Starting a new startup is certainly a challenging task, and arguably the biggest challenge at the beginning is how you can get our name known by our target audience, building brand awareness. This is why implementing inbound marketing as early as possible is very important.

Instead of pushing our message to the customer like in traditional outbound marketing, inbound marketing focuses on attracting our target audience to come to us. The hope is, since your audience is already interested in your product or services offered the conversion rate is higher. You are engaging customers that are attracted to your brand instead of swaying customers that are interested in other products.

Sounds interesting?

In this guide, we will discuss how we can implement an inbound marketing strategy for your startup in 2020. To really understand how to successfully implement this, let’s get a firm concept of inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing, What is it?

Inbound marketing was a marketing term first made popular by HubSpot back in 2006. This term didn’t really resonate until 2012, but since then has become a staple in the digital marketing language.

We have briefly discussed that the main idea of inbound marketing is about attracting our target customers to us. So, what tools are we going to use to attract these customers? The answer to this million dollar question is content. Inbound marketing is about putting valuable, relevant content out there so it can be seen by our target audience.

The most common case in inbound marketing is when the target audience is looking for information or a solution to a problem on Google and then click on a search result to consume the content. Now, this particular audience is aware that a certain brand/blog has information they are currently seeking and at the same time might learn about the product it is selling, the brand, or services offered.

According to the inbound marketing experts at HubSpot inbound marketing can be loosely broken down into four stages:

• Attract: attracting newcomers to visit your website, blog, or social media platform. As discussed, this is mainly done through content marketing and SEO, but we can also use other channels like social media, press releases, video marketing etc.
• Convert: converting strangers into prospective leads by offering something in exchange for their contact information, this is usually a free downloadable pdf.
• Close: nurturing prospects/leads until they are ready to purchase your product or service. This is mainly done via email marketing/newsletter, keeping prospects engaged and close to you is key. This is also done through social media marketing and content marketing.
• Delight: Staying in your customers view when at all possible, reminding current customers about your business and maintaining positive relationships so they become repeat customers and champions for your business.

Is Inbound Marketing for Startups?

The short answer to this is yes, but there are some things to understand about the results of inbound marketing compared to outbound marketing. One of the things about inbound marketing is that the output might be less tangible compared to a traditional advertising campaign. Content marketing can take quite a while time before you can see significant results. That being said, some startups tend to want to see tangible, immediate results to grow the business quickly.

There are some key benefits of inbound marketing for startups, so it’s best for startups to start investing in their inbound marketing efforts as early as possible.

These benefits are:

• Cost-efficiency

One of the key challenges in any startups is limited capital, which often translates into a limited marketing budget. Adversely large outbound marketing campaigns are expensive and their effectiveness in today’s digital marketing age is questionable with respect to cost. .

This is how inbound marketing is usually a cost-effective solution. As discussed, the cores of inbound marketing are content marketing and SEO, and both of them can be free if done by yourself or very affordable if outsourced.

If you are a startup with limited capital, investing in inbound marketing can quickly achieve growth with a limited marketing budget.

• Inbound marketing helps build the credibility and trust in your brand

One of the biggest challenges of building a startup is that nobody knows who you are , consequently making it harder for startups to attract new prospects and customers.

This is why the foundation of inbound marketing is content, high quality, relevant content is the best way to establish credibility as an expert of the industry we are part of.

When done correctly, inbound marketing can be a great way for startups to leverage social proof, convincing customers to complete the buying cycle .

• Sustainable results

The objective of inbound marketing is to build sustainable relationships with your customers.

As an example once, a blog post is ranked on the first page of Google’s SERP, it can generate organic traffic for months or years after you’ve stopped spending on it. This compared to traditional advertising is much more effective in the long term, where as a traditional add stops being visible when you stop running it.

When you can provide relevant, high quality content to prospected customers the cost efficiency and ROI come with it.

While a key part of inbound marketing is about creating awareness, there is another important advantage of inbound marketing: it is designed to attract the right kind of traffic and clients that are the right fit for your business.

Targeting the precise customers is one of main benefits of inbound marketing versus traditional marketing channels. It ensures that your marketing is spent on qualified leads.

• Two-way communications

In today’s world of social media, inbound marketing is not only about getting our content found by our target audience. It is also about listening to our audience and their conversations via social media.

As a result of this, we can use inbound marketing to gather information about our target audience and improve our future marketing efforts using these insights. Inbound marketing can be a valuable source of data so we can improve the products and services we offer in the future.

Comprehensive Inbound Marketing Strategy for Startups: Step-By-Step

Now that we understand how inbound marketing works and how it can benefit startups, we can develop an inbound marketing strategy.

There are a lot of different ways to implement your inbound marketing, mapping out a clear plan will help you be more successful since inbound marketing is a long term strategy.

There are four different stages of the inbound marketing strategy:

1. Attracting visitors to visit your content
2. Converting strangers into leads/prospects
3. Closing leads into paying customers
4. Delighting existing customers into advocates

Our step-by-step inbound marketing strategy below would also be based on these four different stages. So, let us begin with the first one.

Step 1: Defining Your Inbound Marketing Objective

The most basic and arguably the most important step in creating an inbound marketing strategy is defining your goal(s).

The obvious objective of inbound marketing is to attract visitors to our website/platform, it’s ideal to think ahead and try to understand the final goal of your inbound marketing strategy.

In general, your inbound marketing objective should mirror your overall business’ objective. As an example, if your business goal is to grow your revenue by 30%, then this can translate to a 100% increase in lead generation from inbound marketing (with a rough estimation of a 30% conversion rate).

Your inbound marketing objectives should be SMART goals:

• Specific: it has to be clear and targeting only a specific area to improve
• Measurable:  we can assign KPIs (key performance indicators) and we should be able to measure the progress via metrics
• Assignable: we can specify who is responsible for achieving this goal
• Realistic: attainable. Having unrealistic goals is a sure fire way to set yourself and your team up for failure. If the goal(s) you have are too large, it is better to set more smaller goals than one large one.
• Time-related: you can set a deadline for each objective and measure the progress

You should be able to measure the progress of your inbound marketing campaign based on this objective, and it’s important to frequently analyze the results of your inbound efforts through these KPIs.

Here are some examples of clear and measurable inbound marketing objectives:

• Generating 1,000 new leads within 3 months
• Improving conversion rate by 40% within a year
• Reducing churn by 20% within a year

Define your lead generation objectives as clearly as possible, and we’ll use them as the foundation for the following steps.

Step 2: Defining Your Target Audience

A very important part of your inbound marketing strategy is to define your target audience. Understanding the wants and needs of your target audience is part of what makes inbound marketing successful.

Step 3: Plan How To Attract Your Audience

This step is related to the first stage of inbound marketing: attract. This is about how we are going to attract potential prospects to our platforms (mainly website and blog) and build awareness.

There are three core channels to focus on in this strategy: content marketing, SEO, and social media, but in this step, we will mainly focus on planning to attract visitors with these three channels.

Keyword Research

Since SEO is the main way people can find our content, then all of our content creation should begin with proper keyword research. It’s very important to find out how your target audience is searching for content so we can properly target the right opportunities.

There are three key principles in finding our target keywords:

1. The target keyword should be relevant to our target audience. This is mainly measured via monthly search volume.We should primarily target key words with a high search volume.
2. The target keywords should be relevant for your business. Not all keywords that are popular for your audience would be relevant for your business. If you are targeting people between the age of 18 to 25, then keywords related to ‘Tik Tok’ might be popular, but they might not be relevant for your business.
3. If a keyword is very popular, but the competition is to heavy for your budget and timeline don’t purse it, do what falls inline with your business.

Make a list of your target keywords, and set your priorities depending on these three factors above.

Editorial Calendar

Based on the keyword research we’ve performed above, we can design an editorial calendar as a foundation of our content marketing plan.

The editorial calendar should include:

• What the content is: target keyword, topic idea, rough draft, etc.
• Where the content will be published: which platforms you are going to publish the content and with which type
• When the content will be published: the timeline when you’re going to publish the content

Also, in developing your content calendar, here are the important factors to consider:

• How frequently are you going to publish your content? Decide on how often you are going to publish your content: daily, once a week, three times a week, etc. Deciding on this factor would help in how you will design your content calendar.
• How many people will use this calendar? If you have more than one team member working on your content, then you should use a platform that allows multiple people to collaborate and brainstorm on the platform google docs is great for multiple persons. This is especially important if some/all of your team members are working remotely.
• The types of content you are going to upload. Decide whether you are going to focus on only one type of content (i.e. a blog post) or on several different types of content (i.e. videos, podcasts, etc. )
• The process of content development.  Define the different stages your content goes through before it’s published, including required approval process within your startup. You should accommodate your calendar so it can differentiate between two similar projects that are in different process stages.

Last but not least, choose the right platform and/or format that you will use to create your calendar. You can use basic Excel (or Google Sheets) for this purpose, but you can also use platforms like Trello or CoSchedule if you want collaboration features.

Planning Your SEO Implementation

Implementing SEO for startups would cover two different aspects:

• On-site SEO: SEO optimizations performed on your site, which can be further divided into two:
• • Non-technical: keyword optimization and all other optimizations related to the content (layout, word count, etc.)
  • Technical: optimizing the technical factors of your site including but not limited to site speed, mobile responsiveness, META description, etc.

• Off-site SEO: especially about generating backlinks to the content but would also include maintaining social media posts, responding to reviews, etc.

SEO optimization can be a pretty deep subject and you can check with Robynn Paddock if you are looking for startup SEO services. Here are some important things to consider when implementing SEO for inbound marketing:

1. Content quality remains the most important factor of SEO success. If your content is high-quality and relevant, at some point you are going to get those valuable backlinks, and as a result, it will boost your SERP ranking. Consequently no amount of strategies can help low-quality content to rank higher.
2. Backlinks remain the most important ranking factor in SEO. However, it’s important to note that the quality of the backlinks is now more important than quantity. Obviously, however, getting high-quality backlinks from famous, authoritative sites is easier said than done. However, while there can be countless link-building tactics we can use, in the end, they will boil down to just two:

• Link hook: essentially, giving them a reason to link your content. Include things like
• Unique data or information, for example, research report, user testimonials, etc. Information that only you possess.
  • Aesthetically pleasing content like photos or infographics
  • Interesting story
  • A collection of information (i.e. data roundup, reviews of various products, etc.)

• Relationship: obviously we are more likely to provide links to websites we know. Since we are a fairly new startup, building relationships is very important, since it’s unlikely that others will know us by reputation. Here is what you should do:
• Reach out to them. It can be as simple as sending them an email to introduce yourself
  • Join their social media conversations, ask relevant questions, provide valuable answers, etc.
  • Again, the best way to get yourself known is to consistently publish high-quality content

3. Optimize the technical SEO factors of your site, as discussed above. Especially focus on three things:

Site speed: New research by Google has found that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage loads in more than 3 seconds.

• Mobile responsiveness: It’s no secret that Google now prioritizes mobile-friendly sites to rank on its SERP. So, making sure that your website is mobile-responsive or mobile-friendly is very important.
• Indexable: Make sure your website can be properly indexed by Google (and the other search engines), and all the elements on your website are properly recognizable.

4. Keep your content fresh and up-to-date. Google’s algorithm now prefers newer or at least updated content. So, make sure to set a schedule in your editorial content to update your older content once every year (or if possible, every 6 months). Update older content with newer information, fresh images/infographics, and additional content if needed.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is everywhere in today’s market and everybody use it. It makes the most sense to connect with our target audience using this platform as a tool in our inbound marketing strategy.

We can generally divide social media marketing into three different types:

• Organic: that is, growing your own following and share your message
• Paid: using various paid options offered by the social media platform, like Facebook ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Ad, etc.
• Influencer: although influencer marketing can be considered as a marketing channel on its own, it is actually a part of social media marketing.

Organic social media efforts are the most cost effective and afre mostly free but they take time to attract followers and have a significant organic reach. Paid options are great in the short term but can be very expensive. Influencer marketing can be a great medium although if you work with famous influencers or celebrities it can be expensive as well.

Use social media effectively to promote your content and also to engage your audience.

Step 4: Convert Visitors Into Leads

Now that you’ve successfully attracted the target audience to our platform, the next step is to convert these strangers into prospects/leads.

First lets define: we can say that a stranger has successfully been converted into a prospect when they’ve provided their contact information (mainly their email address), confirming their interest in our brand or what we are offering.

In encouraging conversions via inbound marketing, there are three key aspects to focus on:

• Lead magnet: something valuable (perceived as valuable by the user) that we offer for free in exchange for the audience’s contact information. A classic approach is to offer downloadable content (an ebook, white paper, etc.) that is related to your initial content.
• CTA: Call-to-Action, a link or button provided in your content offering the lead magnet. When a user clicks on this CTA, we can show an opt-in form or drive them to a landing page.
• Landing page: a specific page designed to convert users. The page will mainly include the description of your offer (the lead magnet), as attractive as possible, and a form where your potential prospect can submit their contact information.

Attractive Lead Magnet

The key to a successful lead magnet is the offer or the value of your offer. Your audience must perceive that your offer is valuable so they are willing to submit their contact information, this is how to successfully implement a lead magnet.

It is important to make sure the off is a good fit for your business model. If the offer is 4100 for anyone to submit their information, you are going to get a bunch of email addresses that are not viable leads. This will not result in high conversion rates

So, finding the right balance between the value of your offer, the cost (if any), and the relevance to your business is very important. If what you offer isn’t very valuable in the eyes of your audience, then you won’t get too many leads. Adversely, if what you offer is too valuable, you might attract people that are only interested to the offer itself and not your actual product/service.

You can be as creative as possible with your lead magnet offers, and this list can be a good source for inspiration.

CTA Design and Placement

What and where your CTA is can make or break the lead conversion rate.

The purpose of your CTA is very simple: tell your audience about your lead magnet or to direct them somewhere else (your landing page). It can be a hyperlink with an engaging copy or a designed button, but the purpose remains the same.

Here are some tips in creating a high-converting CTA:

• Make them as obvious as possible

You want your audience to notice your CTA, so make them as visible as possible without disrupting the user experience. Yes, everybody hates those pop-up, screen-blocking CTAs, but hiding your CTAs below the fold won’t help your conversion rate either you could lose out on clients that are interested but lost on your website.

Again, finding the right balance is very important: it should be higher on the page but not too high, and it should be stand out enough.

Also, make sure that the message of the CTA is clear. Be straight and to the point with an attractive message. If you are going to use a button, make sure it’s also well-placed and eye-catching.

• Easy to understand

Don’t use confusing or too technical jargon, and use languages that they can easily understand. A good approach is to target the problem your audience is trying to solve and communicate that you can provide a solution. For example, “are you ready to start making a thousand dollars a day? Click here”. Don’t forget that it should be as attractive as possible.

• Command the action

Remember that the CTAs are designed to gently push visitors towards the next action. So, gently command them to take this action whether it’s “click”, “buy”, “subscribe”, ”download”, and others. Use active verbs and an exclamation mark if you can.

• Be consistent

You should repeat CTAs as much is appropriate for your website, they should also all be consistent in message and in design. Consistency builds trust and reassurance with the user.

• Create a sense of urgency

An Experian report found that promotional or emails conveying a sense of urgency had at least 14% higher click-to-open rates, 59% higher transaction-to-click rates, and twice as high transaction rates compared to their average marketing emails. Use words like “for a limited time only” or use a counter showing that only a limited number of offers is left.

• Keep it short

Your CTA should be short, sweet, easy to understand, and as attractive as possible. That being said it shouldn’t be more than 120 characters in length, keeping it at 90 characters is the optimal amount.

Conversion-optimized Landing Page

Landing page optimization can be a very complex subject on its own, and the goal is to optimize every element on the landing page to improve conversion rate using data and evidence.

However, here are some best practices to follow:

• Make your offer clear

Use all the principles of optimizing a CTA above on your landing page. The goal is to communicate your offer as clear as possible and focus on how the customer can understand its benefits and experience positive emotions.

• Less is more

A landinng page should be as simple as possible, and getting rid of as many visual clutters as possible is very important. Your audience should focus on your offer (the CTA), and the benefits they will get.

• Contrast

Use contrast effectively to emphasize your message. A common practice is to use a contrasting, attractive color for your CTA button so it stands out and gets people’s attention. Also, use negative space effectively between your elements and emphasize your logo and CTA.

• Make it as easy as possible

It’s already hardb enough to convince clients to convert, so don’t add to the difficulty. Make the conversion process as easy as possible. If you use an opt-in form, include as few fields as possible. Also, make sure your landing page is mobile-responsive and loads quickly.

• Make it easy to find you

Without adding to the clutter Provide contact information in various different ways. You can build trust and help with conversion rate by including a link to the help center or put your email address on the landing page so they’ll know where to find you.

Step 5: Closing Leads Into Customers

This step is about how you can nurture qualified leads until they are ready to purchase, and finally give them that little push so they convert into paying clients.

The most common (and effective approach) to launch a lead nurturing campaign via automated email marketing. We’ve successfully captured the audience’s contact information, and in this step, we are going to leverage it via a process we call drip marketing.

Identifying lead lifecycle stages

Creating lead lifecycle stages according to the prospect’s position in the funnel/buyer’s journey can significantly help us in preparing a lead nurturing campaign. While the stages might vary depending on your product’s sales cycle, here are the common lifecycle stages you can use as a template:

• Unknown lead: a website visitor that has visited your site more than once and has been tracked by your solution (i.e. cookies) but they haven’t provided their contact information
• Known lead: someone who has given their email address but has engaged very little with your brand
• Marketing-qualified lead (MQL): a prospect who has engaged enough (i.e. consumed several pieces of content, browsed the product pages several times, accepted your free content offer, etc. )
• Sales-qualified lead (SQL): a prospect who has been validated by your sales time and is determined as very likely to buy the prospect. Ready to be approached by your salesperson and discuss their options.
• Customer: a prospect who has been converted into a new customer

Drip Marketing

The idea of using drip marketing/automated email marketing to nurture leads is to send a continuous stream of email messages to the prospect based on their actions and/or their position in the buyer’s journey. Drip marketing keeps the client engaged and creates a sense of importance.

As an example, when they just abandoned an item in their cart or saved it for later , we can send an email about the product they’ve just abandoned to remind them and convince them to purchase.

The idea is, if we can send the right message, to the right people, at the right time, it can slowly but surely improve the chance of conversions.

So, there are two key aspects of an effective drip marketing in lead nurturing: personalization and automation.

• Personalization: not only about using the recipient’s first name in the subject line, but to actually send the right email content based on the actions they are doing
• Automation: using a marketing automation solution to schedule your emails automatically and/or to automatically send an email based on the action taken

Sales-Marketing Alignment

A major in the lead nurturing stage is to make sure your sales and marketing teams are working towards the same objective: converting sales-qualified leads into actual customers.

The main principle is information sharing both teams should be sharing information about the prospective client with attention to time sensitivity.

CRM software can significantly help in this aspect, so both marketing and sales can easily input and share data of different prospects/leads.

Step 6: Delighting and Retaining Customers

The last stage of the inbound marketing campaign is where we delight existing customers, turning them into advocates.

The ultimate goal of inbound marketing is converting customers into advocates that essentially promote your brand/product/service for free and the key here is relationships.

Advocates of your product/service that will potentially generate a lot of referrals are those with actual experience and are happy with what you offer. In this stage, inbound marketing should focus on campaigns like implementing loyalty/referral programs, post-purchase support, further product education, and drip/email marketing that is focused on maximizing retention.

Content Marketing

Although we are already in the last stage of the inbound marketing process, content marketing is still the key strategy.

The idea here is to segment existing customers into their own list and then you can implement drip marketing to push content pieces that are focused on continued education. We can also pursue cross-sell and upsell opportunities, for example by offering additional products that might cover the needs they may have or have in the furture.

However, focus on education/information in how they should maximize the benefit of the purchased product/service. Treat this as an ongoing post-purchase customer service to delight this customer. Remember that you have two main things to focus on in this stage: maximizing retention and converting them into advocates.

Drip Marketing

Loyalty Programs

You should still send a segmented email newsletter to encourage repeat purchase, push upsell/cross-sell opportunities, or simply to provide information related to the product/service or your niche in general.

Remain their first option if they need to make another purchase by maintaining your position as the thought-leader of your niche. Doing this effectively can also remind them to recommend your product/service to their peers, simply because they are happy with your content.

Loyalty Programs

A loyalty program can be a cost-effective campaign to minimize churn. Depending on your product or service, you can implement a referral program that rewards customers that refer your product to others.

The secret to a successful referral marketing is your incentive: offering something too valuable, and you might generate low-quality referrals that are not a good fit for your business. Offering too little of value, and you might not generate any interest. Finding the right balance is very important.

End Words:  Evaluation and Re-Optimization

You should especially focus on lowering lead acquisition and customer acquisition costs. Consistently monitoring your progress based on inbound marketing objectives and KPIs is very important in the long term.

This can be done by monitoring the whole aspects of your website traffic thoroughly: keyword ranking, click-through rate, organic traffic, conversion rate, and other metrics while also considering your overall online activity (social media engagements, etc.)

Keep track of all of your inbound marketing objectives, and your startup business goals in general and stay organized . While implementing an inbound marketing strategy may take a significant amount of time at first, even if your work with a startup marketing consultant, it will also provide sustainable long term results.

Source: https://mikekhorev.com/inbound-marketing-strategy-startups