An inbound marketing assessment can help you identify what needs to be done for your business to achieve its sales goals.
The assessment should take into consideration your current sales strategies and evaluate how well they are working in generate traffic, qualified leads and sales.
At one time or the other, you will have to carry out an inbound marketing assessment. The assessment should define a clear roadmap to follow to realize both short- and long-term goals. The assessment should address the following:
- What specific goals do you intend to achieve with your marketing?
- Who are your buyer personas?
- How does your business stack against your top three competitors?
- What existing assets are you using in your online marketing?
- How can your business goals be achieved fast and in a cost-effective manner?
Answering the above questions will give you a base on which you can craft an inbound marketing strategy that will work for your business.
Assessing Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Your Business Goals
To come up with a strategy that will help you close more customers, you need to define your current and long-term business goals. For example, your goals may include:
- Generate targeted traffic to your website
- Generate qualified leads and close sales
- Improve brand awareness of your product or service
The goals should be clear and help you reach your revenue objectives. To set up goals, assess your website’s current ability to attract leads and determine what needs to be done to improve lead generation.
Follow the SMART formula when deciding your goals. That is, your goals should be Specific,Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Your Buyer Personas
The buyer persona refers to a hypothetical person that is likely to buy your product. This is the person whose needs you want to solve with your offering.
You should define your buyer personas before initiating any inbound marketing campaigns. Your ideal customers should help you determine what makes them tick, what they think about your brand and how you can move them closer to making a buying decision.
Your buyer personas have different needs, goals and priorities. Defining them will help you know the kind of content to offer and the avenues to use for content distribution to convert them to customers.
Your Business Vs. Your Competition
You want your business to be the No. 1 authority in your industry. Therefore, you need to know how it stacks against your competition. Keeping tabs of the competition can give help you track how well your campaigns are doing with regards to closing leads and making your business be an authority in your industry.
To build clout in your industry, you need to create high quality content that resonates well with your prospects. You should aim to make your website the go-to place for matters related to your industry. Your content should address prospects that are searching for a general solution to the problem you can solve, those looking for more information about your products and those that are ready to buy.
Investing in content creation and distribution is likely to take the most time in your inbound marketing activities. You can hire a professional agency to manage your content marketing efforts on your behalf.
Existing Online Marketing Assets
Your existing online assets refer to everything that you already have in place to help you to connect with prospects and convert them to buyers. Start by looking at your online presence and determine what you can do to close more sales.
Some of the activities you can do here include:
- Optimize your website content to make it rank well on search engines
- Create social media profiles and start connecting with prospects
- Carry out SEO on your website
- Create landing pages for your various offers
- Set up analytics to track different lead conversion metrics
You can refine your online marketing activities to achieve your sales goals faster and within your budget. Identify activities that are important in closing leads and refine them for better performance. At the same time, scale down on activities that are not producing results.
Online Strategy Implementation
The final step in your inbound marketing assessment is draw a plan of action on how the various strategies you have identified will be implemented. You need a plan on content creation, promotion, lead generation, analytics and follow ups.
Apart from content creation, promotion is the other tasking part of inbound marketing. Delegate roles to your team to make it easy to implement the online strategies you are pursuing. Every person charged with the responsibility of implementing a strategy should be skilled in that area and know how it fits in the overall inbound marketing strategy.
Carrying out an inbound marketing assessment will help you identify areas of your business that need to be tweaked to close more sales.
