San Antonio HubSpot User Group met for the first time April 1 at Geekdom Event Center in downtown San Antonio.
Stephanie Lussier, principal customer success manager at HubSpot, spoke to an audience of about 30 people about how to build an inbound marketing plan that will help them achieve their online marketing goals.
She covered:
- Understand the inbound marketing approach
- Set SMART business goals
- Create buyer personas
- Build an inbound marketing plan
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is founded on a methodology that helps organizations attract, convert, close and delight visitors, leads and customers through a variety of channels:
- social media
- blogging
- SEO
It's a proven methodology that turns visitors into customers and promoters of your business.
Learn more about inbound marketing
Smarketing: Aligning sales and marketing
In order to implement inbound marketing, your organization may decide to stop certain tactics that aren't working, start implementing tactics that could work better, and continue doing the things that work.
Stop. Start. Continue. assures your sales and marketing teams come together to achieve the end goal.
SMART goals also help unify your organization to ahieve SPECIFIC, MEASUREABLE, ATTAINABLE, RELEVANT, and TIMELY goals.
Lussier differentiatied general goals from SMART goals. For example, "more leads" could be the starting goal, but your organization needs to determine a more specific goal that can be measured and attained with inbound marketing.
"I want/need to generate 50 sales qualified leads — private business over $10M — in the second quarter."
This goal might help you close 1 customer a month that will in return help you achieve your revenue goals for the year.
Build an Inbound Marketing Plan
To reach your goals, build an inbound marketing plan that equips you to achieve those goals.
For example, in order to generate leads, your organization could blog more (at least 8/month) and promote educational offers where you give insight that addresses your buyer personas' pain points in return for valuable information using a form.
This conversion information will help your marketing team qualify leads by moving them down the marketing funnel. Then sales will get quality leads and have an easier time closing.
Building an inbound marketing plan includes:
- Overall inbound planning
- Individual campaign planning
Depending on your goals, you can plan as many individual campaigns and break them up quarterly, which is ideal.
Consider your buyer persona, your ideal customer, and their questions, pain points, and concerns. Create campaigns that address these things and speak the language of your buyer personas.
Support these campaigns with blogging, social media, social promotion, and email marketing.
