Building An Inbound Marketing Channel: Scale, Leverage, Optimize

what is inbound marketing?

Purpose: Increase the number of monthly leads/clients, acquire subscribers and improve search rankings.

How: Guarantee the success for a new inbound marketing channel by sticking to three principles: Leveraging, Scaling and Optimizing.

Scale: As the above methodology shows, there are multiple parts of a successful inbound marketing channel. SEO/Ebooks/Web Pages (i.e. writing, research), CTA’s/Landing Pages (i.e. UX/Design), and emails (automate them!).

Working together with your team, you can make this a simple process. The following outlines who should be doing what.

Research: Your executive level team will already knows their customer personas. Lower level staff should do research to verify and adjust these personas if anything has changed. During the research process, save links, info graphics and statistics to use for your content.
Content Creation/Ideas: Writers, creative, sales team, social media employees
Graphics/Landing pages: Designers (if you don’t have a designer, contract out!)
Emails: Your writers and sales team

Leverage: Repurpose all parts of the inbound channel you just made.

  • Gate the book by embedding a form and requiring a person’s email address, website and budget for right to download
  • Ebook chapters can be search optimized blog posts
  • Landing pages can be search optimized web pages
  • Links to new web pages can be distributed via social media
  • A slideshow of the ebook can be uploaded to a YouTube channel, and you can do SEO for video
  • After gathering email submissions over time, you’ll have an audience you can email new content to

Optimize: Analytics about time spent on page, visitor flow, bounce rates, form abandonment, email CTRs and open rates provide an evaluation of each part of the channel and its effectiveness. By finding weak points in the different stages of the channel, you can correct them and optimize your efforts for better results.

Content Building and Time Investment

Keep it simple, keep the time investment short. Content is where the bulk of your resources and costs will go. Existing non-published content can be used as part of the new ebook/web pages.

It’s important to note that the content idea/title will exponentially increase or decrease the amount of clicks based on its ability to resonate with the web visitors/potential customers.

Content for an inbound marketing channel doesn’t have to be overly difficult to make. The fastest way to provide and share the most value is through visual information (charts, info graphics, custom graphics).

The majority of time should be spent thinking about what the customers most desire to know and understand. Also, what are their pain points?

Discussions and Research: 3-6 hours – agree on customer personas and find great data, statistics and define selling points. See what content you already have that you could use.

Ebook: Putting the actual ebook together (roughly 10-12 slides) shouldn’t take more than 6-8 hours.

Landing Pages: Two landing pages (a/b test) – two hours total.

Blogs: Pulling it apart and making 3-4 articles with it – 6-8 hours.

Graphics: Total number of graphics, 3-4. Includes ebook cover and calls-to-action.

Lead Nurturing Emails: 4-5 lead nurturing emails per ebook, some a/b testing. 5-6 hours.

Reach me, Cort Tafoya, on Twitter @CortTafoya and on Google Plus. If anything in this article doesn’t make sense, I’ll be happy to respond over email. Take care!

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