When was the last time that you had a strategic meeting? How great are they! Everyone share ideas, talk loud, we all get exited and sky is the limit!
However, when it comes to strategy, it is always a good idea to drop the intensity a little and be a bit more conservative.
So basically today we will discuss on how to effectively use the creativity of your strategy with the seriousness of your management!
More precisely, we will cover what major questions you need to answer in order to be able to successfully plan your inbound strategy.
Nota Bene: A Blog is not an inbound strategy
While not being a step for a strategy planning, this point is mandatory for your understanding of what inbound marketing is. Too often, I hear people talking about their content strategy being posting blogs… Inbound is more then simply generating content. It aims at determining who you will serve your content, what type of content to serve them and where to do so. I recommend you taking a quick look at this Inbound marketing guide if you are not too sure about what is inboud marketing.
#1 Come up with SMART objectives
What do you want your strategy to achieve? This will dictate the action your strategy will be undertaking. SMART objective stands for Sustainable, Measurable, Actionable/Achievable, Relevant and Time bound.
By knowing what you want to achieve, you will be able to break down and determine what efforts are required to achieve those goals.
#2 Determine your personas
You can create the best content ever and post it all over the web but if I am not interested about what you are posting, well, you are not going to make me convert.
Take time to find the ideal customer for your strategy and learn from them. Make sure to know who they are, what they do and create your personas using those informations.
#3 Decide what tactics to use
Now that we know what we want to achieve, who we want to cater too, it’s time to know how to do it. There are many options on how you can serve your content to your personas. Here are some examples:
- Blog (you see they are a tactic and not a strategy!)
- Social media
- Email marketing and newsletter
- Lead capturing
- Ebooks
- PPC
- Social media Ads
*If you don’t master those tactics in house, it might worthwhile to think about outsourcing some tactics.
#4 Plan your costs and the time
As stated earlier, strategic meeting often generate crazy ideas that seems to be too good to be true. A good way to know if its feasible or not, is to run budget estimate.
It’s normally at this stage that the strategic meeting becomes more realistic!
It’s also at this stage that we get the best of the meeting. The people who proposed the craziest ideas normally become very efficient at trying to find ways to make those crazy plans fit within the budget.
#5 Sign a pact with your team
The biggest source of failure for inbound strategies is the actual failure of following them.
Make sure that you and your team will not only engage but also embrace your strategy. Engage in day-to-day SCRUM meeting with your team to follow the evolution of your strategy. Mark your milestones and celebrate your accomplishment. When failure occurs, learn from them. Gather your team and perform pre-mortem analysis to know the potential causes of the failure. By keeping your team actively involved with the project, you greatly reduce the likelihood of the project abandonment.
Conclusion
As stated earlier, having a blog does not give you an inbound strategy and I hoped that this article proved it to you. Make sure to educate your team about your strategy because the more they will understand it, the better they will be at it. Finally, remember that if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
If you have any question feel free to ask!
Latest posts by Gabriel Touchette
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