts and images),
• Internet users’ routes and user experience

3 – Align your marketing and commercial teams with the same objectives and KPIs

Defining a “prospect” may have a different meaning, depending on whether you are on the marketing team or on the business team.

This difference in definition often leads to confusion and can generate dissatisfaction in each of the parts. Thus, in order to set up an effective Inbound Marketing strategy, it is essential to align the marketing and commercial teams with the characteristics that define a qualified lead.

A qualification process based on the BANT (Budget, Authority, Need & Timing) model is often the best way to meet the qualification requirements requested by Commercial Managers. These four criteria make it possible to validate the relevance of a lead as soon as it has a defined budget, that it is the decision-maker, that its need for your solution is proven and that the purchase is well planned in the days. or weeks to come.
This step should make it possible to define from when a contact becomes a prospect qualified for your commercial force and can be transferred to the CRM from your Marketing Automation tools.

Thanks to the maturation (nurturing) and scoring process, you can identify which prospects are most interested in your solutions, what is their level of maturity regarding their purchasing decision, and which are ready to relate to your salespeople.

4 – Define your priority keywords

A keyword refers to the expression that Internet users will search for in search engines, and therefore in Google in more than 95% of cases, in order to find the information sought.
Thus, your Inbound Marketing strategy must go through the identification of the keywords that your target prospects will seek the most in your field of activity.

Your keywords will allow you to structure the architecture of your website, as well as the articles, pages, and content that you will set up.

Google streamlines all of your content based on how you organize and classify your keywords on your site. Since Google cannot yet understand the meaning of your sentences, it tries to understand the consistency of your subjects according to the way you classify them.

To structure the architecture of your keywords, start by identifying the priority main keywords (single words) according to the different categories or service offers that you offer, then decline them into secondary and long-range keywords that generate the most research.

Once your list of keywords has been identified, sort them according to their subject, their relevance, their volume, and their potential performance.

To find out which keywords to choose, there are several tools like “keywords planner” available via Google Adwords, Google Trends, but also answerthepublic.com, keywordtool.io, Ferke Keyword Tool, Moz Keyword Explorer, Semrush, or Yoda.

5 – Structure your website

It is not enough to blog with many contents to carry out your Inbound Marketing strategy. You must have a website organized so that Google, like your visitors, can find the information you are looking for quickly.

The most effective is to structure your website according to a simple organization chart containing your priority and secondary keywords called “organization in semantic cocoons”.
Semantic cocoon is a concept introduced by Laurent Bourrelly, Expert SEO, who has identified an optimum pyramid site structure compared to Google after a multitude of various tests. He realized that Google favored websites whose internal mesh followed a logic of main, secondary and tertiary pages by subject sharing the same semantic universe. Also, it will be essential that a tertiary page is accessible in a maximum of 3 clicks from the main page.

Indeed, Google’s corer robots use the semantic affinity of words on a page string to deduce the richness and relevance of the general theme vis-à-vis a search performed.
This is called “giving juice” by multiplying the related pages with a synonym or complementary keywords, reinforcing the weight of your main keyword via a pyramid structure, the secondary and tertiary keywords reinforcing the word. main key.

6 – Publish web pages optimized for Google.

Your main web pages are the most important. They allow you to generate organic traffic on your website from the moment when the targeted keywords are clearly identified by Google, and your pages appear in the first results of it.

They must be clear and complete on the subject addressed. These web pages must explain in detail the challenges and benefits of the subject covered, but also your value proposition. These pages are the showcase of your know-how and have all the links to the secondary pages which will give more details on the related subjects.
However, in order to be visible, your pages must above all be optimized for Google. SEO optimization of your web pages involves the following criteria:

• Work carefully on your page preview in Google’s SERP. Google’s SERP is simply the result page of a Google query. Your overview on this page consists of the SEO Title on your page, your (Permalink) URL and the Meta description. Make sure you clearly integrate your keyword into each of these three elements.
• Insert your keyword into the H1 tag: The main title of your page (H1 tag) must contain your main keyword. Also, remember that each page will need to have a specific and unique keyword. For this reason, make your H1 title unique, and do not repeat it on another page of your site.
• Repeat your keyword in your content and in your secondary titles. Please note, this is not a question of stuffing your page with the keyword chosen, but rather of integrating it in a relevant and regular manner into your text, alternately with synonyms and other words belonging to the same semantic group.
• Google will favor rich and unique content. Do not try to copy the contents of other pages because Google strongly penalizes the duplicated content. Also, content that is too short will have little impact on your referencing because Google algorithms favor long content rich in images. It will take approximately 600 words for a secondary item when it will take double for a main keyword page.
• Integrate images and videos to improve your ranking, but don’t forget to insert the keyword of the page at their “alt” tag. It will also be a good way to position yourself on Google Image.
• Insert internal links. The internal mesh allows you to connect the pages of your site to each other in order to create synergies. Internal links therefore play an important role in SEO because they confirm the consistency of your semantic cocoons created around your main keywords. They allow you to value your secondary pages up to your main page thanks to the “link juice”.

7 – Select your Marketing Automation platform

Marketing Automation is software that identifies the profile of your visitors, record all their online and offline interactions with your company, adapt your messages and your content in a dynamic and automatic manner according to their actions and finally qualify their level of interest in your solutions throughout their prospecting cycle.

The goal of Marketing Automation is to save time for marketing and commercial teams by automating the maturation and detection processes of hot prospects.
The main features of marketing automation include emailing, managing landing pages and download forms, segmenting your contact base, scoring, implementing nurturing scenarios, Account-Based Marketing, and analysis of Performance Indicators for your marketing activities.

Discover more information about the benefits of Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation solutions are very diverse and difficult to choose. You can nevertheless distinguish three main categories:

• Email suppliers like MailChimp, Sendingblue, or Mailgun have developed their solution with Marketing Automation functionality. These solutions are often limited on the scoring part and in terms of integrating third-party solutions.
• More complete Marketing Automation solutions-oriented SMEs like Aweber, GetResponse, Active Campaign, Act-on, SharpSpring, or Wishpond. These fairly affordable solutions offer more advanced functionality than email providers with more advanced share triggers (triggers), the possibility of creating more complex forms as well as “scoring” and route identification functionalities. client via IP addresses
• Marketing Automation solutions for Large Companies are mainly characterized by their ability to make millions of more complex requests in a minimum of time and an extremely more complete panel of scenarios and triggers. We find in this category solutions like Marketo, Eloqua, or Salesforce.

However, a solution stands out…Mautic is today the only Marketing Automation Open Source solution on the market. Mautic was created in 2014 and has evolved very quickly thanks to its international community.
Halfway between solutions for SMEs and those for Large Enterprises, Mautic offers a panel of advanced Marketing Automation functionalities such as ABM (Account-Based Marketing) and dynamic content.

8 – Set up your editorial calendar and your production schedule

As you will understand, content is an essential element in your Inbound Marketing strategy. Content Marketing allows you to increase your natural referencing on Google, generate more traffic on your website, amplify your presence on social networks, support your prospects in their prospecting cycle, and generate more qualified leads.

Also, to be effective in Content Marketing, you must anticipate the production of your content in correlation with your annual events.

Your editorial schedule goes hand in hand with your marketing plan. It will help you effectively implement your lead generation strategy by planning your content production. It will also allow you to flatten all the tools and tactics that you will have to implement to promote your future strategic Premium content. It will thus ensure a better distribution of your communications and a better allocation of the necessary resources.

9 – Prepare your client route scenarios as well as the appropriate automatic emails

Everything seems to be on the right track … all you have to do is orchestrate your communication according to the objectives set and your client routes. This part is nevertheless one of the most complex. This is to prepare your communication emails which will be triggered automatically as part of the actions of your prospects (called “triggers”).

The triggers can be the opening of an email, the “click-through”, that is to say, the fact of clicking on the Call-to-Action link that you will have inserted in your email, or the filling of a form on one of your landing pages to download Premium content.

The most common scenarios are:
Nurturing (B2B) scenarios :
A Nurturing campaign consists in sending a series of emails to your prospects who have downloaded one of your content in order to invite them to consult new complementary content, so as to make them evolve in their reflection on the subject. According to the downloaded document, the contact enters a pre-programmed communications scenario adapted according to its level of maturity and its interactions with your other content.

This Nurturing process usually ends with an invitation to an online demo, a webinar, or a relational event to engage in personal discussion with the prospect.
Each email you are going to create will be an invitation to consult another complementary content via the highlighting of a visible call-to-action (CTA).
Prospecting scenarios for its B2B contact base

Prospecting email must show that it is a personalized email in a personal relationship called “1to1”, unlike mass email. To do this, use “tokens” that will search for civility, first name, or name of your contact in your contact base integrated into your Marketing Automation solution. Thus “Hello {contactfield = gender} {contactfield = leastname}” will be converted when sending to “Hello Mr. Robert’s”,

The main challenge in the prospecting email is to successfully engage with your contact by offering to test your solution or accept a telephone appointment.
Automatic management scenarios for your events

When you set up an event, its promotion often follows the same communication scheme. You must provide your invitation email but also your stimulus, confirmation, and thank you emails. For an event, it is generally advisable to send its first invitation email a month in advance to allow guests to be able to plan accordingly.

Also, a Marketing Automation solution allows you to plan your emails and shipments in advance and also to replicate these scenarios whenever you need them.

10 – Amplify via social networks and link baiting

Social networks are a great way to disseminate and amplify your content, and therefore improve your notoriety. They thus make it possible to win a new audience and especially to use your network as a real communication medium (called the Earned Media).

Your main objective in disseminating your content on social networks is that your publications be taken up by your audience. In doing so, your readers create a natural link (backlink) from their own website, blog, or social networks to your content, thereby generating external links to your content.

The more quality backlinks your site, the more it will go back in ranking Google’s results on your keyword, provided that these links come from sites with a significant authority index (very good reputation of the site, significant traffic, notoriety,..). Indeed, in order to limit the practice of creating artificial backlinks, Google strongly penalizes “toxic” links, coming from suspicious sources and from bad reputations like directories.

Finally, to be effective, the wording of your backlink (called “anchor”) will ideally include the keyword of the targeted page. These anchors incorporating the link of your targeted pages will be formulated either on the exact expression of your keyword or on a synonymous word.

Here are some avenues for obtaining quality backlinks:

• Write content at a very high value. Only articles that differ and whose content is relevant are shared
• Publish regularly to show Google that you are active on the subject and also to stay in the minds of your readers
• Publish on all social networks relevant to your activity, without forgetting Google +,
• Save your company on specific quality directories,
• Broadcast press releases
• Intervene on forums,
• Connect with bloggers on your field,

11 – Analyze your KPIs and correct

Analyzing your traffic, engaging your audience, and converting your visitors to leads is essential to the success of your Inbound Marketing strategy.
We have already discussed this widely in this article, the generation of articles and other digital content can prove ineffective, even negative in the overall referencing of your site if the rebound rate of your pages is too high or your pages do not convert.

It will be necessary to analyze your traffic via Google Analytics in order to identify the pages with a high number of impressions (having generated numerous visits) and a low engagement rate (lowest CTR), as well as those with a high rebound rate. In this case, you will need to rework your pages by bringing more value to readers, or simply de-indexing them so that your rebound rate drops and your engagement rate increases.

You will surely see at the beginning a slight drop in your traffic but you will gain in quality. This will ultimately get you back in Google’s results on your most important keywords and make you gain quality lead.

Conclusion

Inbound Marketing, quality always takes precedence over quantity. An Inbound Marketing strategy must be able to combine Content Marketing techniques with those of SEO, SMO and Marketing Automation.

Remember that Inbound Marketing is the art of attracting and accompanying your target audience throughout its conversion funnel in a personalized manner, without being intrusive. This process takes time…