Social selling and inbound marketing go hand in hand. Building a social presence plays an important role in any inbound marketing plan. Combining social selling with broader social media marketing tactics can help facilitate alignment between your sales and marketing teams.
An inbound marketing plan should have a few building blocks to ensure that your plan is complete, positions your business for success, and enables you to ensure that you begin your inbound marketing efforts with a solid understanding of the steps you need to take. Next.
The core components of any inbound marketing plan include:
1. Buyer’s Persons
You can’t create an effective inbound marketing plan without understanding who you’re targeting. When you think of your buyer persona, you think you have it in control. It’s a bit more challenging to explain it precisely to someone else. But putting it in writing is a completely different story. Finding the right words to describe each aspect of your buyer persona is an excellent exercise because it forces you to be exact. When working with a team, do this exercise together and you will see how everyone will end up wanting to use a different word here and there. Getting together as a team and agreeing on the right words, and using that definition to advance the prospecting process is an incredibly unifying force function.
A buyer persona creates a vivid image of the type of prospects they are targeting. For example, a commercial insurance company that targets manufacturing companies might target the owners or GMs of manufacturing companies. Your buyer persona would include information on their average age, income, hobbies, business information, goals, and typical pain points they find. One of my favorite templates for creating buyer personas is from Xtensio. It’s simple, intuitive, easy to complete, and incorporates the most important things to consider.
2. Buyer’s trip map
Once you have a solid understanding of who you are targeting, you can start charting the journey you would like them to take to become a customer. Mapping the buyer’s journey helps you create content targeted at specific points on this journey and create plans that address the four main stages of the inbound marketing process:
Consciousness Consideration Decision Experience and delight
The buyer journey map ensures that every step of the process is satisfactory for your customers.
3. Objectives and KPI
For your inbound marketing efforts to be successful, you need to define what success really looks like for your business. Summarizing the KPIs that matter most to your company, be it sales, subscribers, recurring revenue, etc., allows you to gauge whether your investment is really paying off. Any goal you describe must follow the SMART goal system.
4. Budget
Because inbound marketing relies heavily on the content creation process to be successful, it can be quite heavy on the budget at first as you build your foundational content. You must enter your inbound marketing strategy with a well-defined budget to stick to. This budget should consider how much it will cost to create all the components of an effective inbound marketing system, including blog posts, lead magnets, email threads, social media posts, graphics, and time spent on manage your social media accounts.
5. Content strategy
You can’t have inbound marketing without content. Many would say that your content strategy is the bread and butter of any inbound marketing plan. Make sure you have a solid understanding of what your customers would like to know about your product, what keywords you would like to target, and whether or not you have the content creation resources (writers, editors, graphic designers, social media managers). on hand to execute the strategy you have outlined effectively.
6. Sales and marketing alignment plan
Inbound marketing is most effective when you align your sales and marketing teams. By creating content that will be helpful to both teams, you will position your sales team to get the most out of the leads that come into your system, while also giving your marketing team the tools they need to be successful. Plan the steps you will take to ensure alignment between your teams.
This article was previously published on the SocialSellinator blog.
Autor: Jock Breitwieser
Follow @MrSocialSelling
With over 20 years of international agency and corporate communications experience, Jock Breitwieser is an award-winning communicator. It focuses on Marketing and Digital Communications.
Throughout his career, Jock worked in agencies and internally, leading global marketing programs that deliver business results. He currently lives in Silicon Valley, California.
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