The Many Hats Worn By An Inbound Marketing Consultant
An inbound marketing consultant's job is to help you get your business found online more often, convert more of your website's visitors and sign up more new customers. That's just the high level part.
Getting Started With inbound
Now is an ideal time to ramp up your business's inbound marketing efforts. But what's the best approach?
The following inbound marketing tactics are pursued by many companies:
Hire an SEO specialist
Start blogging
Do more social media posting
Invest in a marketing automation system
However, none of these tactics on their own will help grow your business.
Below are the research, planning and execution steps recommended for a business that's looking to get real results from inbound.
An inbound marketing consultant acts as a facilitator, researcher and recommender throughout this process.
Some inbound marketing specialists work for a marketing agency. Others are solopreneurs.
An Inbound Consultant's Initial Work
First, we'll take a look at the up-front work that is normally performed and/or facilitated by a consultant. Then, we'll look at the consultant's many ongoing tasks.
As with most business initiatives, the strategy that's behind inbound marketing should drive the tactics.
Assess the Current State
Begin by interviewing stakeholders in order to get some key questions answered. Examples of questions are:
What problem does my company's products or services solve for my ideal clients?
What do my prospects not know about my product or service?
What have past customers learned about working with us that they didn't know before working with us?
Are the sales and marketing teams working in concert?
Is your important website content getting enough visibility in the search engine results?
Articulate Marketing Objectives
Based on the assessment, determine what your marketing objectives are and what the relative priority of each objective is. A list of objectives can include:
Brand building
Getting more business from our existing customers
Landing a greater number of net new customers each month
Acquiring more leads from our vendors
Identify Your Target Accounts
What is your area of geographic coverage? Do you sell locally, nationally, internationally?
What industries/verticals have you sold into in the past? What verticals do you want to sell into in the future?
Define Roles Within Target Accounts
Who are the buyers within your target accounts? If you're selling into small businesses, you may be selling to the owner or to a general manager. If you're selling into larger companies, you may be selling to an IT manager or to the vice president of sales.
Who are the influencers within your accounts? Your marketing may be more likely to get the attention of an influencer than a buyer.
Who are the practitioners? These are the people who will be using your product or service.
Analyze Competitor Websites
How are your competitors approaching their inbound marketing? What keywords are they ranking for—even unintentionally—that we should consider also trying to rank for?
If you have a regional business, what can be learned from similar businesses in other parts of the country?
Determine The Initial Traffic Sources
There are a variety of potential inbound traffic sources. It's important to initially focus on just one or two sources, such as organic search results and social.
Over time you can expand your sources to video, audio and to blog sites such as Medium and LinkedIn.
Define Traffic Destinations
Where do you want to drive traffic that comes from organic search results? Here are some of the options. These are not mutually exclusive:
Home Page
Blog Posts
Product pages
Service pages
Request a copy of our Inbound Marketing Checklist
Identify Desired Visitor Actions
Once visitors arrive at a destination, what calls to action do you want to present to them? Each traffic destination should have one primary call to action.
Call us now
Email us
Get a quote
Schedule an online meeting with a consultant
Download something of value (lead magnet) in exchange for your contact information
Download an un-gated digital asset like a solution brochure
Fill in a traditional "Contact Us" type form
Evaluate the Appropriate Technologies
There are a wide range of technology options for websites, web forms, landing pages and nurture email campaigns. Some are reasonably priced and do not represent a significant cost for most small and mid size businesses.
Depending on business requirements, an inbound marketing consultant will recommend the right blend of technologies.
Develop a Plan For Measuring Progress and Success
A combination of website analytics data, marketing automation system information and CRM data will indicate which efforts are working best.
Marketing revenue attribution can be tracked by creating technical connections along the Awareness to Order path. Proof of the value of marketing efforts can be reported to management.
The Awareness to Order Path
Inbound Marketing Playbook(s)
The results of the above analysis are distilled into one or more marketing automation playbooks. Each product or service line can have its own playbook. A playbook covers:
Goals
Messaging
Audience & community
Competitors
Keywords
Traffic sources
Campaigns
The campaign is a bundle of activities, which can include:
Blog posts
Images & graphics
Calls to action
Landing pages
Gated content (lead magnet)
Autoresponder emails and nurture email sequences
Social promotion
PR
Implement the Playbook Recommendations
Playbook recommendations are implemented over a multi-month period. Recommended actions can be implemented by:
An outside, inbound marketing consultant
A combination of your internal inbound marketer(s) and an inbound consultant
Your inbound marketers only
The Inbound Marketing Consultant's Ongoing responsibilities
The ongoing role of the inbound consultant is to ensure that the playbook recommendations are executed consistently.
The consultant should complement your internal team as an advisor and a contributor of content.
There should be an ongoing transfer of knowledge from the consultant to your team members.
A laundry list of inbound marketing tasks
An inbound consultant can get involved with a lot of details, all of which contribute to the success of your inbound marketing initiative. These may include:
Learning about your new product or service offerings
Performing keyword research
Developing new blog content
Editing new, internally generated content
Re-optimizing existing page & blog content
Suggesting lead magnets and calls to action (CTAs) and project managing the development of these
Making recommendations for acquisition of backlinks
Adding more value to your Google My Business profile(s)
Facilitating communication among salespeople and marketers
Helping to foster a culture of content
Recommending the testing of additional inbound content channels (Medium, LinkedIn, YouTube, Wistia)
Running technical audits on the company's website(s)
Identifying "low to no traffic" content that should be unpublished
Developing workflows/automations in your marketing automation system
Ensuring your marketing automation system and your CRM system are communicating properly
Frequently Asked Questions
What is inbound marketing?
The term "inbound marketing" was popularized by HubSpot. Inbound marketing is an approach to digital marketing that is designed to draw in visitors and potential prospects. The goal of inbound marketing is for people to find your brand, service or product when they are searching for a solutions, answers to questions or any other information that is of value to them.
What are some examples of inbound marketing?
Blogs posts
Podcasts
Social media campaigns (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
Downloadable PDFs (checklists, cheat sheets, ebooks)
Infographics
Search engine optimized website pages
Videos
Webinars
Is inbound marketing still effective?
Inbound marketing still works, but it takes more effort to get results than it used to. Why? A lot more businesses are creating content. Also, the organic search results for many terms appear "below the fold", as they are crowded out by ads, Local Packs and the People also ask section. This means that long tail keywords are more important than ever.
Is SEO (search engine optimization) the same as inbound marketing?
They're different, but they overlap. SEO is one of the most important tactics within an inbound marketing strategy. A study of over one billion pages by Ahrefs concluded that over 90% of web content gets no traffic from Google. Since "being found online" is central to inbound marketing, optimizing content for search must be top of mind whenever content is created or updated.
What is outbound marketing?
Outbound marketing is broadcasting your message to a large audience in the hopes that you will attract the attention of some of those who are interested in your product or service. Broadcast television advertising is a classic example of outbound marketing. Sending an email marketing blast to a large, purchased list is another example.
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