Serious inbound marketers are known for their near superhuman abilities to generate leads. But these supermen and women aren't from another planet, and they don’t have a secret identity. Instead, they utilize modern marketing tools, dig through data and adjust their tactics on a regular basis.
So how can you, too, be an inbound marketing man (or woman) of steel? Well, here are five things that make a super inbound marketer:
To quote HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan, "The very last thing 99 percent of companies out there should be doing is automating their approach to marketing." Super inbound marketers know any automation is something you do once you've laid a foundation for modern marketing success. Are you taking advantage of social channels and advertising? Is your website designed to capture leads? Do you have buyer personas and content created to capture those targeted buyers? Are your offline marketing activities integrated with your online ones? If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” then diving into automation can be marketing kryptonite.
Marketing these days is a real-time activity. A news story or a customer review could offer you the opportunity to elbow your way in on an emerging narrative. And with analytics updates throughout the day, you can make sure you are hitting your KPI targets and plan immediately if you're not. Agility is the name of the game if you want to be a super inbound marketer.
More than 60 percent of companies say that their biggest content marketing challenge is creating enough content. Because content is the backbone of inbound marketing, marketers need to know how to create effective content, efficiently. With just one eBook, a super inbound marketer can create a video, multiple blog posts, a series of emails and more. All of this can be used for an inbound marketing program that runs for months with a few tweaks to ensure optimal performance.
Data drives almost every marketing activity these days. But looking through all of those numbers can be overwhelming. An inbound marketing man of steel can see through all that data and discover trends that can be used to form both short-term and long-term marketing strategies.
Most importantly, super inbound marketers are focused on transforming the way marketing has been done for years. They create helpful content with buyers' problems in mind—whether it’s a blog post, a video or an eBook—instead of focusing on what the company does. This isn’t just to meet those KPI goals, though. It's also to make marketing something people want to experience rather than dread (and avoid). Or as HubSpot Dharmesh Shah once said, we should strive to make marketing a noble profession.
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Dan Stasiewski is Technology Director at Kuno. When he's not talking about marketing data and trends, he's probably in a movie theater... or randomly breaking into song. You can connect with Dan viaTwitter, LinkedIn or Google Plus.
