Inbound marketing for beginners

For Beginners
Everything you need to know to get started.
INBOUNDMARKETING
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Bill is a Certied Inbound Marketing Specialist with Honors with 18 years of
marketing experience. Not only is Bill an Inbound Marketing Specialist, but
also has been a successful small and medium sized business owner in multiple
industries since 1994.
With a marketing degree from UCLA and a team of
inbound marketing agents behind him, Bill founded
Inbound Marketing Agents to help small and medium
sized businesses close the marketing gap on larger
companies at a fraction of the budget.
In this eBook, Bill will share with you everything you
need to know to start inbound marketing for your
business.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. What is Inbound Marketing? 6
2. Why Inbound Marketing? 9
3. Required Resources 14
4. Software Requirements 20
5. Getting Found 26
6. Lead Generation 31
7. Converting Leads to Customers 34
8. Measuring Results 38
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What is Inbound
Marketing?
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing primarily uses the Internet to distribute compelling content
that attracts prospects and builds trust with clients within your sales funnel.
Outbound marketing pushes marketing messages to prospects via billboards,
television, direct mail, telemarketing, and tradeshows, which disrupt your
prospects daily schedule.
Inbound Marketing consists of:
Blogging Email Marketing
Premium Content (eBooks, Whitepapers) Social Media Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Webinars
Closed Loop Marketing Content Distribution
Analytics Measureable ROI
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Outbound Marketing consists of:
TV Commercials Direct Mail
Billboard Advertising Trade Shows
Direct Mail Banner Advertising
Print Media Non-measureable ROI
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Rather than doing outbound marketing to the
masses of people who are trying to block you
out, I advocate doing “inbound marketing” where
you help yourself “get found” by people already
learning about and shopping in your industry. In
order to do this, you need to set your website up
like a “hub” for your industry that attracts visitors
naturally through search engines, the blogosphere,

and social media.
I believe most marketers today spend 90% of
their eorts on outbound marketing and 10% on
inbound marketing, and I advocate that those
ratios ip.
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The best analogy I can come up with is that
traditional marketers looking to garner interest
from new potential customers are like lions hunting
in the jungle for elephants. The elephants used
to be in the jungle in the ‘80s and ‘90s when they
learned their trade, but they don’t seem to be there
anymore. They have all migrated to the watering
holes on the savannah (the internet).
So, rather than continuing to hunt in the jungle, I
recommend setting up shop at the watering hole or
turning your website into its own watering hole.”
–Brian Halligan, CEO, HubSpot
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Why Inbound
Marketing?
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Leads generated by inbound marketing cost
61% less than outbound marketing leads.
% OF PEOPLE

WHO SKIP TV ADS
% DECLINE IN TRADE
SHOW SPENDING
% OF DIRECT MAIL
NEVER OPENED
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86% 46% 44%

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN, AUGUST 2011, TSEA.ORG, MARCH 2009, & EPA.GOV, NOV 2010
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82% of consumers search the Internet prior
to purchasing a product or service
COST: Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
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Inbound marketing costs 61% Less per lead
than traditional, outbound marketing
The average company marketing budget
spend on social media & blogs has increased
by 3X in three years
Small businesses are allocating 14% of their
marketing budget to outbound, while large
companies are allocating 33% in 2012
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Inbound marketing channels cost
less than any outbound channel.
State of Inbound Marketing, Hubspot, March 2012
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Inbound marketing tactics don’t just
generate leads. They generate revenue.
State of Inbound Marketing, Hubspot, March 2012

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Required
Resources
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1. ANALYZE YOUR CURRENT MARKETING

Before you decide to jump into inbound marketing, you need to know where
your current marketing plan stands. Do you have a website and can
your team work with it? How many visitors do you generate each month?
How many leads do your currently generate per month and how many
convert to customers? You must understand this so you can understand
what needs to be implemented with your new inbound marketing plan.
Inbound marketing is changing the way traditional
marketing departments operate and consists of
numerous components to be successful.
You need to identify a few key resources to be sure inbound marketing will
be a good t your company and your brand.
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2. DEDICATED PERSON TO HANDLE INBOUND MARKETING

Inbound marketing consists of multiple marketing channels all being utilized at
the same time to increase website trac, generating leads, creating compelling
content, building buyer personas, managing your SEO, measuring success and
failures via analytics, and optimizing landing pages.

The components above do not include social media, email marketing, lead
scoring, press releases, creating video content, and building new web pages.
You don’t have to start with all of these components, but it is important to
understand that you need a person or a team that can perform all of these tasks
on a regular basis.
Most small businesses can’t aord a full edge marketing department, but it is
still critical that you have at least one member of your team that is dedicated to
your inbound marketing strategy.
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This individual can work with an inbound marketing agency,
like INBOUND MARKETING AGENTS, to support, educate,
and teach this person the process and supplement
services that your company can not complete in-house.
3. GOALS

You now know what your business will need and where you currently stand
with your current marketing plan. Now you need to identify what your goals and
benchmarks will be for your new inbound marketing plan.
How many new leads or customers do you need each month? What
verticals within your current client base do you want to grow? What
decisions need to be made to achieve these goals?
Once you have this information in place you can accurately plan your inbound
marketing strategy to specically target your goals.
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4. BUILDING YOUR CUSTOMER PERSONAS

Many small businesses don’t know exactly whom they are selling too. You will
want to know exactly whom you’re trying to sell to based on demographic
information. By dening these personas, you identify potential markets and will
know exactly what you need to do to sell to them.
You will market dierently to a 50-year-old male executive than you will to a
25-year-old female just out of college. By having developed your personas you
won’t waste valuable time and money sending the same marketing messages to
each persona unsuccessfully.
5. BRAND

What is your company all about? What are your
goals? What is the company culture?
Your company brand is much bigger than your logo and your color scheme.
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Everyone within your company to be able to implement an eective inbound
marketing strategy, as you will be communicating your culture, tone, and
commitment via your content, must share your company goals and identity.
Identifying your company brand is one of the rst steps that should be
taken before implementing your new inbound strategy.
Everyone within your company to be able to implement
an eective inbound marketing strategy, as you will be
communicating your culture, tone, and commitment
via your content, must share your company goals and
identity.
Identifying your company brand is one of the rst steps
that should be taken before implementing your new
inbound strategy.
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Software
Requirements
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Your software needs will be determined by your
budget and the goals you have set forth previously.
Keep in mind that your budget needs to be inline with the
goals that you have set and the software your choose will
play a big role in the eciency of your inbound marketing
campaigns.
Below are our recommendations for software to execute
inbound marketing, but if you have little or no budget
there are also solutions you can implement to get started
and then work your way to these platforms. We will note
these options at the end of this chapter.
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1. INBOUND MARKETING SOFTWARE
There is a big dierence between inbound marketing software and Google Analytics or
social media software or apps. Inbound marketing software gives you all of the tools to
track the success of your marketing like analytics for trac, leads, lead conversions, click
through rates, social media, email marketing, and more.
HubSpot brings your entire marketing world together in one powerful, integrated system.
Integrating HubSpot into your marketing allows you to reap the benets that this
software has to oer as the best in the industry.
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2. TASK MANAGEMENT/TIME TRACKING SOFTWARE
Time tracking and task management software is a component
that most beginners neglect to implement, yet it is crucial to
eectively manage your time and projects.
Blogging is a prime example that requires time tracking. A 400-600 word blog article
should be written in one hour or less, but it will take a beginner much longer in the early
stages. You need to track your time so you can become more ecient and identify the
components that slow you down.
Inbound Marketing Agents uses TeamworkPM to manage all
of our internal projects and time tracking for each project.
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3. CLIENT RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
Small companies with smaller budgets won’t need CRM in the early stages, but
for medium to large companies this is an essential investment to close the
marketing and sale loop to track your ROI.
We use Salesforce.com to manage our sales funnel
and customer lifecycle, which enables us to further
customize our marketing and track our ROI.
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