Inbound Marketing Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for successful inbound marketing?

Craig,

I wrote a post awhile back titled, "Does Inbound Marketing Really Work?" In order to demonstrate the value of inbound marketing, we actually revealed results from our own campaign over an 18-month period.

In that post, we highlighted nine tips to make inbound marketing work. Here are three of the most important:

1) Disrupt the market. Stop relying on PR and advertising to make you appear more interesting. Differentiate your organization from competitors, bring real value to customers and continually innovate.

2) Design and activate a fully integrated inbound marketing strategy focused on six key areas: brand, Website, content marketing, search marketing, social media and public relations. Keep in mind that YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are brands and platforms, not strategies.

3) Adapt, execute, evolve and take risks.

Full post: http://www.pr2020.com/page/does-inbound-marketing-really-work

Good answers submitted thus far. Here are a few more things to consider:

1. Plan for Response: Inbound marketing won't do much for you if you don't have a plan for responding. If you can interest people enough to come to you, extending their attention and engagement is a pivotal point for success. What do you want them to do once they get there? What might they be interested in next based on what brought them to your website, blog, etc. Inbound should be the start of a dialogue.

2. Mine the Data: Where are your inbound efforts having the most success? Based on the source, how can you improve results? What adjustments can you make to inbound efforts that lag behind to increase the attraction value?

3. Integrate Inbound with Outbound: This touches on Barbra's point of creating great content. With great content, outbound can actually drive inbound. An example would be an outbound email that gets forwarded to others and pulls inbound interest from people you didn't previously know about - or who didn't know about you.

1. Earn a reputation as a top quality content brand - one that consistently adds value to the issues buyers care most about. If you've done this, each piece of content and each new campaign will be welcomed. If you fail to do it, you're starting over at the bottom of the hill each time.

2. Make every engagement as personal as you can. Don't just automate your responses, get involved. Look at the prospect's website and personalise your replies.

3. Treat the top influencers in your market as valued colleagues. Spend some energy furthering their agendas instead of always pushing your own. This respect will come back to you trebled.

Inbound marketing has many components, if I had to pick the most important three I would go with:

1. Commit to Inbound - One of the core differences between inbound and outbound, is that outbound can be like a marketing drug. With outbound, you pay an invoice and instantly can start seeing traffic and leads, but it is costly and not sustainable. However, inbound marketing is like going to the gym, it takes some time to see some results, but once you do, the results keep getting better and better, especially for the time and hard costs required to deliver them.

2. Understand What YOUR Business Needs - Benchmarks are great, but you have to determine how many leads inbound marketing needs to drive for your business. Look at you existing lead flow and determine if your sales team currently has the number of leads on a monthly basis to be successful. If they do, then figure out over time how you can increase the percentage of those leads that are inbound. If they don’t have the leads they need, then do the math to determine how many more leads the sales team needs to hit your customer acquisition goals.

3. Understand What Sticks - When you first start with inbound marketing, it is important to try different types of content, keywords, lead nurturing, etc. You need to know what type of content and timing work best for your audience. You have to start by throwing all of your inbound marketing ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Once you have a clear understanding of what sticks, then optimize and tweak these methods to improve their performance.

1. Learn to Think Like a Your Customer: I love talking about this subject. I call it The Curse of Knowledge and I think all of us suffer from it to one extent or another. Because we are constantly in, around, and involved with our business, we all too often assume that our customers understand and see the world the way we do…which could not be further from the truth. For example, if I’m explaining to a client what a content management system for a website does, I don’t use the phrase CMS. That’s tech-speak. I use the phrase ‘Web Design System for Dummies’. This is just one silly example but it applies to every niche and industry around the globe. May we learn to always communicate with our customers on their level, not ours.

2. Have a Big, Fat Opinion: That’s right, don’t live in the world of grey…think black and white always. Consumers like people with opinions, so give it to them. Don’t be afraid people won’t like you. In fact, if you don’t get some negative feedback for your writings then you’re likely not taking enough of a stand. You must establish your voice in the marketplace if you ever want to be viewed as an expert.

3. Speak and Write as You’d Like to Be, Not as you are: This one goes hand in hand with #2 but it’s critical. I read and listen to internet marketers all the time and there are clearly ones that are confident with what they are saying and then there’s a group that are timid and thus ineffective. For example, when I write about marketing I see myself as Seth Godin. I feel I have his same authority. But is this the case? Of course not, but I’m dang sure going to stand tall as I tell the world how I feel, as should any company or marketer. Be the expert!

1. Start with customer's point of view. You may have great marketing messages and data, but consider first what questions the customer is trying to answer for themselves. Then center the theme of your content around helping them research the answers and make your content fit their need.

2. Consider where customers will look for answers. This is an aspect of knowing your customer from Barbra's post. For example, technology company decision makers will be likely to look online first, whereas doctors who are online for fewer hours in the day will balance online more with publications, events and face to face.

3. Understand how they consume information, what gets their attention and how far you need to go to make your case. Engineers and Operations Managers (analytics) will attract to more detail and longer form content. Sales and Marketing (expressives) will want you to get to the point very quickly and gravitate to content on tone and feel as well as the content itself.

1. Creating meaningful content for your targeted buyers
This seem obvious but is worth repeating. This is important because your time is valuable. You must first figure out who your target market is and then provide information that is meaningful, relevant and problem solving to them. If it isn't, you might as well throw it away.

2. Be brave and try new things. Content Marketing is new enough that not everyone knows about it. Try things and don't be afraid to fail in public

3. Spend a lot of time researching your target market. Research, plan, discuss and research again. Develop personas for your target market so you know them like your best friend.

1. Commit to it and stick with it forever. Don't just test the waters by dipping a toe in to see if the water's warm. Step back, run and jump in head first. Inbound is not something you can do by just playing around every once in a while. Commit this is the new marketing you are going to be doing and do it often and never stop.

2. Write remarkable content regularly and become a thought leader. Publish a few articles a week. Share your ideas and be open. In the past so many companies hide their "trade secrets", including us, and this held us back. Inbound is all about giving away your knowledge. You would be amazed at how much will come back to you and how this set you up as a thought leader in your industry.

3. Engage & interact with your audience. Create a plan for how to engage with your followers and commenters. We try to connect with everyone who leaves a comment on our blog within a day, but really shoot for within a few hours. This is a powerful way to connect and build relationships with prospects and clients. Connect with your followers on Twitter, send them direct messages, retweet their info. It is more important to have a handful of solid relationships than thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers that are really unknown. Ask questions in Facebook in order to stir up conversations on industry topics.

Great answers here, but let me add my two cents:

1) Know your customers - what makes them tick. what they care about. what's important to them.
2) Think Different - create some really interesting and different content. Let your mind go. Give away some great knowledge and share it everywhere.
3) Be ultra responsive - be a great team player and respond right away when someone makes an inquiry. And actively engage people too. Case in point - someone downloaded our content and wrote "Don't call" on the form. We wrote back "We won't call. You asked us not to. But we hope you find great value." She wrote back "LOVED your response!"

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Find New Customers "Lead Generation Made Simple"
http://www.findnewcustomers.com
@fearlesscomp