Today, marketing is a science. It's predicable, it's scalable and it's repeatable. To get good at it - and I mean really good - you have to take a scientific approach. This means conducting experiments with the understanding that even if you try something and it fails, you still learned what not to do.
This month's focus for 2Inbound is Strategy. It's fitting that I share with you some of the actual results from our lab with regards to how marketing strategy, and specifically an inbound marketing strategy, contributes to helping us get leads for our clients.
Many of you have probably attempted to execute inbound marketing without a plan or strategy. Perhaps some of you thought creating personas was enough of a plan to get started. While personas are a requirement, they are just one small part of what should be going into your planning exercises.
The two most important parts of a sound inbound marketing strategy are what makes you different and matching your tactics directly to your quantitative business goals.
Differentiation. We all know we need to have it, but attaining it is difficult. It takes work, creativity and vision. Being different is at the core of good marketing. It's your marketing team's job to make you stand out versus your competition and it's something we spend a great deal of time on with our clients. For those of you who have breezed past this step, or thought this to be unimportant, think again. If your business isn't remarkable - it's invisible.
This means actually calculating the number of website visitors and leads you need to generate in order to hit your sales targets and tracking that month over month. If you don't have this, you're not ready to get started and in essence, you're flying blind. Tracking is easy to do and should be done monthly to ensure that your marketing is perfectly aligned with your company sales goals.
I didn't say creating a marketing strategy and inbound marketing plan was hard; I said it was a requirement. It's only a requirement if you want your investment in marketing to produce real results that propel your business to the next level and beyond. Without a written inbound marketing strategy, be prepared to proceed with caution.