Are you a fan of puzzles?
I am, as is my 5-year-old daughter. We often spend a rainy Saturday afternoon putting one together. Not just an ordinary ‘child-sized’ puzzle, mind you. No, she insists on the 500-piece country garden cottage with a sprawling, colourful garden complete with creeping ivy. That’s a lot of pieces and a lot of colour!
After a particularly grueling session, carefully placing pieces, can you imagine my horror when I found a piece missing? 499! Really?! Chances are that the remaining piece landed up under the sofa only to be sucked up by Mr. Hoover or as my toddler son’s mid-afternoon snack. Whatever its fate, the ‘almost accomplished’ feeling after so much effort left me feeling rather deflated.
As I stared at my unfinished masterpiece, the comparison to an incomplete Inbound Marketing programme dawned on me. Without all the pieces in place, you are unlikely to achieve the full potential in terms of profitable ROI.
What Are The Pieces of the Inbound Marketing Puzzle?
The Marketing Platform
When I build a puzzle, my go-to strategy is to find the straight edged pieces and build out the outer frame before working on the inner area. This is much like bedding down your marketing framework. Without that solid foundation in place, there is very little chance you will be able to gain traction with any other tactics designed to roll out via the platform.
Here at Struto we call this is a ‘business-ready website’. It comprises 3 integrated components:
- Marketing-managed website (CMS)
- Customer relationship system (CRM)
- Marketing software
A website built in an easy-to-use, light-on-IT-reliance content management system (CMS) allows marketing to take ownership for the ongoing website maintenance. This is particularly valuable when it comes to marketing agility, be it loading blog posts or creating landing pages.
More recently, HubSpot introduced the CMS Hub which takes maintaining website content a step further, allowing for greater personalisation and thus optimisation has taken the place of the defunct management term.
A customer relationship system (CRM) is the link between marketing and sales in terms of lead handoff and client management.
With marketing software, such as HubSpot Marketing Hub, you are able to integrate these elements and create a powerful platform for marketing. It enables you to capture leads directly from your website, roll out lead nurturing campaigns and provide insights and intelligence around your contacts. The integration allows for a closed loop view and analysis of your marketing and sales efforts, ensuring these teams are working cohesively towards business objectives.
Content
Content is the lifeblood of any successful inbound marketing programme. Not just any old content though. Your content should be aligned to your buyer persona’s needs and interests, providing them with the information to help them make a buying decision about your products or services. High quality content serves to educate - not to overtly sell – and moves them through the buying cycle more effectively on their own terms.
Search Engine Optimisation
There are numerous reports that tell us the majority of people use search engines as the first port of call when looking for goods, services or products. In order to find favour in those search engine results, we need to properly optimise our content and website.
While there are many ranking factors that do fall outside of our control, making sure that you are ticking all the on-page SEO boxes will go a long way in giving your content a fighting chance of ranking well.
Social Media
Social media platforms continue to grow in both number and users and there is very little chance of that trend dwindling in the very near future. It has been said that people spend 4 times as much time on Facebook than what they do on Google.
By sharing out content on social media networks, you are able to attract prospects to your website and convert them to leads. Social media is equally important as a channel to deliver customer service by monitoring conversations and responding quickly to questions, suggestions, comments or complaints.
The Marketing Magic Happens When They Are Connected
I really battled to write this post. It took a load of mental energy to keep the elements separate as I was explaining each one. I suppose that just cements the entire puzzle analogy. Independently each is just a piece. It is only by putting each piece together that the full picture emerges.
Without social media and SEO, our content may very well never be found by our prospects. Without content we have nothing to optimise for search engines and nothing to share on social media. Without a COS website we aren’t able to create dedicated landing pages in order to capture leads via our content. Without marketing software we wouldn’t be able to track, nurture and analyse our leads. I think you get the picture?
