Inbound marketing is a big undertaking. It is a holistic approach to marketing, that starts with a big picture focus, yet relies on pulling together all the small details that drive success.
What does inbound marketing success look like? It looks like achieving the top priorities of most marketers:
So what are the big picture topics and the small details you need to focus on to succeed in inbound marketing? Here is a 30-point checklist — divided into six different categories — of the elements that make up a strong inbound marketing program. See how many you can check off, or download the full Inbound Marketing Scorecard for even more details and helpful links.
Strategy, Planning & Cooperation checklist
These five items are essential to start your inbound marketing program off with a strong foundation. Without these elements to build on, your program will likely falter. If your team can’t confidently answer that these are in place, take time before launching inbound marketing to focus on brand identity, customer personas, and a strong working relationship between departments.
Content Creation checklist
Content is often a marketer’s greatest challenge, but also best investment. Consider these figures offered up by Cellimark Digital Marketing:
and
In other words, content creation is absolutely essential, but it can be very difficult to do well. If you can answer yes to the following questions, then you are probably doing content creation very well.
Content Promotion checklist
The ultimate success of your content creation efforts also relies on how well you promote that content. With the flood of new material being created every minute, it takes more than just publishing a blog post to your website to stand out amongst the flood. (Here’s a look at what the real-time addition of content to the world wide web looks like: Internet Statistics In Real Time: Are You Keeping Up?.)
Are you doing what it takes to promote your content? How many of these questions can you answer with a confident “Yes!”?
Lead Nurturing checklist
One of the key advantages to inbound marketing, besides its lower cost per lead generated, is the ability to capture lead information and use that information for automated lead nurturing, which can reduce the length of the sales cycle and contribute to higher per-deal revenue. (Check out the numbers here: 10 Stats To Back Up Your Lead Nurturing Efforts.)
If you can answer yes to these five questions, you are likely seeing the positive results mentioned in the infographic linked above.
Sales Enablement checklist
As I mentioned earlier, inbound marketing is a holistic approach. Rather than focus strictly on one aspect (for example, an advertising campaign to increase website traffic), inbound marketing encompasses everything from initial brand awareness through the sale, with an emphasis on understanding how it all works together. One part of that is bringing the marketing and sales teams together to find ways that marketing can contribute to sales’ success.
Are your teams taking these steps toward sales enablement?
Measuring & Reporting checklist
Even after you’ve planned, created, launched and executed your inbound marketing and lead nurturing campaigns, there is still one more set of tasks to complete. If one of your priorities is that third one listed at the very beginning of this post—proving the ROI of your marketing efforts — you still need to measure results and report them to the C-suite.
Here’s what you should be doing.
How does your checklist look? Are there more empty boxes than you would like? Or just enough that you still think there is room for improvement to capture more opportunities?
Download the full Inbound Marketing Scorecard to take a more detailed look at each of the items and see where your biggest challenges and opportunities lie. The Scorecard includes links to more than 20 blog posts and resources that address specific strategies and tactics with tips for improving your overall inbound marketing success.