1. Work from a strategy

A clear strategy, consistency and patience are indispensable for the successful application of inbound marketing. Why? Because otherwise you’ll start haphazardly, posting blogs on your website. Without a strategy, weeks and months can pass by with only individual visitors looking at the website. With a strategy you lay the right foundation for a steady stream of relevant visitors.

Your strategy lives or dies based on the questions you ask at the very beginning. Are the blogs you publish both relevant and valuable to the target audience? And is blogging even the way to reach your target audience? In short, you should start by making sure that you define your strategic goals and define the buyer persona. Only then can you set up a good content calendar and achieve the desired results.

2. Bring your organisation together

It’s logical to place responsibility for the development of your marketing strategy with your marketing department. But if you really want to do it right, you have to involve the rest of the organisation. This doesn’t just ensure that your strategy is widely supported, you also benefit from the knowledge available in your organisation.

Digital transformation in complex organisations is not an easy feat. Our experts will gladly help you on your way.

Employees in your organisation who have direct contact with your customers often have a real understanding of what your target group’s questions, problems and challenges are. Involve sales, account managers and customer service when designing the buyer persona and the content calendar.

Final tip: involve the right professionals at every stage. Talk to your product developers, talk to the people that are producing the content. This is the best way to ensure the quality of the content in your strategy.

3. SEO optimisation for extra results

The essence of inbound marketing is that your target group already knows how to find you, usually via the well-known search engines. Make sure those machines guide your target audience to you.

So keep an eye on your website’s SEO. Focusing your web team on SEO, or the presence of an SEO specialist can make all the difference.

The inbound marketing funnel is an important foundation for your strategy and your content calendar. Our tip: use the funnel below and prioritise your different content ideas step by step.

By using the right technology, you can gain a lot of ground. Like HubSpot, for example. As a marketing and sales automation tool, HubSpot is well suited to any inbound marketing strategy. With HubSpot you can automate the generation, management and qualitative maintenance of your potential customers. You could consider HubSpot to be a good technological basis for your next steps.

Oh, and by the way — our HubSpot experts cannot wait to build the perfect advertising strategy for your brand.

1. Attract visitors: generate new visitors

In the first step you attract relevant visitors to your website. This can be through blogs, interesting social media posts, or other on-site SEO-optimised content. This builds your findability and brand awareness.

It never hurts to keep an eye on current events. Can you pick up on a recent event? Is it relevant? If you suddenly notice a lot of search volume on a certain topic and you have an article ready, you can immediately get to work on attracting your target group.

2. Convert leads: converting visitors into leads

When the right visitors find their way to your website, it's time to convert them into leads. The most common step is to collect their contact details, for example via a special offer, e-book, email course, demo or giveaway. In any case, always ask visitors to leave an email address.

3. Close customers: converting leads into customers

The third step is working on the relationship with your leads. You are preparing them for a purchase. This includes providing relevant information in the form of emails. You can convince potential customers quickly with personal offers and discount promotions.

4. Delight: recruiting and retaining customers

The last step in the funnel involves recruiting and retaining your customers. By focusing on high quality contact with your customers, you sell more and ensure that your customers recommend your products or service to others.

Examples? Think of good customer service, newsletters with blogs and tips, a loyalty system or loyalty promotions.

We have already proved the value of inbound marketing. What about outbound? Enter Account Based Marketing, a new hybrid form of marketing that combines the best elements of both. ABM is an approach to B2B marketing where you create specific content and set up campaigns aimed at certain types of companies and organisations. These are often organisations that perfectly match the customers you want to reach as an organisation in terms of activities, sector, company size or location.

You thus provide content that you can use for your inbound strategy, but which can also be perfectly combined with a classic outbound sales approach.

Are you thinking about getting started with inbound marketing?

Then make sure that you are properly prepared and that you are working from a solid strategy. Our experts would love to help you get started and - who knows - maybe even long after that?