WHY YOUR NEXT WEBSITE SHOULD BE AN INBOUND WEBSITE

G PAROLD TNE R

WHY YOUR NEXT WEBSITE SHOULD BE AN INBOUND WEBSITE

Introduction
A great way to get started on the road to creating an inbound website is to understand the issues and challenges your target audience face, and the sort of information they will be seeking online to help inform them about the subject. The online customer journey increasingly starts in search engines and social media where users seek to educate themselves about their issues and problems and how they can solve them. Most users are not ready to read about detailed service offerings or functional product specifications at this stage of the user journey. So if your website is organizational centric and describes the company and its products and services you offer in some detail, then it is highly likely that your website is NOT an inbound website attracting users based on how they search on google or other search engines around issues and questions they are seeking to answer. As more than 80% of users start their search for products and services online in this way, searching for valuable content, then your web site is likely to become increasingly less relevant to many users. The biggest challenge ahead for many businesses is to create great content on a regular basis that address the needs of your audience and drives deeper user engagement over time. To do this an inbound website is critical to both enaging and capturing user interest.

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WHY YOUR NEXT WEBSITE SHOULD BE AN INBOUND WEBSITE

Key benefits of Inbound Marketing

As a reminder, inbound marketing is the use of insightful content, search and social media to pull qualified opportunity towards your company. The key benefits to adopting inbound marketing include: Gaining a measureable commercial return from your marketing activity Responding to changing consumer buying behaviour Addressing customer issues, rather than self-promotion Building online reach and competing against your rivals Positioning your business as a thought leader through remarkable content More closely integrating Marketing and Business Development functions Generating more qualified business leads at a lower cost per lead

OK, so youre convinced - inbound marketing is worth considering and it appears to offer clear benefits over traditional outbound promotional marketing. So how easy is it to adopt inbound marketing in your company? The good news is you dont have to start by completely rebuilding your website right away. Inbound marketing goes far beyond simply thinking about a website. Its attraction is that you can start small, test, adapt and grow your inbound marketing activities over time. So you can start with just one simple campaign or undertake, as some companies are doing, a more fundamental review of their marketing activities and website as a platform for adopting inbound marketing companywide. If you start small, you will need to make some changes to start to adapt your existing website to attract and capture user interest.

FIVE STEPS TO ADOPTING INBOUND MARKETING IN A SOFTWARE COMPANY

The Journey to an Inbound Website

PERSONAS USER JOURNEY CONTENT CAMPAIGN ANALYTICS

The creation of an inbound marketing website is not a singular once and done endeavour but involves the creation of a scalable marketing framework that will allow for the delivery of personalized content and campaigns over time that will drive deeper engagement with users and provide a mechanism for conversion and lead generation.

The Funnel

Key Steps in the Journey to developing an Inbound Website

WHY YOUR NEXT WEBSITE SHOULD BE AN INBOUND WEBSITE

Personas
Personas are descriptions of archetypal clients across your marketplace. By understanding the issues, needs and challenges of your audience you are able to define key user journeys, information needs, content and functional elements that will drive engagement and conversion. These sample questions will help you get started on creating your key personas.

ROLE
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What is your job role? Your title? How is your job measured? What is a typical day? What skills are required? What knowledge and tools do you use? 6. Who do you report to? Who reports to you?

PERSONAL BACKGROUND
1. Age 2. Family (married, children) 3. Education

LEARNING
1. How do you learn about new information for your job? 2. What publications or blogs do you read? 3. What associations and social networks do you belong?

GOALS
1. What are you responsible for? 2. What does it mean to be successful in your role?

PREFERENCES
1. How do you prefer to interact with vendors? (email, phone, in person) 2. Do you use the internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how do you search for information?

CHALLENGES & FRUSTRATIONS

What are your biggest challenges?

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WHY YOUR NEXT WEBSITE SHOULD BE AN INBOUND WEBSITE

With the answers to these questions youll be able to develop individual persona sketches for your target market. Once you have your persona sketches youll be in a much more powerful position to develop marketing communications that speak directly and emotionally to that personas goals, aspirations and pain points, and help you build great content and effective user journeys.

User journeys
With a deep understanding of the issues, needs, challenges your audience faces through persona development you can start to define key user journeys, information needs, content and functional elements that will drive engagement and conversion. Some user journeys will be uncomplicated and short while others may be longer and more complicated. This will depend on your product or service and the questions, concerns or prior knowledge that the audience may already have. Bear in mind, too, that different methods of content delivery will be more appropriate than others at different stages of your audiences journey. The infographic on the opposite page will help you consider content for different stages in the buying process. What content do you need to expose your audience to? What content will answer the questions and address the concerns that your audience may have around whether to buy your product or service? And most importantly, what content do you need that will lead to your audience giving you and your Business Development team permission to speak to them directly by whichever channel they prefer? The content should be mapped back to the goals, aspirations and pain points that you identified in the persona sketches. The audiences user journey will move them through the marketing funnel, from raising awareness to a qualified marketing lead, ready for Sales intervention. The next step is to consider how to engage your audience with personalised content. Personalisation is now not just limited to multi-national marketers with millions in their budgets. New and accessible capabilities are available to the more modest marketers who can now affordably integrate personalisation within their Inbound website. Also, bear in mind that your content doesnt always need to be on your website. Your website should form part of a wider network of online resources and current best practice suggests that 75% of online activity* should be happening off your website driving users back to the website hub.

*Source: Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah

WHY YOUR NEXT WEBSITE SHOULD BE AN INBOUND WEBSITE

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WHY YOUR NEXT WEBSITE SHOULD BE AN INBOUND WEBSITE

Content
Central to any inbound marketing website project is great content. Content gives you the opportunity to place yourself as a thought leader and increase credibility for your business. And if you are known as an expert in your industry or market, people are much more likely to trust you and ultimately to do business with you. How do you establish yourself as a thought leader? Pamela Vaughn from Hubspot has some great ideas. 1. Maintain an Active Business Blog: Launching a blog that covers important topics relating to the industry in which youre selling is perhaps the best way to establish and uphold your image as a thought leader. 2. Contribute Guest Blog Posts: Once you start gaining traction as a credible business blogger using your own blog, its also a great idea to seek opportunities to contribute guest articles to the blogs of other industry thought leaders. 3. Publish Long-Form Content: Publishing longer form content such as ebooks, whitepapers, and even webinars shows prospects and customers that your knowledge about given topics expands beyond 600-word blog posts. 4. Launch Your Own Podcast: An alternative or complement to blogging, launching a regularly scheduled audio or video podcast is another great way to exhibit thought leadership. 5. Speak at Conferences/Events: Your thought leadership doesnt have to be limited to the web. Live, in-person conferences and events are valuable marketing assets, and a presence at these gatherings can be valuable to any business marketing efforts. 6. Answer Questions in Social Media: This is perhaps one of the easiest thought leadership tactics to keep up with on an ongoing basis. Social media is littered with people trying to learn more or find answers to questions they have. Content is critical to the success of your inbound website and is the way visitors and prospects move from being unaware of your product or service to become engaged and ultimately converted to a lead . This signals a fundamental shift from publishing information about an organisation and its services to content focused on the needs of the user. The type of content you create at each stage of the marketing funnel should be focussed on responding to any barriers that your personas may have identified and talking about the goals and aspirations that you identified in the persona sketches, and how you can help the audience achieve those goals. Hopefully you already have some of this type of content but be prepared to develop new content formats to make your website truly an Inbound site.

WHY YOUR NEXT WEBSITE SHOULD BE AN INBOUND WEBSITE

UNAWARE

INTERESTED

ENGAGED

OPPORTUNITY

Campaigns
Now for the fun part! You have become informed about your personas and what kind of information they may be interested in. You will be aware of when and how you should engage with them through search and social media and the type of content they like to consume. And you have created great content users can consume on your website. So now its time to start to roll out inbound marketing campaigns. Campaigns are the fuel by which you will drive users to engage with your content via search, social and on your website. This will help you: Boost your on-page and off-page search engine activities to grow better targeted and qualified user traffic. Increase your social media influence on all relevant social media channels, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest,

Tumblr, etc., with the view to creating a loyal community of followers. Create relevant and compelling content on a regular basis with the care, regularity and precision of a publisher to engage and attract users. Increase conversion and lifetime customer value through planned website enhancements and the integration of inbound marketing capabilities.

Analytics
Measurement is a key component of the inbound marketing process as it gauges your online performance and provides insights that inform the planning of future campaigns and content. Inbound marketing analytics joins up what can be a disjointed picture of your online activities. With the advent of inbound marketing and marketing automation tools, marketing departments can breathe a sigh of relief, as handling large amounts of marketing data just got a whole lot easier.

Summary
Many of these tools, like Hubspot, offer closed-loop analytics, meaning that you can monitor web traffic, content performance, and social media data, tracking users to leads to prospects to customers. This allows you to establish which online channels are the most valuable to your company. By measuring the return on your online marketing investment you can make future decisions based on hard facts, not opinions. The adoption of inbound marketing within a company requires a commitment to a strong process that will drive changes in the way that you communicate with, and interact with customers and prospects. It will have implications for the way you use online media and your website, the types of content you create, the marketing campaigns you run, and crucially the way you organise marketing and business development internally to deliver success. The rapidly growing appeal of inbound marketing lies in its ability to deliver improved online performance, lead and customers at a lower cost than traditional marketing methods. Follow the key steps in this whitepaper to help ensure the smooth adoption of an inbound website by your company. Once established, every action and transaction can be tracked, measured and optimised to increase the value of your online marketing efforts. Do you want to learn how to generate relevant opportunities for your company? Get an inbound marketing assessment from Brightfire (its free!)

LEARN HOW TO GENERATE RELEVANT TRAFFIC AND POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS FOR YOUR COMPANY GET AN INBOUND MARKETING ASSESSMENT
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Brightfire is a leading UK inbound marketing company and Hubspot gold partner. We work in partnership with our customers to transform their online presence, build online audience and capture more sales leads. We are experts in digital content creation, social media and online search. We create fully integrated inbound content marketing programmes with a clear focus on lead generation, lead conversion and sales. Based in London and Glasgow, we work across the UK and beyond with customers in Software, Technology and Professional Services.

WWW.BRIGHTFIRE.CO.UK
Glasgow 0141 229 1515 London 0207 554 8560

What is Hubspot?
Hubspot offers all-in-one marketing software including blogging, marketing analytics, social media, email, automation and more. It helps businesses generate inbound leads through SEO, social media and valuable content.

www.hubspot.com
G PAROLD TNE R

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