If you’ve committed to inbound marketing, you know it’s a commitment to action — and you understand that the day-to-day marketing activities supporting your inbound program have a direct impact on the quality and quantity of your marketing and sales leads.
So, you’ve done the research, learned about your buyer personas, and used the insights to create your optimized website, blog, and relevant content pieces. You promote all that great content via email, social media, and marketing automation.
If you follow the flywheel approach, you recognize these daily marketing activities are the elements that add force to your program, and the constant tweaks to improve conversion rates, response rates, and customer satisfaction are the elements that eliminate friction.
More force and less friction powers your business flywheel and creates a better experience for your prospects and customers.
It’s essential for you to organize your day-to-day marketing tasks in a way that prioritizes the most effective actions. This checklist can help you focus your daily work to make the most of your inbound marketing plan.
Inbound marketers embrace continuous improvement. That means checking your website for errors, monitoring traffic, and making sure you’re marching daily toward your key performance indicators (KPIs). Any drastic drops or spikes should alert you to investigate.
Check your traffic sources to understand where it’s coming from — organic, referral, or direct. Daily monitoring should tell you plenty about which keyword, promotional, and content strategies are working best to drive website traffic. Is organic dropping? That should send you to check your SEO analytics, and make sure you’re using the right keywords in blogs and content, too.
LEARN MORE: 6 FREE SEO TOOLS TO IMPROVE WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
Blogging is the content-driven, persona-informed foundation of your inbound marketing strategy. You should be posting frequently and consistently, following your editorial calendar — that means your daily work includes keyword research, outlining, writing, and editing.
And THAT means daily monitoring of blog performance is vital, to ensure you’re hitting the mark with content that meets the needs of your target audiences. Every time you post, you’re generating fresh opportunities to attract, engage, and delight new prospects who may ultimately convert to marketing and sales leads.
LEARN MORE: SMARTER KEYWORD RESEARCH — 6 TIPS TO SUPPORT YOUR BLOG CALENDAR
Your analytics give you a good idea about who’s visiting your website and where they’re coming from. Review lead conversions to track the content they converted on, and how they found your website. This can help you evaluate calls to action, plan future content, or generate new ideas about how to promote existing content offers.
Add your new leads to a nurturing campaign. If you haven’t set up automated workflows, you should at least have determined what differentiates a marketing qualified lead (MQL) from a sales qualified lead (SQL), so it’s clear when to hand off an SQL to the sales team and when it makes sense to follow up on an MQL with another contact piece.
LEARN MORE: HOW TO USE MARKETING AUTOMATION & CRM FOR LEAD QUALIFICATION
Make sure that newly published content or blog posts are promoted on your social media accounts. Create and schedule social posts in advance so you can focus daily on monitoring, rather than coming up with posts on the fly.
Check terms you’re following to find relevant conversations you should participate in or questions you can answer. Consider a social listening tool like HubSpot’s monitoring and management tools to follow industry-specific terms, trends, conversations, and brand mentions — while streamlining your efforts and saving time.
Use the tools to schedule daily (or more frequent) social posts on topics that demonstrate industry awareness and thought leadership. Shoot for a weekly mix that includes 3 links to your own content, 6 links to third-party content, and 1 specific offer that links to a landing page for a content piece on your website.
RELATED: WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA METRICS MATTER THE MOST?
If you’re thinking, “Wait, I thought these were tips for inbound marketing daily tasks,” you’re right. So, what role does pay-per-click advertising play in your day-to-day marketing tasks and powering up your business’s inbound flywheel?
Paid digital ads can actually support your inbound marketing efforts in a number of ways, including:
In the right hands, and with daily management and care, paid media can turbo boost your inbound program.
By keeping up with the daily items listed above, you’ll maintain a strong grasp on the condition of your website SEO, the performance of your content and communications, and the general state of your prospects, MQLs, SQLs, and even customer-promoters. All together, those efforts continually add force to your business flywheel.
Other important content-related tasks happen less frequently, but are still essential. These include data-informed tweaks and changes that do the work of removing friction throughout your flywheel, smoothing your targets’ buyer’s journey as they navigate your content on the road from prospect to SQL. Keep these in mind on at least a monthly basis:
By taking care of these daily and less frequent tasks, you’ll be doing the work to effectively manage your inbound marketing program and gain a greater understanding of which content works and what you need to adjust.
Does your audience respond better to long-form content like case studies and ebooks, or do they convert more on video content? Are important conversations happening on LinkedIn or Twitter? The more you know, the better your future content will attract, engage, and delight prospects, leads, and customers, powering your flywheel and growing your business.
Learn more about what it takes to build and maintain an inbound program with our free Inbound Flywheel Overview and Workbook. Just click the link to download your copy.
Topics: Inbound Marketing
