What are the best practices to follow when you are starting or are in the progress of transforming your company to an inbound marketing and sales machine? It all begins from how well you know your customer.

To know this you also need to know who are the customers you should target. What is the clear value you can bring to buyers of your service or product? A short introduction to inbound you can read here. 

1. Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are the foundation of inbound marketing. They are your existing customers or customers you’d like to acquire and are based on actual research not assumptions. It is a fictional description of who they are as a person and how they spend their day from challenges to what they read online.

You base your marketing message, content and buyer journey based on these imaginary profiles you have created. You can see how important it is to nail these profiles to the smallest detail to ensure success in your inbound marketing and sales efforts.

Company you work for might have just a single buyer persona profile or multiple ones depending how much resources you have or what you are offering. For example a recruitment agency would have two major ones – candidate and client buyer persona.

2. Buyer’s Journey

Buyer’s journey is the “path” you take you buyer through when you are converting them to become your customer. The buyer’s journey consists of three stages on which you are guiding your leads through. The stages are awareness, consideration and decision. You and I might argue that there is a fourth stage which is delight. Delighting your existing customers is important to build loyalty for your business.

When you are creating content you need to consider to which buyer persona you are creating it for and at what stages of the buyer’s journey they are.

The content you are creating shouldn’t only be about keywords and driving traffic to your website but also educate to have visitors come back and convert to leads.

A good example is if you are writing a blog post directly about a solution you are providing then you are creating it for consideration stage and it will only speak to those visitors and/or leads who are at that stage of the buyer’s journey.

3. Remarkable Content

Your content is your voice and your brand. Make it stand out with your own voice! In inbound marketing content has to be aligned with context. Otherwise your writing is a waste of time in worst cases. When thinking of context you have to think of which are your buyer personas and for what stage of the buyer’s journey you are creating content.

Having a remarkable content will ensure that visitors come back again and again to convert into leads and eventually to customers.

4. Leveraging Your Content

Now you have great content and amazing buyer’s journey. What to do with it if nobody finds it? Some traffic comes through organic search of course but don’t forget to distribute it!

We have so many channels available for us and knowing where your potential customers lurk is critical information. You just have to be where your customers are. Social media, marketing emails and different blogging platforms that direct traffic to your website.

To truly leverage your content you have to take advantage on all the knowledge you have from your customers and how they interact on your website. With different calls-to-action, landing pages and content offer you are able to convert visitors into leads. It is when they are leads when the real work starts and you can leverage marketing automation to nurture those leads so that when they interact with a salesperson they are in the right mindset.

5. Salespeople as Content Distributors

Why salespeople should know most if not all the content you have? It is an easy way to leverage your content and distribute to people just at the right time. Especially if you are on the road to transform to a inbound marketing and sales methods. They are the ones that are able to provide you with visitors or even ready leads that you can nurture through the buyer’s journey.

When they interact with prospects they can share relevant blogs or content offers to build trust which is essential part of inbound sales process and social selling. You can read more about inbound sales in our blog post – Introduction to Inbound Sales.

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