Member Article

What makes a good Inbound Marketing Manager? PART 1

Go back ten years and you wouldn’t have heard the term. Today, however, Inbound Marketing is mainstream and growing in significance. More and more businesses are adopting the Inbound Marketing methodology and hiring ‘Inbound Marketing Managers’. But what are they – and what makes a good Inbound Marketing Manager?

In this two-part handbook, we’ll cover the top ten things Inbound Marketing Managers should be doing and thinking about on a day to day basis.

Create some buyer personas!

Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on market research and real data about your existing customers. They are essential to your Inbound Marketing success.

Make sure you build your buyer personas in granular detail, consider including customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, goals and pain points. The more detailed you are, the easier it will be to understand the issues and challenges that your customers are facing. You can then use that understanding of your customers to create tailored content for your website and your marketing that provide the solution(s) to their problems.

Lead generation, management and scoring

High-quality content will help to drive interested parties to your website, but if your website is not set-up to support the lead generation process then your content creation will go to waste.

In order to generate leads, you need to include a variety of calls-to-action (CTAs) on your site and in your blog content, encouraging visitors to “download” a piece of relevant information, perhaps an eBook, whitepaper, case study, article, video, guide, pricing documents, or research paper. These content assets then need to be “gated” behind a form, requiring the visitor to fill that form in before they can access the content.

After generating leads, you need to manage them properly. In order to do so, Sales and Marketing need to speaking the same language, so make sure you clearly define your lead lifecycle stages and identify when marketing should hand over leads to sales.

Lastly, lead scoring. Lead scoring helps you to identify the most qualified prospects, using a contact’s user behaviour and interaction with your business to determine how “ready” they are to talk with a salesperson. Lead scoring helps your sales team to prioritise leads and engage at the right time.

Marketing Automation

Modern marketers have a lot on their plate when it comes to managing Inbound Marketing campaigns; social media promotion, content creation, landing page creation, lead management, website analysis, building workflows, reporting, communication – and that’s not even the full list!

With Marketing Automation, however, the standard marketing process can be automated.

For example, a visitor lands on your website and downloads an eBook; that visitor (now a contact) is then put into an automated workflow, configured so that they receive a new piece of relevant content every X number of days. Their record in your CRM is automatically updated and the salesperson assigned to that contact can monitor their status, web visits (including pages viewed) and when the best time to engage with that contact, via the phone, would be.

Content Creation

Content is king. If marketing tools are your Ferrari, then content is your petrol. In order to push your marketing campaigns forward and start driving visitors to your website, you need content! But what content should you write and how do you decide?

This is where your buyer personas come in handy. Your buyer personas are a great starting point for any content ideas – and you need to ensure that your content addresses the main problems and pain points that your potential customers have, otherwise it won’t resonate. Be specific with the content you create, regardless of whether it’s a blog, eBook, whitepaper or infographic.

Also, make sure you use everyone in your business in the content creation process, everyone has different perspectives and expertise that can be woven into your content.

Social media promotion

In the modern era, social media is the way that people participate in the big conversation. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram – you name it – your potential customers are interacting on these channels, and if you want to generate leads you need to be there too. Your approach needs to be tailored for each individual channel; LinkedIn is more professionally orientated, so blog content and articles are likely to perform better than images. Whereas Instagram is all about images, so high-quality photos with short tag lines will perform better.

When it comes to promoting on social media channels, take the time to consider what will work best. Once you have an understanding of that, distribute your promotional material and make sure to monitor its performance. Knowing what works will help you to refine your activity and get better results.

That concludes the first half of our Inbound Marketing Manager handbook, in the second half we’ll cover paid social, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), reporting, tools and embracing Inbound Marketing. Stay tuned!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Bob Dearsley .