When You Look Around The Office, Do You See An Inbound Marketing Team?
Does your staff possess the analytical, editorial, social, and artistic skills to launch and sustain a successful inbound marketing campaign?
Crosscheck the following skills with your team to determine if you are currently capable of using inbound marketing to grow your business. And use them as a guide to acquiring the people or skills that are needed for success.
1) Project Management/Content Strategist
This is a job for a more tenured staffer or at least someone who has been in your industry for a while, if not with your company. Producing relevant content that is helpful to your audience requires solid industry roots, knowledge of current trends, and an ability to develop buyer personas that accurately reflect your customers. The project manager/content strategist is the chief idea generator for your content topics.
Also important in this role is a broad understanding of your business’ particular goals and marketing plan so all content is brand consistent and aligned with other aspects of your marketing efforts.
Content strategy requires planning ahead, and your content strategist will be responsible for populating a calendar of content topics that gives the rest of your team enough time to properly develop them.
2) Writer/Graphic Designer
Content can take several forms, but exceptional writing, editing, and an eye for design always apply. Content that is inaccurate or not grammatical will work against the point of your inbound marketing campaign- to establish your business as an authority and attract leads- and instead repel prospects.
Blog posts that are engaging and well-written, and social media intros that are creative and eye-catching, are what give an inbound marketing campaign its traction.
Ask Yourself These Questions Before Hiring An Inbound Marketing Company…
You’ll need a dependably excellent writer to do this consistently, and a graphics wiz to adorn the content with infographics and other visuals. If this can be the same person, bonus!
3) Social Media Management
Don’t underestimate the complexity of today’s social media landscape. There are about a half-dozen social media platforms, each with different conventions and methods of content distribution. Your social media manager should understand each one enough to determine which your business should be focusing on. We have found that starting with a focus on one or two social platforms that are the best fit for your business is more effective than jumping into all of them at once.
A social media manager is skilled at attracting and growing an audience and maintaining steady communication with your followers. They’ll be responsible for keeping your social profiles fresh and posting regularly.
They will be building relationships on your company’s behalf with other social media influencers and amplifying the reach of your content across multiple platforms.
Choose a natural conversationalist with a great personality and sense of humor for this job.
In addition to distributing your content, the social media manager also will pull content ideas from social channels for your team. They will stay tuned into the online conversations going on in your industry and update your inbound team to direct future content offerings.
4) Data Analyzer
Your inbound marketing campaign won’t be complete without periodic evaluation and improvement. Visitor metrics are available to help you hone your campaign, and you’ll need a staffer dedicated to analyzing the data and figuring out where to tweak your campaign.
For example, which of your landing pages are converting the most visitors into leads? Compare them with underperforming pages to uncover the best pitch. The same can be done with your calls-to-action.
You’ll also want to monitor your search engine positioning for the keywords of your industry and build a strategy to rank higher for the keywords you are most interested in attracting customers with.
Monitoring these data sets will ensure your campaign continues to improve.
Implementing an inbound marketing campaign is a big undertaking. Is your current team up for the job, or do you need more help? Either way, make sure these four bases are covered to ensure success.
Thanks for stopping by,
Laura
Editor’s note: This blog was originally published in May 2017 and has been edited and updated in February 2022.