5 Steps to a Successful B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy

This is the third post in our Inbound Marketing 01 series intended to help B2B marketers boost brand visibility and generate better leads for their sales teams to convert into customers.

After learning about the benefits of inbound marketing, most companies want to immediately jump in and begin. They’ve heard they should start blogging, create more eBooks and send more emails. If you start executing tactics before you’ve put a comprehensive B2B inbound marketing strategy in place, you’ll find yourself banging your head against the wall in 12 months. You’ll end up spending lots of time and money with little to no results to show for it (except one enormous headache).

Here’s five steps to make sure you get the most out of your inbound marketing efforts.

Step 1: Set inbound marketing goals

The first step to creating an inbound marketing strategy is to define your business goals. Based on where you are and where you want to go, it’s important to create a roadmap of how to get there.

Before the days of Google Maps, would you have ever considered a cross-country road trip without having a map in hand? Nope, we didn’t think so.

Take a look at your competitors, your industry market and where you are in that market to help create realistic and attainable goals. Then determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) so you have visibility into your inbound marketing program.

It’s critical you get a sense of what success looks like. Without pre-determined KPIs, you can’t judge the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts.

Step 2: Identify your target buyers

Before you move any further, you need to make sure you know who your ideal customers are. You also need to gather as much information about them as you can.

How do they spend their time? Where do they get their information? What do they care about?

To accurately define your ideal customers, you need to build target buyer personas. Target buyer personas allow your company to provide prospects the information they need about your company, when they need it and in their preferred channel.

Buyer personas are considered the backbone of an effective B2B inbound marketing strategy. People are sick of being bombarded with general, one-size-fits-all marketing communications.

By knowing who you are creating content for, you can more effectively target your message.

Step 3: Attract your ideal customers to your website

Having a deep understanding of your buyers allows your company to identify how prospects are searching for your content through keyword research.

Keyword research is when marketers use keywords to find and research actual terms that people enter into search engines. Knowing what these actual search terms are can help inform content strategy as well as your overall inbound marketing strategy.

Through this research, you can identify which keywords to target in order to attract the right type of visitor to your website and keep your prospects coming back for more.

Incorporating your target keywords into your blogging, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) and social media efforts is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive organic traffic to your website.

Step 4: Convert visitors into leads

Now that you have your visitors attention, it is time to convert them into into leads.

The vast majority of visitors that come to your website aren’t ready to buy.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they are bad prospects. It just means that you need to continue to educate them until they are ready to buy.

In order to do this, you need to encourage visitors to fill out a form or give some type of contact information in exchange for something valuable.

This can be a how-to guide, a whitepaper or even an interactive checklist that educates them on an area or topic that they may currently be struggling with.

Targeted landing pages with strong calls to action and forms for your visitors to fill out can help you build your contact database and turn them into leads.

Step 5: Close leads into customers

Not every lead will turn into a customer. It’s up to you to provide them with relevant information at this stage to close the sale.

By now your leads are fully aware that your product or service may serve as a solution to their problem.

This is where your content needs to go one step further, communicating your unique value proposition and reassuring leads how you can fulfill their needs better than your competitors.

Any content you offer at this stage must help overcome objections that the lead has, offer social proof—such as testimonials—and create trust and credibility.

People will always choose companies they trust, especially after a strong connection has been established.

Many companies choose to nurture their leads through emails. This typically occurs through automated workflows or drip notifications.

With the combined power of marketing automation and targeted content, lead nurturing can be more personalized and sophisticated to convert your leads into customers.

Build your B2B inbound marketing strategy before jumping into tactics

We have seen far too many marketing dollars wasted on tactics without any connection to an overall strategy.

If your company is executing multiple tactics, something is bound to stick to the wall. Sadly, without an underlying B2B inbound marketing strategy, even the best tactical execution can miss the mark.

Inbound marketing strategy before tactics is a must when it comes to defining and executing an effective inbound marketing program.

5 Steps to Creating a Successful B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy