12 steps to planning your first inbound

marketing campaign

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12 Steps to Planning your First Inbound Marketing Campaign

““So the time’s come for you

to plan your first inbound

marketing campaign...

You’ve done the initial research and now you’re feeling slightly overwhelmed by all the elements you need to consider. You’ve got this! As an experienced marketer, you can feel confident that taking a structured approach, as you would do with any marketing campaign, will give you a solid grounding from which to launch into inbound. Prodo’s advice is to follow best practice and produce an allencompassing plan, which remains simple in both design and actionability. This eBook will provide you with a digestible breakdown, helping you to manage your inbound marketing activity step-by-step and prioritise the 12 key aspects of your campaign.

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Step 1. Goals and Leadership

Before you begin inbound marketing, as with any campaign, you need

to develop a framework to work within, toward and exceed, so that your

marketing and sales activities have context and something to be benchmarked

against. Think about the overall marketing and sales goals of your organisation,

concerning what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve it and by

when. By taking the time to consider these simple questions, you can begin to

construct a framework which will inform and dictate the marketing and sales

activities you conduct.

This is essentially a SMART goal – to recap, that means it’s:

Specific: Everyone in the business is aware

of exactly what it is you want

to achieve, what is expected of

everyone, why it’s important and

how it’s going to happen.

Measurable: Do you have concrete criteria for

measuring progress and reaching

your goal?

Attainable: Is the goal realistic and feasible?

Relevant:Is the goal relevant to your

business’ overall agenda?

Timely:Can you allocate an expected date

for when you will reach the goal?

Keep it SMART and grounded in

context. Develop your goals and

regularly reconvene to assess your

performance so far!

Step 1. Goals and Leadership

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Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL):An individual or company that has

identified themselves as being

more engaged and meet initial fit

criteria.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL):An individual or company that not

only matches the pain that you

solve, but also meets a deeper

set of criteria which indicates

readiness for a level of sales

engagement.

It’s always a good idea to decide how many customers (or end actions) you

need to gain from your inbound campaign at the outset – from here, you can

work backwards to understand how many visitors and leads you’ll need to

generate to hit your target, based on your usual attrition and close rates. A

basic level of lead-stage definition could be as follows:

Step 1. Goals and Leadership

Visits:Unique visitors to your website

Lead:A simple lead, i.e. an individual

who has downloaded something

online or a referral who is yet to

engage with your company and

has given you permission to email

them.

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Step 2. Campaign Planning

Building out a campaign strategy can, at first, seem daunting for any

organisation – let’s break this process down into

five simple stages:

Step 2. Campaign Planning

Preparation

• Produce buyer personas to

represent your key audiences

• Produce and carry out a

content audit

• Outline marketing channels

• Outline design elements and

resource

• Outline intended software/tools

for content generation

• Outline ROI metrics

• Outline website structure,

keywords and URLs

• Build keyword search terms lists

Implementation

• Start creating copy for website/

blogs, graphics etc

• Outline lead capture systems

• Produce social media plan

• Produce content plan

• Produce email marketing plan

• Create workflows

• Produce SEO baseline report

• Outline CRM integration needs

Launch

• Deploy blog

• Deploy CTAs

• Deploy emails and workflows

• Deploy landing pages

• Test

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Step 2. Campaign Planning

Live Campaign

• Amplify content through social

media and other specified

channels

• Maintain and develop website

• Produce monthly impact

reports to monitor performance

• Pencil in monthly meetings to

review performance

• Launch PPC campaign

• Iterate

Timeline planner

• A timeplan helps to add clarity

to the main aspects of your

campaign, providing you with

a visual reference point to keep

you on track.

• Task management software

such as Teamwork or

DoInbound is also extremely

useful for managing activities,

delegating tasks to other

team members and assigning

deadlines to each part of the

campaign, and will give you a

Gantt chart to work from.

• Campaign planning always

seems like a hefty task;

however, if you start with an

initial framework to work from,

you can break each aspect of

the campaign into actionable

chunks which will be easier to

both plan and execute.

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Step 3. Develop Your Buyer Personas

Step 3. Develop YourBuyer Personas

Buyer personas are generalised, semi-fictitious representations of your ideal

consumer. Profiling your perfect buyer by building personas can help identify

your optimal target market, which shares a similar need for, or interest in your

product or service. Personas help when diagnosing issues with your current

smarketing (sales and marketing) output by encouraging a ‘customer-first’

focus, as well as highlighting the most effective ways to communicate with

your target market.

By building and refining your marketing strategy around your buyer personas,

you produce an approach that is created entirely around meeting your

customers’ pain points. If you really want to maximise your marketing machine

and convert visitors into leads and leads into customers, then building

personas to mirror your real buyers is an absolute must for any organisation.

• Job role

• Professional goals

• Company and sector

• Preferred sources of information

• Professional associations and social

networks

• Preferences for interacting with

vendors

• Age

• Family situation

• Education

• Shopping preferences

• Income

So what does a persona comprise?

Create a picture of your ideal

customer, covering off typical

characteristics such as:

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Step 3. Develop Your Buyer Personas

Remember that you’re unlikely to have a single persona – there may be several

typical groups of buyer. Create a persona for each key group, rank them in

terms of importance and decide on the main persona for your campaign.

Trying to hit too many diverse personas will dilute the impact of your

campaign; staying focused is much more beneficial for results.

Quick Tips:Buyer personas make up the

foundation of your inbound

marketing efforts. You must

ensure that you allow enough

time to workshop and develop

your personas to establish a

comprehensive and accurate

representation of your prospective

buyer.

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Step 4. Identify Your Buyer’s Journey

Step 4. Identify YourBuyer’s Journey

The way people buy has changed. Traditional outbound methods should now

be used with caution; buyers simply don’t respond positively to interruptive

tactics such as cold-calling, meaning that outbound is no longer a practical

option for lead generation unless you have already pre-qualified your leads

using the inbound methodology.

Today, your prospects aren’t generally in desperate need of help – they’re

extremely resourceful, adaptable and time-conscious. The modern buyer will

seek to find the solution to their problems on their own, meaning that

they could have potentially gone through 50% of the sales cycle or more

without even engaging with your business. So how do you ensure that it’s your

organisation that comes onto their radar? The answer is to create educational

content that aligns with your prospect buyers’ issues and resolves pain points

to capture them early in the cycle. While moving prospects down your sales

funnel, content will help them to both understand and learn how to mitigate

their issues; this will boost the chances of them choosing your business

moving forward.

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Step 4. Identify Your Buyer’s Journey

or methods available to pursue

the goal or solve their challenge.

This is where middle of the funnel

content comes in handy; think

webinars, case studies, expert

guides and videos.

DecisionDuring this stage, buyers have

already identified the options

available and have decided on a

solution category. At this point,

bottom of the funnel content like

case studies, product literature,

vendor/product comparisons and

software trials/downloads will

help to induce buyer decisions

regarding your organisation.

AwarenessAt this stage, buyers identify their

challenge or an opportunity they

want to pursue. They also decide

whether or not the goal or

challenge should be a priority.

To engage with buyers at the

Awareness stage produce top of

the funnel, educational resources

such as: eBooks, eGuides, blogs,

vlogs, whitepapers and templates.

ConsiderationDuring the Consideration stage,

buyers have clearly defined

the goal or challenge and have

committed to addressing it. They

evaluate the different approaches

Action: Map out your buyer’s journey

visually – what is their problem and what

are they doing at each stage as they try to

resolve it? This will help you to map your

content out later.

REMEMBER: content is crucial in pushing

traffic through your website and helping

prospects to understand their problems

and – more importantly – how you can

solve them!

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Step 5. Plan Your Content Strategy

Step 5. Plan YourContent Strategy

Content’s still king, and there’s no reason why this should change anytime

soon. Digital content is how you get your company, products or services out

there in the online space, on show to all your potential customers.

An essential first step in your content strategy is to conduct a content audit to

assess all the assets you already have at your disposal and how best you can

use them. For instance, aggregating all your existing content and linking it

to your buyer personas and buyer journey stage (awareness, consideration,

decision) not only means you don’t have to start from scratch, but it’s also a

good exercise to highlight content gaps. As soon as these gaps have been

examined, you can develop your content plan to address each one; then you

can apply multiple content items at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

As you plan in new content, think

about where it needs to

sit in the marketing funnel:

Awareness - top of the funnel

Consideration – middle of the

funnel

Decision – bottom of the funnel

REMEMBER: you shouldn’t start talking

about your brand until the decision stage

– up until that point, content should be

focused on defining the buyer’ issue and

exploring it in greater depth. Although this

may seem counterintuitive compared to

more traditional marketing approaches, it’s

all about building trust without the hard

sell. You present your solution once you’ve

earned your buyer’s trust by helping them

think through their problem.

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It is still important to incorporate your long tail keywords within your:

• Page title

• Subheaders

• URL

• Meta-descriptions

• Image descriptions

Step 6. Keyword Strategy

Step 6. Keyword Strategy

While it’s becoming increasingly important to consider the concepts that

Google interprets regardless of the actual words that are being used, keywords

are still a vitally important concept of SEO.

Consider your keywords’ placement

over their frequency.

Short tail keyword placement is also

still a significant factor. Regarding

frequency, you may simply need to

worry less. It isn’t important for you

to repeat a keyword over and over

throughout the content anymore – in

fact, it’s to be avoided. This strategy is

becoming more and more ineffective

and may actually devalue the copy and

make it less enjoyable to consume.

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Step 6. Keyword Strategy

The Big Picture

In addition to being key (pun intended) to the SEO of a website, keywords are

important for off-site content and social profiles as well. This is so that people

using the internet can discover your website through a variety of ways rather

than just through searching keywords that are contained on your website. This

type of presence can help you to connect with various networks, pushing more

customers to your business.

Although keywords are still important, thanks to Google getting savvier to

algorithm-bending tricks, they don’t hold the same weight for tactics of

cramming in repetitive keywords to rank higher in Google. In truth, this is

actually a positive change as it forces content creators to be more creative

with their content. Content should be optimised for the users, not just for the

keywords – otherwise, the content will feel forced and disingenuous anyway.

Remember: thinking from the perspective of the searcher can really help you

with your keyword strategy. Also, short and generic keyword terms are over-

saturated, meaning you are competing with lots of other content – to get

around this, pick longer keyword terms that are relevant to your content and

business as a whole.

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What’s in your toolbox?

Social media – Instagram, Twitter,

LinkedIn, Snapchat, Facebook,

Pinterest. Buyers research and

compare products and services

and factor in reviews from the

social communities of each

platform. You’ll already have a

good understanding of which

platforms work best for your

business – plan-in outreaching

your content on them.

Paid advertising

Pay-per-click, Google AdWords,

Snapchat Ads, Instagram Ads,

Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads

PR

Thought Leadership, Market

Leadership, Media Coverage

Step 7. Content Promotion and Amplification

Step 7. Content Promotionand AmplificationLet’s assume that you’ve planned some amazing new content alongside

some tried-and-tested favourites. How are yougoing to get that content

found? Now’s the time to determine which channels are most relevant to your

business and how you’ll utilise them to amplify your content to increase your

lead generation.

Consider your keywords’ placement over their frequency.

Email marketing

Since GDPR, there’s been a

certain air of tentativeness around

email marketing. However, when

engaging with a clean, GDPR

compliant database comprised

of happy, opted-in contacts email

promotion is still a valuable weapon

for any marketer.

So, what can you do to optimise your email promotion?:

• Set a clear goal

• Segment your recipient list

• Personalisation

• Test and revise

• Use action-oriented language

and captivating subject

lines and preview text

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Step 7. Content Promotion and Amplification

Marketing automation software can allow you to send mass emails to your

database that appeal to your specific buyer personas while maintaining an

element of personalisation, while tools such as Sigstr can ensure brand

professionalism and consistency across your organisation.

Conversational marketing

This feedback-oriented approach to

marketing used by companies to drive

engagement, enhance customer

loyalty, and grow their customer

base with the end goal of increasing

revenue can form a fresh new

aspect of your content strategy.

Data suggests that people prefer

communicating with businesses

through a chat function as opposed

to via email or telephone. With

integrative automation in the form of

chatbots, messaging platforms

are a good way to spew out more

content for people who interact with

your business in this way or through

daily updates.

Messaging

Bear in mind that conversational

marketing can be optimised

through messaging apps – Facebook

Messenger and WhatsApp are

all good examples. With the last,

specifically WhatsApp business, any

contacts who’ve added your number

will be on your contact list. From here

you can broadcast

at regular intervals, sharing relevant

content to keep prospects engaged

and move them further down the

funnel – test whether daily, weekly or

other frequencies work best.

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Step 7. Content Promotion and Amplification

Social media quick tips

Don’t just create content around

your company: provide information

about emerging trends, strategy

and technical elements related to

your industry.

Create dynamic content such as

images, gifs, animated and live

videos

Keep up to date with latest

functions and incorporate them

into your content, i.e. Instagram’s

interactive features, such as gifs,

polls and live video, will help to

convey an image that the brand

has its finger on the pulse of

current trends. Use relevant

hashtags to reach your target

audiences

Don’t automate all your social

activity; it should be natural and

reactive

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Step 8. Landing Pages

Step 8. Landing Pages

Landing pages are where your best content lives: sending your prospects to

landing pages where you capture their information and create new leads for

your sales team is best practice for inbound campaigns. Seek to create striking,

well-designed landing pages that will attract new leads. The basis of a good

landing page is to deliver a desired user action, so keep what you want your

visitors to do once they land on your page front of mind.

Landing pages are constructed around a ‘gated’ content offer, for instance, an

ebook, quiz or case study. This gated system is made up of a form that requires

prospects to enter their contact details (as well as asking them to ‘opt-in’ to

further content to ensure data compliance in light of GDPR!) and, in return,

they receive something of value – an asset

or offer.

Landing page quick tips

Keep explanations brief but

straight to the point: the content

offer should be presented in no

more than five sentences

Use bullet points, bolding and

numbers in the copy to separate

elements

Use relevant imagery to the

content offer

Don’t incorporate menu

navigation/links that have

the potential to distract visitors

from the offer

Use clear, action-orientated

headers

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Incorporate social proof, such

as testimonials, reviews from

customer social accounts

Use CTAs to entice leads into

additional content

Step 9. Thank You Pages

Step 9. Thank You Pages

Thank you pages are an important feature to provide visitors with confirmation

when they have submitted a form on a landing page.

Keep this copy clear and concise, detailing the next step – for example: “Your

ebook is on its way to your inbox.”

Another benefit of Thank You Pages is in the way in which they give you the

opportunity to provide your new prospects with other relevant content offers,

helping you to move leads further into the buyer’s journey.

Thankyou page quick tips

Give your leads the menu

navigation back

Include social sharing options

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Step 10. Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

Step 10. Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

When visitors interact with a website, they want to manoeuvre through it

intuitively as well as to be able to easily distinguish premium and valued

content - this is where calls-to-action (CTAs) come in.

A CTA is an action-inducing button (or link) which has the potential to

influence your website’s lead acquisition rate. Through compelling, streamlined

graphics and typography, CTAs direct visitors to your landing pages with

content offers or communication opportunities such as webinars or face-to-

face consultations.

Keep your CTAs action-orientated

and simple, with highlighted

active verbs as part of the copy

such as‘Download’ or ‘Register’.

Make sure your CTAs are

distributed evenly across your

site and are well visible i.e. in the

middle and at the end of blogs.

CTA quick tips

Incorporate a range of CTAs on

your website to appeal to different

visitors

To facilitate lead generation, you

can design A/B CTA test groups

and position them on various

pages throughout your website.

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Popular platforms:

• HubSpot CRM

• Salesforce

• Insightly CRM,

• Zoho CRM,

• Microsoft Dynamics

Best practices for CRM integration:

• Outline the lead management

process

• Outline your platform sync

requirements

• Review data capture

functionality and how

it corresponds with the

smarketing requirements

Step 11. CRM Intergration

Step 11. CRM Intergration

To effectively manage your leads, CRM integration is a necessary component

of any inbound marketing campaign. With this in mind, time must be spent

to both identify which CRM platform best suits your smarketing (sales and

marketing) requirements, and conduct best practices to ensure a seamless

integration process.

A straightforward CRM integration

will ensure that your lead capture and

distribution across your marketing

and sales teams is accurate, providing

you with a clear picture of high-

quality, engageable leads.

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Examples of report formats include:

• Dashboards

• Visual reports

• Written story reports

Step 12. Report and Review!

Step 12. Report and Review!Don’t relax too soon, there’s still more to do… The imperative twelfth step –

report and review – requires you to, well, report and review!

If you’ve planned your campaign thoroughly from the outset, you should

already know which metrics and KPIs you need to crunch the numbers on. This

means that when data is pulled through your automation software or CRM,

everyone is on the same page and is well aware of what patterns they want

to see and why. Another consideration should be the format of your reports.

Consistency is key here to ensure the data patterns and actionable insights are

easily identifiable.

Tip: Inbound marketing is all about being

agile. Regular review meetings give your

team the opportunity to come together to

assess what’s working well and what isn’t

and – most importantly – the chance to do

something about it. Keep maintaining

good communication with expectation of

being nimble and reactive to your results;

this is essential in a highly changeable

marketing landscape and will allow you to

scale your successes.

This list isn’t exhaustive and, of course,

these formats can be combined

to produce a format that everyone

involved in the reporting and reviewal

process is happy with. Bear in mind

that, while your marketing team

will eat up all the minutiae of what’s

worked best, your director will be

most interested in whether you’ve

hit your lead generation target, so

make sure that you don’t lose clarity

in the over-reporting the details when

you’re presenting your results.

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Final thoughts...

Having reached the end of this guide, you should now have a

good understanding of everything that you need to consider

when planning your first inbound marketing campaign. Yes,

there’s a lot to think about, but inbound marketing is all about

structure, which makes it relatively straightforward to implement

if you follow the rulebook.

As you’ve probably realised, the key to adopting an inbound

approach is to exploit the tools a good CMS platform provides

to make the process as easy as possible, from implementation

to reporting results and feeding your sales team. Hopefully, you

already have the right system in place – if not, our advice is to take

a step back and research the options fully first. Launching into

inbound marketing without the benefit of marketing automation

and built-in analytics to track your prospects across different

touchpoints will hamper both your results and your ability to

demonstrate ROI. Don’t let this put you off – rather, use it as some

added impetus to tackle this major blocker to inbound success!

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