Inbound Marketing is all about Strategy,

so start by looking at your overall marketing strategy: are you using advanced tools and software like marketing automation and data analytics? How closely aligned are your marketing and sales teams? Is your marketing multichannel? All of these things play a role in how well you can integrate an inbound marketing strategy into your overall marketing efforts.

Start with Sales

Inbound marketing is about building customer relationships, so talking to your sales team about what helps them connect with your buyers on an individual level will give you a good insight into what you can do at scale to build a strong relationship with your customers, and create a streamlined buying cycle with your sales team.

Get Tech-Savvy

If you're not on board with marketing automation and data analytics, you're not only missing out but implementing inbound marketing will be much more time to consume and much less easy to manage. Marketing automation takes a headache out of managing the more complex, multi-channel campaigns that inbound requires. Because it's so content-heavy, inbound marketing needs a robust marketing automation platform to help marketers keep up with the demands of content generation and campaign management. Once you're automated, data analytics becomes a must. Your inbound strategy will hinge on creating the types of content that best resonate with your target audience. Tracking engagement then becomes critical in order to gauge where prospects are in the buying cycle, what content to send next, and when to move them into your sales funnel.

Go Digital

While the idea behind inbound marketing is to draw prospects to you, you still need to be able to promote your content out in the first place. Strong web and social media presences become very important here. 66% of B2B marketers rank LinkedIn as the most effective social media platform for their business (co. You don't need a profile on every social media platform to be good at inbound - instead, focus on the platforms where your audience is most engaged with your content.

Your website is also an important asset to inbound marketing. It's the face of your brand - 94% of B2B Buyers research online before making a purchasing decision (Brafton), and more than likely, their first introduction to your brand will be your website. Test your CTAs, experiment with the placement of your content, and make use of interactive or visual media whenever possible.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
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