Your strategy is locked down, you created compelling messaging, built a new inbound website and have a steady stream of educational content flowing out to the target market—now what?
What you do after all the planning and foundational work is done makes the difference between missing and exceeding your lead goals. It’s the key to inbound marketing success and it requires a ton of experience.
So today, I’m going to share a few of the tricks and tips we’ve learned over the past 10 years of doing inbound marketing optimization for clients in a variety of industries.
Give Your Team The Ultimate Freedom
A lot of agencies are delivering stuff—blog articles, whitepapers, landing pages, websites, social updates. Clients want to buy stuff, they’ve been purchase stuff from marketing vendors for years, so that’s what they’re comfortable buying. However, the stuff can get you into trouble.
Instead, teach your clients and your teams that the stuff is less important and the results, the leads and the revenue growth is really what your clients want. Only an experience inbound marketing agency knows how to translate the deliverables into the outcomes the clients are expecting. Once you align clients with your teams, they should have the freedom to do whatever they need to do to improve visits, conversions, leads and closed clients.
Use Data To Drive Your Decisions
Inbound has something traditional marketing never had—data. Yep, inbound is run on the constant flow of real-time data that shows you what’s working well, what’s working sub-optimally and what’s not working at all. Make sure your people are looking at the right data, have the correct time perspective and know what stories to tell clients related to data driven program performance.
Build In Required Rhythms
As you teach your teams how to optimize engagements and they, in turn, teach clients how to evaluate their own programs, building in regular rhythms is very important. Here’s a blog article I wrote that shows you exactly what inbound marketing metrics to watch daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly. Take these and build in regular huddles, sessions, client reviews and internal brainstorming meetings to turn this information into action. Make sure that the actions that come out of these sessions are installed during the next 30 days.
Keep Your Clients Involved In The Conversation
Your clients don’t know what you’re doing. They don’t really understand inbound. Oh sure, they know what it’s supposed to do theoretically, but they don’t know all the little details associated with making it work and work well. Your job is to educate them.
Teach your teams and your people to constantly remind clients what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and how it’s going to help them. Work with clients to set goals, to relate goals to actual performance data and help them understand all the ways the tactics contribute to hitting and exceeding goals.
Set Goals Monthly
You should have learned by now that any plan longer than 30 days has inherent risk associated with the numbers. Creating a 12 month lead goal projection is highly aspirational. One way to turn that 12 month plan into a more action oriented program is to reset those goals monthly. There’s no shame in adjusting your goals based on actual program performance. Forcing anyone to match an old projection is an exercise in futility and the conversations that go along with that effort are unproductive.
Instead, recast your inbound goals every 30 days. Use data and use the action plan getting executed to set new goals, then review performance monthly. This will put you in the right rhythm to drive performance up and to the right month over month.
Inbound optimization is one of those activities you might not have done before. While you’ve built plenty of websites, done rebranding, launched a press release and worked to optimize pages for selected keywords, inbound optimization is a whole new ball game.
The only way you and your team is going to get good at it, is to get in there and do it. Follow the directions outlined above and you’re going to put your team in the best position to start doing inbound optimization. Over time you’re going to see a dramatic improvement in client program performance. Ignoring this critical step is a recipe for clients that disengage. Don’t make that mistake. Keeping clients is easier than getting new clients. Optimization is how you keep clients and keep wildly happy clients.
Start Today Tip – Your already working hard to systemize all the elements of your inbound engagement. Now work to build a system for ongoing inbound optimization. Give your team the tools they need, set up the rhythms, teach them the techniques they need and set the expectations that client results is the ultimate measure of success for inbound marketing agencies.
If you’re looking for information on what you can do today to impact your client results tomorrow, download your eBook that outlines 13 tactics you can deploy at your agency right now. Click the button below to get started.
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