An inbound marketing campaign can help your company grow by using digital channels in an organized and measurable way. Usually, the goals for inbound campaigns involve certain marketing goals, like increased visits, improved conversion rates, defined marketing qualified leads, and (of course) increased total customers.

Your website serves as the foundation for all inbound marketing activities. Inbound marketing not only produces a steady stream of business through your website but does so at a much cheaper cost than outbound marketing.

To build this kind of plan, you need to know how each piece of the puzzle works together to attract potential clients to your business and ultimately convert their attention into sales.

This little Blackbook will help you to break down the key steps that will effectively work together to build one consistent online strategy.

Step 1: Target a Specific Persona

 The first step is to clearly define your buyer personas. Your first inbound campaign should target your primary persona —the person who will most likely become a future customer. This will help you tailor your messaging and create a focused campaign across all channels.

Let’s say you are a shoe manufacturer, making both running shoes and high heels, but you want to increase the number of leads wanting heels. This has a huge impact on the kind of website you will create because its content will be aimed at women who want shoes for work or events, not for running at the track. This messaging should stay consistent in your emails, PPC ads, social media posts, and other inbound campaign tactics.

Step 2: Pick intent-driven keywords

 Not all keywords are created the same. The right keywords can create a difference between 100 vs 1,000+ organic visitors per month.

Therefore, before building your first campaign through various channels, you need to find strong keywords. You need keywords that concur with the search intent (purpose or objective) at every stage in your campaign.

Now that you have targeted your personas, ask yourself these questions:

• What keywords are my personas typing into search engines?
• Are these keywords achievable on my website?
• How can I use these keywords in my inbound marketing efforts?”

If your keywords are intent-driven, targets the right persona, has an appropriate search volume (e.g., 250) per month, and have a difficulty of 30 or less then you are definitely on the right track..

Step 3: Create Shareable Blog Posts

 Use your new long-tail keywords to create enticing blog posts that educate your persona on topics related to your offer.

The purpose of content marketing is to provide worth or value. These may come in the form of guides, whitepapers, video, blog post, case study, podcast, webinar, and more. Stay away from posts that sell the reader and focus more on educating and providing real value. Make sure the bottom of the blog post includes a clear CTA to engage your visitor and hopefully, converts them into a lead.

But if you have a video that you are promoting, you can actually cross-promote this on your blog.  For your blog article, you could write a concise preface to the video, and give some teasers to your audience about it.  This helps to get the search engine optimization component behind your video while directing people to the landing page to watch it. No matter what industry your business operates in, you can create amazing blog posts with some creativity and scheduling.

Step 4: Create an Effective Conversion Path

A conversion path consists of a call-to-action (CTA), a landing page with a form, a thank-you page, and corresponding thank-you email. This pathway lets people interact with your content while also giving you information about themselves and their interests or goals.

Once someone enters your conversion path to access a piece of content, that person generally becomes a lead. This is mandatory to the success of inbound campaigns; you can’t give content away without knowing where it will land because then you can’t capture leads, nurture people, or understand the impact and success of each campaign.

PRO TIP: Follow the three B’s when building landing pages:

• Brief—stick to the point!
• Bullet Point Benefits—tell them why it is valuable?
• Blink Test—check if you can find the value of this page within 7 seconds?

Step 5: Promote Content on Social Media Channels

 As mentioned previously, sharing your content on social media is very influential. It can be used to connect with your customers, provide information to leads, and of course, promote new inbound marketing campaigns. When promoting your offer, choose the social media channels where your personas get the most engaged. You can promote the landing page of the offer, blog posts, and other campaign assets.

PRO TIP: Use Twitter to post the same content more than once. By varying messages and trying different times of the day, you can reach more customers. Twitter feeds move so quickly that it is safe to do this without being spammy, unlike with LinkedIn and Facebook.

Step 6: Segment Leads & Build Email Workflows

Now that you have leads, it’s time to follow up in a valuable way. This nurturing process is typically done through email, so people still have control

over their time but can easily find your content when they are ready. By creating the right lists, you can target the right people at the right time in their individual buyer’s journey.

Lists are typically broken down to align with both personas and the different stages of your buyer’s journey and can be easily created and managed in HubSpot. Inbound campaigns are also fascinating because you can track how a customer-first came to your website and understand the steps they took—which is a huge boost to ROI.

PRO TIP: Suppose a lead downloads your e-book on the best high-heeled shoes for prom. Next, you can send them an email that follows up with some tips on how to dance in heels. Next, you might send an email that pairs heels with different prom dresses, showing your product and including an offer to save 15%.