Once you have solid foundations, inbound is the first land to conquer and the most fundamental one, if you ask us.
What goes under inbound? Think about all traffic (and leads or conversions) that are marked direct, Organic, referral, or alike.
In other words, any traffic that comes to you voluntarily is considered inbound. Here we present all related services, excluding paid campaigns.
1
Strategy, goals & KPIs
This is the first part of ‘the brains’ of the operation. It includes identifying the exact mission, setting up goals and KPIs, looking at the target personas and accounts, and anything else that is needed to kick off the inbound operation
2
Competitive analysis
This is VERY important because looking at your competition (or just other solutions that target the same audience) can tell you a lot about what works and what doesn’t – winning inbound strategies, winning SEO tactics, the right keywords to focus on, and alike.
During this phase, we deeply research the ecosystem, looking at content pieces, SEO strategies, social media communities, and tactics, lead gen via inbound, social advocacy, referring and direct channels, and a lot more. This helps us gear up towards building a winning architecture.
3
Building an inbound architecture
That’s the best part! Here we build a flow chart that maps the activities, types of content we will be using, SEO components (on-site and external), referring channels, and communities for content promotion. We build the operational planning, and we attach KPIs to each stage. have you ever built a house? we love using this analogy as it’s a very close example. This stage is the master plan- the recipe.
4
Building an arsenal
Inbound pays off. In fact, it pays off so well in the long run, that once it starts it only grows. Once we are done with building the architecture, we focus on an ongoing mission of filling the content arsenal with relevant types of content . We create SEO content and content that fits different steps in the prospect journey: “edutainment” content, trust-building content, persuasive one, content that fits mid-funnel stages, product marketing content, and alike. Ever-going research of keywords is an integral part of the process, to make sure our content leverages on the right keywords. We also reformat content to fit promotion in different channels (turning case studies into videos, for instance)
5
Leveraging social media
Social media plays a key role in inbound marketing. It’s no secret that social media is crucial to B2B tech content promotion. But, it depends on how it’s done. In order to turn social media marketing into an inbound channel that delivers, data-driven marketing must enter the game. We work on both company pages and personal advocacy, run extensive activities to increase connections and followers and measure the impact on our promoted content in these channels. We post content in multiple channels, run activities to leverage the media algorithms (engagement pods), and track the impressions, clicks, and actions.
6
Day-to-day management, reporting, and optimization
As mentioned above, inbound marketing is an operation that is ongoing and should be continuously fueled. Day-to-day management includes the creation of new content (based on the best performing previous pieces), SEO on-site and external work, social promotion of content (website pages, personal advocacy, and communities), and other activities that result in solid traffic increase, that continues to stream in, in the long run. This part includes looking at content pieces that are best in terms of lead-gen, identifying intent, playing a key role in closing a deal, or turn into SEO gold. This part lays the ground to future improvements and inbound progress.