I for Inbound – An Inbound Marketing Action Plan for small businesses.

Take action, kickstart your inbound marketing and manage it from ZYM.

First, can your business do Inbound marketing?

Yes! Without a doubt!
Every business large or small can embrace Inbound marketing and up the ante this year. With a little help from this blog and your team you can easily implement an inbound strategy, designed to achieve your business goals.

Inbound marketing is not something you and your team should be afraid of doing, you have likely already done some inbound on your website and other written content that you have produced. Now is a great time to consciously expand on your Inbound Marketing and make your competitors green with envy of your website, blogs, guides and inbound content.

In this blog, you can learn how your business can do Inbound Marketing like the Pros and implement an inbound marketing strategy in just weeks. When it's done, it's done and you will only need to tweak and measure the impact. Plan it out, action it and review every 6 months to make sure it stays up to date. Let prospects find you online with better SEO and more engaging content.

AND

It can be managed and implemented from ZYM, a marketing platform that has all the digital tools you need to support your inbound marketing.

What is inbound marketing exactly?

Inbound marketing is marketing that attracts visitors to your website through no outreach process, instead, like a magnet, your content and SEO draws the attention of visitors that are searching online for solutions like yours and THEY find your content in the process of their online buyer journey.

We know that a good inbound marketing strategy means that when prospects can find you more easily through their own searching efforts, they are instantly a warmer prospect. If they enjoy your website content then your brand reputation will increase leaps and bounds, along with your SEO.

Inbound marketing is distinct from outbound and it can be described as non-interruptive and organic, while outbound marketing is interruptive and the prospect isn’t actively searching for a solution for when they encounter your outbound.

To explain this in more detail and to highlight the differences between the inbound and outbound marketing content, let's take a look at what inbound versus outbound content looks like.

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

Blogs	Telemarketing
Infographics	Billboard Advertising
Whitepaper/Ebook/guides	PPC Ads
Videos	Videos
Case Studies	Print, TV & Radio Ads
Webinars	Trade Shows
SEO	Direct Mail
Social Media Marketing – organic	Paid social media ads/boosted posts
Landing pages/web pages	Influencer Marketing

Whilst marketers will need both inbound and outbound as part of a good marketing strategy, an inbound marketing plan will help you put the spotlight on the content that provides SEO on your website and increases the chance that your prospective customers will find you on their buyer journey without being forced to look at your offerings on Ads and in emails.

Statistics spotlight “Properly executed Inbound Marketing tactics are 10 times more effective for lead conversion compared to outbound methods” (Gartner)

Can ZYM help you manage Inbound Marketing?

The answer is yes, with a combination of ZYM tools, you can plan, execute and manage inbound marketing campaigns all from one place. Just use the tools you need and launch your new Inbound campaign in ZYM. This blog highlights both the actions you need to do and the ZYM tools that can help you with your Inbound strategy.

Want to find out more about ZYM? – Watch the video tour and find out more.

Don't fail to prepare! – 4 steps to take before you prepare an Inbound action plan.

Content Audit – Does your business have an existing content review process or plan? Audit your existing inbound content and consider if it is worthy of your audience. Is the content up to date and relevant? Would you read it? Review your content on a regular basis and stay current in your online arena. Benchmark against your competitors and see if your content is up to scratch and can hold its own in your industry.
Goals – Set your new content goals, is it 10 blogs, 5 guides and 3 new landing pages, 1 new webform or pop up and an SEO review? How do they help you reach your overall business goals? Give yourself a timeframe to complete all the new content, if it needs to be 2 months, it will be worth it.
Target audience – Define your target audience, that will be consuming your content, could you go further and build a persona, for even better targeting and messaging? Create your persona on ZYM for free here.
Timescales – Make the action plan time bound and give enough time to develop the new content assets for your inbound strategy. Add the content and the timescales in ZYM’s Content Calendar – FREE here.

ZYM Spotlight: See example below of ZYM's Content Calendar.

Kickstart your Inbound Action Plan.

All inbound content is not equal, and every business will focus on differing types of inbound depending on their industry. For the purposes of demonstrating the action plan in this blog, it has been decided that the new inbound is going to consist of the following content collateral, which will cover the next 6 months inbound marketing strategy.

The Inbound content.

A content theme for next 6 months, pick one core to your business
Split this into 6 individual monthly topics
An SEO keyword audit – find out the popular search terms
3 new guides based on popular topics (pick the core topics)
3 new infographics to go with guides, blogs & social media
6 new blogs (on core topics)
15 social media posts per month (send prospects to your new content)
1 Webinar on the theme (could be held more than once)
1 video on the theme
1 new landing page, with post entry page & autoresponder email
1 new pop up for webinar
1 new webform for webinar

All collateral will be designed with a strategy in mind to drive potential prospects, (based on the persona) to sign up to/buy a product and increase website visits/sales/leads.

Week 1 of the Inbound marketing action plan

Output: Drafts for 6 blogs, 3 guides and SEO keywords plan.
When you have decided the overarching theme content for the next 6 months, then what do you write about in the individual guides/blogs? Consider the following and then outline your content theme and topics.

What is your expertise? Don't be shy! You are an expert in your business, so go ahead and draft a brief for the 3 guides & 6 blogs & 1 landing page. If you're too busy to actually write these, then use a copywriter that “gets” your business. Give them a good brief and then edit the copy within your team.
Get content theme inspiration. You can use software like Buzzsumo to quickly find out which content themes are most well received in your industry or intended content topics. It’s easy to use and FREE, just add your topic and Buzzsumo will find what people are searching for and you can be inspired!
Organise your content plan. Use ZYM’s FREE content calendar and see a birdseye view of the content planned for your Inbound Strategy. Upload and manage all your inbound content on ZYM.
Find out the best keywords. Use ZYM’s FREE keyword analyser to find the popular keywords in your industry that you should use to enhance your SEO and the chances of getting your content found online more easily.

SEO Statistics spotlight: “83 percent of online tech buyers found their vendor via Google search.” (https://www.marketingsherpa.com/)

Outcome of week 1: This week you have set the content topics of the written content, there's an SEO audit with the most attractive keywords (from ZYM analyser) which can be included in any new content and you have a new clear content plan, viewable and editable in ZYMs free content calendar.

Blog statistics spotlight: “Businesses with a blog receive 55 percent more visitors to their website than those that don’t.” (https://www.oberlo.co.uk/blog/blogging-statistics)

ZYM Spotlight: Use ZYM’s Blog scheduler to add, design and publish and store all your blogs. (£10 a month), see example below of ZYM Blog results area – find the blogs which have the most impact.

Week 2 Inbound Action Plan

Output: Video drafted, webinar planned, infographics drafted.

Video solves problems. Show off your business solutions with a video on your website. We know the power of video as attention spans decrease and your prospects are no different! What problem can a video solve for you? Outline a draft of what you want your video to cover and the format you want, will it be animated or have a real person in it? This is likely beyond the skills of your existing team, so it’s time to work with a video expert. Get 2 or 3 pitches for this, give them a clear brief and ask for a deadline.
Plan a webinar. Base it around the core theme and make a list of questions that your customer might ask. Create some great slides with your webinar and aim for 30 mins worth of presenting time. Choose a webinar software you are comfortable with, like Zoom or MS Teams. You can run the webinar more than once, and even tweak the topics each time.
Infographics. A picture says 1000 words. It's so true! The human eyes love to take in information visually, grab your industry statistics that relate to your guide topics and make life easy for your prospects. Outline a brief for your designer (you might have to employ a freelancer) and use them in your guides, blogs and on social media, you can even add to your website.

Statistics spotlight: “Video marketing increases qualified leads by 66%” (https://www.socialfilms.co.uk/blog/video-marketing-statistics-uk)

Week 2 accomplished: video brief, infographics brief, webinar planned.

Week 3 – Inbound action plan

Output: social media graphics and posts, landing page, post entry & autoresponder email.

Make it sociable. No inbound action plan is complete without social media posts to drive prospects to your website, blogs, guides, videos and infographics. Design monthly posts around the monthly topics and plan ahead in ZYM’s social media scheduler. (£10 a month) Again if you need some template graphics designed, get your designer on the job and just change the text on the posts for maximum impact.
Capture leads in a form. The last piece of the inbound puzzle is a ZYM landing page (gate your guides or webinar registrations behind the form), complete with a post entry (the page that appears after the prospect fills out the form) and an autoresponder email (an automatic email confirmation).

If you think you don't need a ZYM landing page, you could always create a new website page with a ZYM webform and add a ZYM pop up to catch leads for your guides and webinars.

Week 3 accomplished: Inbound social content that will help drive prospects to engage with your new website content or landing pages, blog, video and guide content.

ZYM Spotlight: Use Landing pages with a lead form to capture webinar registrants and leads. See example below of a landing page created in ZYM.

Conclusion

This Inbound action plan is viable for around 6 months, if something changes in your industry or you start to sell a new product, then you will need to realign your inbound strategy. You will need to refresh your inbound strategy every 6 months and focus on the core parts of your business to keep current and relevant.

You can see that you needn’t be overwhelmed by inbound marketing, by following the action plan in this blog you can stay on top of it. For 3 weeks, every 6 months you will have managed to create and start executing an inbound marketing action plan, using the steps in this blog.
Your business will reap the rewards from it in the future, be consistent and keep focused on inbound marketing.

What now, when the inbound plan is underway?

The content pieces that are created can be used in ongoing outbound marketing campaigns.
No inbound strategy is complete without a measurement process at the end of the time period.
Measure everything on your analytics software, or let ZYM do it for you in the social media, blog, SEO health and website tracking tools on ZYM.
ZYM can handle your inbound for you, with the help of ZYM you can plan, launch and measure all your inbound efforts easily, whilst generating brand new content to engage your prospects and stand out from the crowd.

What are you waiting for?
Find out more about ZYM marketing platform!

Take a free 14 day trial here.

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