According to recent B2B Marketing and Tomorrow People research, a very small minority of marketers are satisfied with the ROI created by their inbound marketing strategies. There are a huge number of reasons why this may be the case, but to get the most out of your inbound marketing efforts you have to adopt a strategic approach to your content. This guide explains how B2B marketers can navigate the road to strategic inbound success.
1. Re-focus
Businesses may already have gained momentum in their content marketing programmes, but it pays to stop and refocus to increase success rates. More specifically, success relies on:
• Creating a ‘many-to-many’ marcomms programme, where identified experts work to define the content strategy and author your content, creating a conversation with your target market.
• Turning off your outbound marketing channels to maximise inbound ROI.
• Managing expectations: build the right business case, focusing on a two-to-three-year market development strategy, rather, than a campaign approach. Define your KPIs and overall strategy to help measure success metrics along the way.
• Restructure your marketing team to support these new goals, and make sure you have access to the correct skills.
2. Enable the business
Much of the disappointment with content marketing ROI is based on misinformation and poor understanding of what the technique actually entails.
You should focus on educating C-suite executives and thought leaders about your inbound marketing strategy and expected ROI, allowing between nine and 18 months to see positive outcomes. In the first nine months you should build the foundations of the programme, identifying target personas, building social reach, creating an opt-in database and deploying an optimised, visible website. It also pays to implement a documented process to regularly review metrics and actions.
In months nine to 18 you should develop and transition the value of your community from engaged prospects to sales ready leads. This should involve introducing the opt-in community to customers, refining and improving your content strategy based on previous successes, refining your marketing automation systems and the continued optimisation of your conversion process.
Create a content committee who collectively work on the programme, author the content and implement the methodology. Work with team members with insight in the product, the market and the vision of the white space.
3. Throw out your pretty site
Sixty per cent of B2B websites get less than 3000 visitors each month and very low levels of inbound leads. This is often because they are ‘tactical’ rather than ‘strategic’ in design.
To address this:
• Carry out a website review to assess how well it engages your target audience.
• Benchmark website traffic and conversions against the other B2B inbound marketing report respondents – are they higher or lower?
• Use these insights to redesign your site, defining qualified traffic from key personas.
• Build the foundations that will facilitate the switch from tactical to strategic website.
• Integrate your website with your marketing automation tools.
• Focus on conversion rate optimisation techniques, performing A-B testing on an ongoing basis.
Website reviews are critical to the inbound marketing process – you will need to review quarterly to ensure you are still engaging and converting the right prospects.
4. Re-engineer your process
Map your customer’s journey to accurately define content they need to engage with your business. To build your content process you should focus on creating performance content unavailable elsewhere. Don’t be afraid to create less content if it raises the quality of what you do make. You should also establish your white space position; find your angle in the market, creating content to support it.
It’s also important to invest in primary research to solidify your position as a thought leader; customers can get reports based on secondary research anywhere. This can help bleed into your efforts to use a story-telling strategy. Each customer journey needs content that addresses the beginning, middle and end, creating a narrative that accompanies them through the sales pipeline. Blogging regularly can also help with this.
5. Revisit your strategy
Inbound marketing is a continuous improvement technique that needs constant tweaking for maximum effect. This is why your business needs to carefully select measurable and actionable KPIs. Focus on:
• Relevant traffic and MQLs.
• Conversions by channel – is the volume of qualified leads being delivered by inbound marketing increasing?
• Analysing if your pre-defined personas are delivering the right leads.
• Measuring the reach and size of your opt-in database, and the levels of engagement through time on website and returning visitor metrics.
• Keeping your inhouse thought leaders informed about the success of your strategy, seeking their input for improvements.
• Revising your targets quarterly, based on the results of your analysis – not what you think they should be.
Remember, it may be necessary to educate the business on this new marketing strategy as it involves a wholesale review of your sales and marketing activities.
