This is our super secret strategy for making inbound marketing work for our clients and ourselves. (Yep, you’ve just hit the jackpot.)
An Introduction
To This Massive Post
Video Transcription
We love to help companies succeed with their inbound marketing. As we’ve done that, we’ve realized that there are certain patterns that have to happen in the first month if you want to get a company set up for success. So, in the spirit of who we are here at Nectafy (an open book!), we wanted to share with you this gigantic post—our last count was 12,000 words [now it’s over 19,000]—where we detail out the processes we use to help companies get off to a great start.
Now, we’re not saying that these are the only methods you can use—they’re just what we use to help companies kickstart their inbound marketing. If you’re looking to grow your company in a massive way through inbound marketing, we invite you to take a look at these steps. You can actually implement our suggestions step-by-step, and achieve the same kind of success that we help our clients achieve.
So, without further ado, here it is. Our entire inbound marketing process.
This strategy will work with any platform, but since we use HubSpot, that’s what we’ve focused on in this post. You can literally use this entire tutorial to take your company from zero to hero using inbound marketing.
Here’s a table of contents to make it a little easier to get around.
Table Of Contents
Opening Video
#1: Build Your Team
Make It A Team Effort
Staff Your Team
Hire Writers & Marketers
#2: Set Up Your Systems
Marketing Software
Social Media
Content Management System
Other Internal Systems
#3: Learn To Think Like Your Prospects
Interview Your Customers
Create Buyer Personas
Do Keyword Research
#4: Plan Your Content
Identify The Stages Of Your Buying Funnel
Create Buyer Questions
Come Up With Content Ideas
Create A Content Calendar
Create Special Offers For Each Stage Of The Journey
#5: Make The Machine Work
Write Blog Posts
Establish Lead Scoring
Build Landing Pages
Create Forms
Build Workflows & Email Automation
Share & Monitor On Your Social Channels
#6: Evaluate What’s Working
Monitor & Improve Your SEO
Analytics
#7: Troubleshooting
Closing Video
#1: Build Your Team
Make It A Team Effort
Written By Lance Cummins
Before you dive feet-first into inbound marketing, you need to know exactly what it is. (See The Beginner’s Guide To Inbound Marketing.) After that, there’s one critical point you need to understand:
The success of inbound marketing is dependent completely on your commitment to making it work.
It’s not some magic sauce that you smear on your existing marketing plan that will suddenly attract visitors like flies—not even close. For inbound marketing to generate the kind of return on investment (ROI) you need, you’ve got to completely immerse yourself and your company in the inbound process. Anything less is failure.
Inbound marketing is such a powerful tool, and if you aren’t using it correctly, you’re wasting it’s potential. We consider this type of effort to be failure because if you’re only going to dive halfway into the inbound pool, you may as well save your money, time, and effort, and put those efforts toward a different venture. To reiterate my previous point:
If you only give a partial effort to inbound marketing, you should expect lackluster results.
The reason I can say this confidently is because I’ve been there. When I was introduced to (and began learning about) inbound, I only gave a partial effort for several years—and unsurprisingly, I got less than mediocre results. Finally I decided to make an all-out inbound marketing attempt, and lo and behold: the results were astounding.
The first hurdle you’re going to need to clear is getting your company to get over their preconceived ideas about marketing. Inbound marketing really should just be called “inbound business,” as it can strengthen and amplify every area of your company.
So how do you immerse yourself in inbound marketing?
1. Commit for the long haul.
While the tactics of inbound marketing can sometimes generate an instant buzz, the greatest value for your company will happen over the course of months, not weeks. Make sure you have communicated this timeline well to your company.
Be prepared to invest at least eight or nine months of intense effort in inbound marketing before declaring that it “doesn’t work” for your company or your industry. If you’re in a hurry to see results from your inbound marketing efforts and don’t allow time for the seed to take root and grow, you’re wasting a ton of time and money. There are some great ways to create a hybrid strategy of inbound and pay per click (PPC) marketing to generate leads and customers right now while planting the seeds for ongoing effectiveness with your organic efforts.
2. Get key players to commit.
Before you invest time and money in inbound marketing, you’re going to have to get the right people in your organization invested. If you’re in a leadership role at your company, it’s not enough to simply tell your team they’re now going to help with inbound marketing. You can’t rely on just declaring it into existence. That’s a great way to make your inbound marketing flop (and make yourself look like a moron in the process).
Instead, you’re going to need to communicate the value of inbound marketing to the leaders in each department. They need to understand the key role that inbound marketing can play in their success.
At a minimum, here’s the roster you need to have in place:
Executive Visionary
If you’re the CEO, that’s you. If you’re the marketing manager in a large company, you may not be able to get the CEO’s attention, but you at least need to have your leadership commit to the process at some level for inbound marketing to be thoroughly effective. Why? In the words of Proverbs 29:18, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Without leadership commitment, your inbound marketing will not receive the funding, focus, or time it needs.
The executive leader also needs to commit to lending their expertise, and even more importantly, their opinions. Your inbound marketing should reflect unique views on the challenges in your industry to show that you’re an advocate for your prospects. In other words, be a champion for the “little guy” and fight against the injustices or ambiguities in your industry. Be the one who speaks up and tells it like it is.
Sales Team Point Person
One of the most difficult relationships in any corporation is the tenuous one between marketing and sales. The marketing department thinks the sales team can’t close a deal, and the sales team wishes the marketing department would actually send them some good leads.
Inbound marketing turns this process on its head, because you actually need the sales team to be your eyes and ears, and give you feedback—after all, they’re the people who are in contact with prospects (the folks you’re trying to reach!). When this relationship becomes symbiotic, your inbound marketing team can turn the feedback they’ve been given into a content goldmine.
From a practical standpoint, your sales team needs to be willing to commit 20-30 minutes a week to provide ideas, answers, and opinions on topics that would interest your prospects. (We’ll talk more later about additional ways to help with this process.) Your salespeople most likely have some key insights into your industry and understand the issues that frustrate and discourage prospects. The information you glean from them can then be developed into content streams to better prepare leads for the sales process.
Subject Matter Expert
It’s possible you don’t have all the answers for your industry—and that’s OK. But in order to provide content that is valuable to your prospects, you’re going to have to nurture some of your connections and find subject matter experts. These are the guys that know a ton about some sliver of your industry and can help clarify things for your prospects. They are allies in your industry, and they are usually looking for a way to get a little more visibility.
Explain to these experts that you need them for a 15-20 minute interview, and make sure to give them a topic in advance so they have time to think about it. Then, when one of your inbound marketers calls them, they’ll have a chance to quickly unload what they know. It’s an amazingly efficient way to get a lot of valuable information in a short amount of time.
Don’t have great connections? Try one of these methods for identifying subject matter experts.
HARO—Help A Reporter Out is a free online resource that enables journalists (or in our case, marketing content creators) gather sources and information quickly and efficiently.
LinkedIn Groups—LinkedIn has tens of thousands of specialized groups, both open and closed. Joining a group gives you access to the group conversations and allows you to have discussions with members, which can help you glean key insights.
Twitter—Search Twitter to find relevant hashtags (topics, in other words), and you’ll see who is talking about that topic. These could become your subject matter experts.
3. Spread the load.
When I say, “spread the load,” I don’t mean that your inbound marketing is like horse manure. Far from it. (But that is kind of funny.) You’re going to need several of your team members to actually create the content, so no one person is overwhelmed with the process. Unless you’ve specifically hired an inbound marketing writer or a marketing manager who can focus exclusively on creating content, you’re going to need a few folks to help pull the weight. I know one company that has two staff members that take on an extra 10 hours each week to create content for their inbound marketing.
No matter how many team members you have sharing the workload, you’ll need one person to be responsible for scheduling, publishing, and content management. (Continue reading to learn more about the different roles you’ll need to fill.)
Staff Your Team
Written By Traci Polifka
As the adage goes, “It takes a village,” and inbound marketing is certainly no exception. Since this is a team effort, there are specific roles that need to be filled. These are the positions you’ll want to have staffed before you begin with inbound.
Inbound Marketing Strategist
This individual will head up the creation and implementation of all aspects of your marketing strategy (which, you should know, is very important). They should understand all the marketing tools used by your team and be able to work seamlessly with the marketing department, sales department, and beyond.
Content Manager
The content manager does just that—manages content. This means all of the fine details that go along with content creation, from scheduling and publishing to monitoring the creation process. They’ll coordinate with all other members of the team to make sure things not only get done, but get done correctly and on time.
Writer(s)
You could have one dedicated content creator or an entire floor of them, depending on the size of your staff. Your writers will create blog posts, offers, web copy, and any other content you’ll be creating for your inbound marketing. They’ll do research, interviews, and gather data about your topics. (Since they’re so vital to the inbound marketing process, we’ll discuss how to select these writers in the next section of this post.)
Editor
The editor will proofread all of the content that is created by your team. They will not only be checking for grammatical errors, but they’ll also ensure all content is fulfilling the specific purpose it was created for. They’ll review and approve everything created by the team, check for accuracy and factuality, and more.
SEO Team
This team will work to make your site is search-engine optimized in order to improve your rankings (primarily in Google). They’ll do keyword research to get your content discovered, improve conversion rates, and help you rank against (and hopefully above) your competition. This team could include—or be entirely made up by—your inbound marketing strategist, depending on the size of your organization.
Social Sharing Team
The individuals who make up this team will lead up your social media and email marketing campaigns. They’ll create and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and others, and send out email notifications to your leads. Like the SEO team, this team could also include (or be entirely in the hands of) the inbound marketing strategist. They’ll optimize email campaigns, work to improve click through rates (CTRs), oversee mailing lists by keeping them up to date, and encourage and promote social sharing.
Creative Team
Your creative team will be made up of graphic designers and visual communicators. Their priority is to take the content created by your writers and put it in the beautiful visual form the customer will see it in. They’ll design offer layouts, website graphics, logos, infographics, and more.
Developer
You’ll need a dedicated developer (or several) to create and maintain your website(s). Larger firms will typically have separate front and back end developers for efficiency. It’s important to note that having HubSpot will save your developer from having to build many forms and templates from scratch, but he or she will have to become comfortable with the platform. Depending on the learning curve, this may take some time, so plan accordingly. (Consider using HubSpot’s Design Certification Program to help your developer get up to speed.)
Before you begin frantically writing job posts to fill these positions, hear us out. Many of these roles can be filled by your existing team; you just need to label them accordingly (and be sure they’re up for the job!). Filling the positions internally can save you both time and money.
Hire Writers & Marketers
Written By Marisa Dube
Hiring Writers
Hiring any old schlup who can put pen to paper won’t do you or your inbound marketing plan any good. You need to find someone who can research and craft compelling copy (say that three times fast!) that will drive visitors to your website. Different styles of writing require different expertise, and you need to consider this while searching through candidates.
An In-House Writer
If you want to hire an in-house writer, you should put all candidates through an interview process. During preliminary interviews, be sure to ask questions like:
“How long have you been writing?” Their answer should corroborate with their resume and writing samples. “I wrote some college papers” is not an acceptable answer.
“What kind of writing are you most experienced with?” You should be looking for someone with a background in creating technical papers, blog posts, or website copy. If they’ve written children’s books for a living, their expertise probably isn’t in line with what you need.
“What are you currently reading?” Reading is a way great writers can improve their skills. If an awkward silence ensues after this question, followed by an answer that includes the word “Facebook,” run the other direction––this shows that they don’t prioritize the development of their skills.
Be clear in your expectations of a writer. Anyone applying for a writing position is essentially saying they can give you professional, high-quality work. Therefore, you should demand professional qualities, such as:
An excellent grasp on grammar.
A grasp on what makes an interesting or intriguing story.
The ability to create articles with specific word counts.
A mastery of many writing styles (such as online and offline materials, ads, email copy, etc.).
The ability to write a lot, and frequently.
For some more tips on hiring an in-house writer, watch How To Hire An Inbound Marketing Writer.
Contract Writers
If hiring an in-house writer isn’t your cup of tea, you could also outsource your writing to a freelance writer.
There are hundreds of websites that will give you access to thousands of writers looking for freelance work. You can search sites like Zerys, Scripted, and TextMaster for writer profiles, which usually include a writer’s credentials and areas of expertise to help you identify the best fit for your company.
You can also post your writing jobs to sites like Elance and Odesk, where writers can apply for the job. On these sites, you have the option of posting one-time writing opportunities, or posting for part-time and full-time positions. If you choose to find a writer this way, include qualities you’re looking for in a writer in your post—just like what you’d do if you were hiring an in-house writer. The more specific you are about qualifications, the more likely you are to find the kind of writer you’re looking for.
Hiring An Inbound Marketing Agency
There are plenty of pros and cons to hiring an inbound marketing agency. Of course, one of the cons is the expense.
Do you think you might be able to do inbound marketing in-house and allocate that money elsewhere? Before you make a decision, take a close look at your own company and (honestly) answer the following questions:
How much time do you have? It takes a minimum of 40 hours each month to do inbound marketing correctly. Take the time to identify how much work each team member currently has per week, and how long it takes them to complete it. If you can spread out the 40 hours to your team members, you’re in a great position to consider doing inbound marketing yourself and spare yourself the cost of hiring an agency.
Is your team confident using the necessary tools for inbound marketing? There are a lot of inbound marketing platforms available, and your team needs to be skilled in using the tools you select. Even though many of these platforms boast simple and user-friendly interfaces (which many do have), there’s still a lot to learn. You’ll want to find and parse through all of the data these platforms provide to make sure you’re getting the most value out of the software you decide to use.
Do you know who you’re targeting and how to market to them? It’s imperative to know the type of person who buys your products or services. Maybe it’s a 40-year-old male marketing manager in a small or midsize company seeking solutions for reporting. Or, it could be a 65-year-old retired woman looking for flexible vacation options for her and her husband. In order for inbound marketing to work, you have to know who you’re targeting, so you can create content that will answer their questions and provide value to them. If you don’t already have this information (what we call “buyer personas”) in place, you should absolutely complete this exercise—this information is invaluable, regardless of whether or not you’re doing in-house inbound marketing. (See the Create Buyer Personas section for more information about how to do this.)
Is your team willing and able to contribute to writing content? If you have skilled writers on your team that are able to create truly helpful and valuable content for your buyer personas, you’re in a great place. Spreading the responsibility of writing content keeps everyone involved and prevents one or two people from having to carry the entire load (while keeping up with their normal job duties). Content creation is a key part of the inbound marketing process, so it’s very important that you have enough people available to write.
Is your company’s message established? Do you know what you want to say to your prospective customers and how to say it in ways that will make sense to them? If you’re already communicating your message to your target audience in a way that they understand and are responding to, you may be able to do inbound marketing on your own, without the help of an agency.
Are your sales and marketing teams aligned? Sales and marketing teams tend to be at odds. The way it’s supposed to work is that the marketing team gathers sales-ready leads to give to the sales team, so the sales team can work on converting those leads into customers. Often, though, there is disagreement over what a sales-ready lead actually looks like. If your sales and marketing teams are working in alignment, you’re miles ahead of most businesses. Things are going according to plan if your marketing team delivers leads that are truly ready for your sales team to pursue and close, and your teams are working together harmoniously to continually refine and identify what a sales-ready lead looks like. No organization is perfect, but if the relationship between your sales and marketing teams is strained, your conversion process will be, too. You have to get it figured out in order to do inbound marketing effectively, whether you’re planning on doing it in-house or hiring an agency.
If you think your company would benefit from hiring an agency, there are many to choose from. Selecting the best inbound marketing agency for your company can be a little overwhelming if (a) you’ve never done it before, and (b) you really don’t have the time to sift through all the possible companies.
Here are two important pieces of advice to follow as you’re searching for an agency. They’ll help you narrow down the huge list of potential agencies and find the best one for your company.
1. Examine the agency’s inbound marketing efforts.
Their Website
If you want an agency to redesign all or part of your website to optimize it for inbound marketing, you’ll want to be sure they’ve done an excellent job designing their website. Do you like the way it looks? Is it easy to navigate? If they’ve designed their website well, you’ll feel better knowing they have the ability to do a great job designing yours.
Their Blog
A blog is a great place for businesses to share valuable, helpful articles that answer their target audience’s questions. An agency will most likely work closely with you to plan topics for your articles, determine your writing style, establish a blogging schedule, and so forth. So you should spend some time evaluating the agency’s blog posts. Do you find their articles helpful and interesting? Do they post regularly? What kind of images and graphics do they use with their articles? Don’t underestimate the importance of this step—if an agency hasn’t put a great amount of effort into their own blog, they won’t put a great amount of effort into yours.
When you find an agency with a website and blog you like, add them to a short list.
2. Ask important questions.
Once you have determined several agencies you’d like to potentially partner with, you should prepare some questions to ask them. You need to fully grasp how each agency handles the following:
Planning & Strategy
With some basic information from you (like your current situation, your goals, and the challenges you face), an inbound marketing agency should be able to come up with a basic plan of action for what they’d do for you. You should know what the agency will do specifically, and more importantly, why they’d do those things. Talk is cheap, so ask them to back up this information with examples from past and current clients.
Measuring Effectiveness
If you’re going to work with an agency, you need to establish goals with them and then see how they report against those goals. A good agency should measure the work they do for their clients, and keep them informed on how they can adjust their plan for ever-improving results. Any agency should at least track these four things:
Traffic
Leads
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
Customers
This information will help you understand how the agency measures success, and how often you’d be updated with your progress.
Account Management
It’s important to learn about the experience and expertise an agency’s account managers have. The account manager is the person you’ll primarily be working with, so you should have confidence that they will manage your account efficiently and effectively. It’s also important to ask if the agency outsources any of their work. If they do, find out what they outsource, and who they outsource it to.
Software
Identify what kind of software programs—like Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, or HubSpot—the agency uses to implement their plans for your business. Find out if you’ll have access to these programs and if they’ll train your team how to use them.
Research
If you’d like the agency to do any writing for you, they’ll most likely need to do some research (as they probably aren’t experts in your industry). So, identify what the writers will do to learn about the topics they’ll be writing about.
For more details on hiring an inbound marketing agency, check out The Control Freak’s Guide To Hiring An Inbound Marketing Agency, Part 1 and Part 2, and our video about The Simple Way To Choose An Inbound Marketing Agency.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: hiring an inbound marketing agency is a tough job. Keep your eye on the prize—you want to choose an agency that will put you on the road to success with inbound marketing. Doing the extra work to find that great agency will pay off when you’re successful with inbound marketing.
#2: Set Up Your Systems
Marketing Software
Written By Henry O’Loughlin
Inbound marketing primarily takes place online, which means you’ll need software systems in order to make it all happen. When choosing the system(s) you want to use, you have one of two options:
You can decide to go with an all-in-one system like HubSpot or Marketo.
You can pick individual tools for each part of inbound.
Let’s take a look at each of these options.
Choose An All-In-One System
This is called inbound marketing, content marketing, or marketing automation software.
HubSpot—We use HubSpot at Nectafy for our clients and our own marketing. The main benefit of HubSpot is that every piece of the inbound marketing process is in one place: email, social media, landing pages, the content management system (CMS), the blog, analytics, form building, calls-to-action, lists, leads, campaign management, keyword tracking, etc. With everything in one place, you can see if one lead follows you on Twitter, then ignores one email you sent but opens another, fills out a white paper form, and more specific details. Knowing how every lead interacts with your marketing is a key benefit of HubSpot.
Alternatives—Here are some other options to take a look at: Marketo, InfusionSoft, Act-On Software, Eloqua, and Pardot.
Choose Different Systems For Each Piece
You’ll hear marketers refer to this approach as “disparate systems.” Companies get so attracted to a landing page software, for example, that they go with that particular tool, then they do the same with an email system, a social management software, a form builder, and so on. And before they know it, they have a number of amazing systems. But here’s the kicker: none of them do a good job of talking to one another. In that circumstance, the company can see that their conversion rate for landing pages is 18% and their email open rates are 37%, but those numbers live in different systems.
Having all of your marketing efforts take place in disparate systems makes it hard to see what an individual lead is interested in.
If you are set on taking this approach—as a way to save money, or to put most of your focus on a few channels—here are my recommendations:
Google Analytics for your web metrics.
Unbounce for landing pages.
MailChimp for small business emails.
Eloqua or ExactTarget for enterprise-level email marketing.
Hootsuite for social media management.
Buffer for intelligent “tweet” scheduling.
WuFoo for form building.
Moz or RavenTools for search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword management.
WordPress for your content management system (CMS) and blog platform.
Pipedrive for your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
If you’d rather capitalize on an all-in-one marketing system instead of messing around with all these different programs, you’ll need to know how to properly set it up before you can begin using it.
How To Set Up HubSpot
If you’re on the free trial of HubSpot or you’re a brand-new paying customer, it’s time to set up the technical aspects of your system. HubSpot has a full step-by-step PDF that they’ll provide to you so you can get these steps done. For this resource, we will follow the same steps that HubSpot recommends and add some back story to each step from our own experiences.
If you’re not feeling warm and fuzzy about this step, keep in mind that it’s important to set up HubSpot quickly and in full. Follow these steps to get your HubSpot account optimized and ready to go so you can properly run your inbound marketing.
HubSpot Technical Setup Checklist
1. Add users.
For the Basic package, you are capped out at three total users; user accounts are unlimited for the Professional or Enterprise packages. It’s important to set up unique users for everyone who will contribute, because updates and changes can be tied to each user (making the tracking process easier for you). To add a new user:
Click on the drop-down in the top right of your HubSpot account.
Click “Settings.”
Click “Add User.”
Follow the on-screen instructions and decide what type of access you’ll grant the new user.
2. Install the JavaScript tracking code.
If you are hosting your website on HubSpot, you can skip this section. If you use WordPress, Squarespace, Drupal, or some other host for your website, this is an important step. HubSpot gives you a little snippet of code to place on every page of your website. That will allow for them to automatically track your visitors and and pull over information about leads, keywords, and more. This step is vital for HubSpot to be useful, so get it set up right away. You’ll want to start collecting data about visits and web page performance early on so you know your starting point. Here’s how to get the JavaScript code:
Click “Reports.”
Click “Report Settings.”
Click “Copy To Clipboard” in the top section.
3. Connect your domain name or subdomain.
If you plan on using HubSpot’s website pages, landing pages, or blog, you’ll need to connect your entire site (or a few subdomains) to HubSpot. As an example, nectafy.com is hosted on WordPress, but we use HubSpot’s landing pages, which sit at explore.nectafy.com. There are unique instructions depending on your HubSpot plan and your current CMS. I recommend referring to the tutorial PDF (page 6) for this information.
4. Set up lead tracking.
This one is simple: use HubSpot forms for all of your web forms in order to make sure you can track a lead’s journey through all of your marketing. If you want to build a new contact page, do it through HubSpot’s landing page tool and follow the instructions to embed a form on that page. It’ll take care of the rest from there.
5. Integrate your CRM.
Generally speaking, HubSpot is for your marketers, and a customer relationship management (CRM) system is for your salespeople. The two need to work together to ensure that your marketing dollars turn into real sales. Check out the API integrations that HubSpot offers to see if your CRM can be connected. If you use a different CRM, consider using Zapier to integrate the activity between HubSpot and your CRM. We use Pipedrive, and absolutely love it. We integrate it with Zapier.
6. Import your contacts and leads.
You’re encouraged to now scrape together all of the leads you have from your pre-HubSpot days and import them into HubSpot. It’ll kick-start your nurturing campaigns and lead management.
If you are on the Professional plan, you’ll pay an extra $50 per month when you hit 1,000 contacts in HubSpot, and another $50 when you hit 2,000, and so on. So if you have a ton of old email addresses you’ve interacted with in the past, but they are pretty dormant at the moment, we recommend waiting to import them into HubSpot. Rather, run them through an email series in MailChimp or Constant Contact (or whichever other email system you use) and then have the calls-to-action send people over to HubSpot. The most interested leads from your past will convert into HubSpot leads and all of the dead email addresses and uninterested people will remain out of HubSpot. It’s a little trick to save some money without disregarding hot leads.
If you have a lot of active leads from a previous system, it is important to import them directly into HubSpot. Here’s how:
Click on “Contacts.”
Click on “Contact Home.”
Click “Import” and upload your .CSV file.
7. Connect social media accounts.
Social media is one of the big pieces of inbound marketing. A lot of people will find your content through Google, but others want to find it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other social networks. In order to manage your social presence through HubSpot, you’ll want to connect your accounts. You can post, monitor, respond, and follow all through HubSpot, so it makes sense to move things over from Hootsuite (or any other social tool you might use).
This process is pretty straightforward, so don’t overthink it. Make sure you are logged into the Facebook account that has administrative rights to the company page, and make sure you’re logged into your company’s Twitter, Google+ page, and more.
Here’s how to connect your accounts:
Click on “Social.”
Click on “Social Settings.”
Click “Connect An Account.”
Follow the steps for each network you want to connect.
8. Set up your HubSpot blog (or link an external blog).
If you’re setting up a HubSpot blog, you can get in-depth instructions here. If you’re sticking with a WordPress blog, you can follow these steps.
Your blog is a driving force behind your inbound marketing because it allows for you to post helpful articles for your buyer personas to read. You can target keywords with each post in order to increase traffic for Google, and each new post gives you something to talk about through social media.
9. Exclude your own traffic from analytics.
This last step is a little trick to make sure that your numbers don’t look inflated. Since your whole company is excited about the new inbound plan, they’ll keep visiting the website to check for new content. But you don’t want those visits to count toward your analytics because they won’t drive any business. HubSpot has a little tool that allows you to hide IP addresses from your website analytics. That way, if you visit your company’s blog from your computer, it won’t count as a visit. We recommend doing it no matter what size of a company you have so the numbers are always right. Here are step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
Social Media
Written By Emily Nix
Setting up your social media strategy is an important component of making inbound marketing work for your company. The social media platforms you use will depend on several factors, including:
Your audience.
The amount of time you have to allocate on social media.
Your goals for each channel.
Who is running each (or all) of the accounts.
Once you’ve determined who is going to run the accounts, what you’re going to say, and the goals you have, you should consider the benefits of each outlet.
Social Tools
HubSpot Social Media Dashboard
The HubSpot social media dashboard is our recommendation no matter what individual channels you use. The social media dashboard is integrated with your website, so you can post to LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, and Facebook from one place—you don’t have to go to individual websites to manage them. The HubSpot social media dashboard also tracks the various statistics your posts are driving and compiles them into organized, up-to-date reports. You can also monitor your competitors’ social media postings from HubSpot’s dashboard.
Buffer Or Hootsuite
If you choose not to use HubSpot’s social media dashboard, Buffer and Hootsuite both have similar applications you can use to control multiple accounts from multiple platforms. The downside of using either of these is that in order to track and manage your social statistics, you’ll have to do a little extra work and compile the reports yourself. Additionally, you won’t be able to see the activities of your lead across those platforms through your site.
Social Networks
If your business has never used social media, you need to start from the very beginning with creating profiles. Here are some of the most popular social media networks to use:
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is our most recommended option for B2B clients. If you’re new to LinkedIn, you can create your own individual profile, as well as create a company page. You can also join professional groups related to your industry or trade; these groups give you an outlet in which to share the helpful content you’re creating with a wider audience who already have a good chance of being interested in what you have to say.
Twitter
Twitter is an indispensable social tool, and getting started is easy. Once your sign up and customize your company page, you can tweet links to your products, blogs, articles, and more. Twitter’s hashtagging system makes it easier for you to connect with current and potential customers, and continue to build brand awareness and relationships.
Google+
We value honesty, so here’s the truth: we’re no Google+ experts. We know plenty of people who have used it as a powerful tool for the business, but we haven’t personally seen much success from it. However, it’s difficult for us to believe that posting your article to Google+ doesn’t somehow affect your Google search engine rankings. For that reason alone, we suggest that you create and maintain a Google+ account.
Facebook
Facebook probably isn’t the answer to driving new leads that turn into sales. However, some companies have great success using Facebook to raise awareness and build their reputation. So, if those are your goals for using social media, Facebook may be a good outlet for your company.
Other Social Networks
Depending on your target audience you may also be interested in the following options:
Pinterest—If you create a product that is interesting to look at (or helpful to use), Pinterest is a great option.
Instagram—If you have a devoted fan base or highly regarded brand (or you’re looking to have one of those things), Instagram is helpful.
Slideshare—If you have a lot of presentations already created, it doesn’t take much work to reformat them for public consumption and publish them to Slideshare.
Quora—If you consider yourself (or someone on your team) to be a “thought leader,” or an expert in your industry, creating a Quora account and answering the questions that other people have can build awareness and repertoire.
Again, the most important aspect of using social media to build relationships is to be strategic. This is why creating a social media content calendar is very helpful. By preparing content for posting ahead of time for each outlet, you will be able to provide a consistent voice that will in turn benefit those reading.
If you have a plan for what you want to accomplish, you can then measure each outlet’s effectiveness to see if it is a good use of resources. If you want to find out more about sharing and monitoring your content on social media, hop down the page.
Content Management System
Written By Henry O’Loughlin
A content management system (CMS) is a web application that allows you to build and update a website without having to get into the code (for the most part). These systems make all of this inbound marketing stuff possible for anyone, not just coders. You can change text like you’re in a Word Doc and add images like you’re attaching them to an email. The CMS creates the code behind the scenes, ensuring everything on your website looks how it should to the public. This saves you from needing a full-time developer just to upload a picture or change a header.
Let’s take a look at the most popular CMS options for your website and blog.
HubSpot’s CMS is easy to use and has valuable built-in SEO tools. If you don’t have a web developer on staff and you don’t have grandiose design ideas, HubSpot is a great way to go. The CMS is automatically tied to your analytics and other marketing tools (like the landing page builder, form builder, keyword rankings, email marketing system, etc.). The HubSpot CMS has quick load times, is mobile-responsive, has drag-and-drop backend functionality, a button builder, and more. These are all important for managing a successful website on your own.
WordPress is the most popular CMS, and it’s free and open source. It’s very easy to use and there are tens of thousands of user-created plugins to choose from that can add serious value to your site for free or cheap. For all of these reasons, WordPress is used by 23% of top 10 million websites.
Why is it so popular? WordPress and its many themes and plugins are easy to install and the interface is user-friendly. The code is simple, and written in a way that Google bots are attracted to, so if you use WordPress, you’ll be more likely to show up in search results as opposed to a CMS like Blogger. Beyond that, you can add SEO plugins like Yoast or All in One SEO Pack. And if you need to integrate with HubSpot, there is a plugin you can use to send data about visits back to HubSpot from your WordPress site.
Other CMS Options: Squarespace, Drupal, and Joomla (we don’t use any of these three).
Our recommendation, without understanding your specific needs, would be to build your entire site through HubSpot if you are already a HubSpot customer. This makes it easy to have everything in one place. If you don’t have HubSpot and you don’t feel like you can justify the cost right now, use WordPress. At Nectafy, we use both WordPress and HubSpot depending on the client’s needs, but we’re mostly moving all new clients to HubSpot. If you’re looking for a deeper analysis of content management systems, check out this article on The Sales Lion blog.
Other Internal Systems
Written By Megan Combe
While HubSpot is a fantastic all-in-one marketing tool, there are some important management systems that it doesn’t support. To successfully manage your inbound marketing, you’ll need to utilize the best internal systems for the following issues:
Team collaboration—To work cooperatively on documents and share them with your team, we highly suggest Google Drive. Not only is it inexpensive and trustworthy, it can also be used to plan future content and track your inventory.
Project management—Choosing a powerful project management system will make all the difference in team and client organization. This will help get your clients and team on the same page through communication portals, file sharing, and organized group discussion. Our favorite project management tool is TeamworkPM. Not only is the interface clean and user-friendly, it is also chock-full of features that the competitors don’t have. Some of our favorites include private projects and discussion, and solid search functionality. Basecamp is another popular choice for project management.
Design tools—There’s no arguing that every creative department should have design software. Adobe Photoshop is the most trusted and time-honored application on the market. If you aren’t sold, give Illustrator or InDesign a try. If you’re stumped on which software is right for you, take a look at their primary uses. Photoshop is great for photo manipulation, Illustrator is ideal for vector images like logos, and InDesign works well with large design templates.
Customer relationship management (CRM)—You need CRM software integrating into your marketing system to better manage your leads through the sales process. If you choose not to use HubSpot for your CRM software (our first recommendation), check out Pipedrive or SalesForce.
When you are deciding on which internal systems your company needs to be successful with inbound marketing, look to your strategic objectives. Are you meeting your goals with ease and efficiency? If not, note your biggest problems and look toward some of these applications to solve them.
#3: Learn To Think Like Your Prospects
Interview Your Customers
Written By Tiffany Nix
If you want to attract and convert customers, your process has to begin and end with the customer in mind. Writing content broad enough to appeal to “anyone and everyone” won’t work. You need to focus your content toward a specific target audience.
To start this process, come up with a list of five to 10 of your best current customers. To arrive upon your list, ask yourself and your team, “Which of our clients would we like more of in the future?” This decision can be based on anything—the customer’s position in the company they work for, how much money the customer spends with your business on a regular basis, which products or services the customer has chosen to use… it’s whatever criteria is important to you and your company.
Once you have that list of “favorites,” get ready to interview your customers. (If you’re a B2B company and you’re having trouble deciding which person in your customer’s company to interview, choose the person who initiated buying your product or initiated a service contract with you.)
You should always have a third party do the interviewing for you. Your customers will be more likely to give their honest answers and opinions to someone outside your company. Focus groups are a great way to accomplish these interviews. If you can get all your best customers in a room together, you’ve created an ideal situation—you’ll be able to get a feel for how your customers identify with each other, which are connections that can’t be made in one-on-one interviews.
Your third party’s interview agenda should include questions about your client’s demographics, their job, their challenges, and how your company has helped them with the products or services you provide.
When we do these interviews for a B2B company, here are some of the questions we ask:
What is your title? What is a summary of your job description?
What does your company do?
What does a typical day look like for you?
What does it mean to be successful in your role?
What are the biggest challenges you have in your job?
How do you learn information about your job/industry?
What social networks do you use professionally?
Do you use the internet to search for recommendations/tips about any aspect of your job? If so, what subject matter are you searching for?
What problems do you have to solve on a daily basis?
Why did you want to find a company that does <INDUSTRY>?
Which of <COMPANY>’s services do you use?
Were you working with someone else for <INDUSTRY> initially? Or was <COMPANY> your first experience with a/an <INDUSTRY> company? Why did you switch?
When you were considering <INDUSTRY> companies in general, what things were important to you? What problems were you having that their services could solve for you?
When you were considering <COMPANY> specifically, what questions did you have for them?
Who in your company uses <COMPANY>’s services? What are their job titles?
If you were to recommend <COMPANY> to a business similar to yours, why would you say they’d need those services?
Notice all these questions center around the customer and their challenges and experiences—some questions don’t even have anything to do with your company at all! And that’s the point. Remember, the goal of this exercise isn’t to gather insights about how stellar your clients think your products and services are. Instead, it’s about focusing on the client’s insights and finding out how to craft your content in order to help you attract more customers similar to those on your “favorites” list.
Create Buyer Personas
Written By Tiffany Nix
Now that you’ve interviewed your current “favorite” customers, you’re ready to begin creating “buyer personas” (which is really just a fancy term for some more-defined members of your target audience). Buyer personas, as defined by HubSpot, are “semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
In short, you’re going to divide your customers into two or three categories (based on their demographics), then create “personas” that represent those categories, and write a few paragraphs that describe the demographics and daily challenges of each. The outcome is a set of semi-fictional characters you can “speak to” whenever you’re creating content.
Here’s the more detailed process:
1. Think about who buys from you in terms of demographics.
If you had to group your customers together based on their commonalities, who typically buys from you? (Hint: Think specifically about the customers you just interviewed.)
If you’re a B2B company, sometimes it’s a good idea to start by considering your buyers’ job titles. Are your customers marketing managers in large companies? CEOs of midsize businesses? You may come up with several different categories of people, and right now, that’s okay.
Example:<