I wanted to share this fantastic and easy to understand infographic I came across outlining the Inbound Marketing Process. It was created by an agency in Wallingford, CT called Impact Branding & Design. According to their website, Impact Branding & Design is a “Creative team of inbound marketing professionals which develops and executes highly effective online marketing campaigns.”
Step 1: Develop a successful marketing strategy
Determine the purpose of your marketing by establishing clear goals, objectives, and challenges. Without a marketing strategy you won’t be able to optimize and measure your inbound marketing efforts.
Marketing is an investment in the growth of your business, not an expense - Impact Branding & Design
Step 2: Create & maintain a powerful website
A website is a tool for your customers and prospects to interact with your brand and content. This tool should add value to the experience of doing business with you. Basic website principles go a long way: Easy to navigate, professional appearance, search engine friendly, mobile ready, easy to update.
An effective website is the hub of all your online marketing and lead generation - Impact Branding & Design
Step 3: Generate more traffic
Promote your thought leadership through a blog, social media, SEO, and PPC.
- “A blog gets you 55% more traffic!”
- “400% more indexed pages are produced by blogging”
- “Nearly 2/3 of U.S. internet users regularly use a social network”
- “20% of monthly Google searches are for local businesses”
Step 4: Convert traffic to leads
Leverage your website in order to get the visitor’s information and start your sales process. You can’t do business with an anonymous web browser. Also, visitors providing their information should get a fair exchange. Give them something of value in order to collect their email and information. Solve a problem for them and start the relationship right off.
Step 5: Convert leads to sales
Leverage marketing automation tools to identify your high value leads and route them to your sales force. If your budget can support it, set up a system such as Eloqua.com, Hubspot, or Marketo (to name only a few) and connect to your customer relationship database (CRM). Score them, segment them, and send targeted and thoughtful communications.
Step 6: Measure everything
You can’t optimize if you don’t track the right numbers. Figure out how well you’re doing by measuring every step of the process. Utilize your website analytics, your media purchasing data, your social media metrics, and your sales conversion rates. Close the loop by determining your return on investment (ROI) and focus on spending your dollars in the right places.
Now, below is the infographic:
