We organized an inbound marketing training yesterday with Howtomo, a Finnish community offering peer-to-peer learning, with women teaching other women. Our training was a ”Crash Course in Inbound Marketing”, aiming to teach how to attract the attention of your target audience by offering them helpful and meaningful content, instead of aggressively advertising your solutions. The goal of the session was to understand the theory behind inbound marketing, define the key benefits and give the attendees basic tools to start with when planning and executing a successful inbound marketing strategy. A couple of points seemed to raise more discussion and questions more than others — we decided to list those, as a handy checklist for anyone who might be starting with inbound marketing.
As branding and understanding how your stakeholders perceive your company is always a key step in marketing, we started off with that — as a little task, everyone selected a company they wanted to use as an example, defined its brand with a couple of words and wrote the value proposition statement. As simple as it may seem, this was actually the most difficult part for many! Value proposition statements are often forgotten and overlooked but actually, they hold a lot of important information that you really should revise every now and then.
We moved ahead to target personas (pro tip: interview 3–10 clients and see what they have in common), and discussed how to select the right channels and types of content. One important lesson here is to not go big right away. It might seem tempting to build a presence EVERYWHERE, but trust me, it’s not a good idea in the beginning. Choose the best one for your buyer persona, nail that, and then pick a couple more. Inbound is all about quality.
When you have that amazing content and a selection of channels to distribute it in, please do not share that exact same infographic or article in every single channel. You need to modify it to suit the style of the channel. Recycling is another good point — once you have a great blog post, try re-doing it as a video!
Lastly, you need to make sure to nurture the potential leads in your buyer’s journey. Make sure you have good CTA’s and useful content for them — if they want to follow you, ensure they can do so in the most simple way possible. Once you start seeing the same people liking your posts or downloading ebooks it might be tempting to go ahead and sell, right? Well, that might backfire. The whole idea of inbound is to be there, ensure your leads feel safe with you and understand the value when they are ready to buy. You won’t get the deal if you try before they are in that state, and the whole idea of inbound is to make your customers reach out to you. So hold your horses and wait patiently. As a last side note, don’t freak out if you don’t see results immediately — inbound will take time.
Read more about inbound marketing and how we’ve used it here!
