How to Create an Inbound Marketing Campaign for Your Cary Business

This post is the first of a five-part series on Inbound Marketing campaigns, and the different pieces that go into them.  

Inbound marketing is a critical part of finding new clients — even for smaller businesses in Raleigh and Cary. But many business owners we speak to think inbound marketing is confusing. Here’s a breakdown of what inbound marketing means and the path your customer will travel.

What is Inbound Marketing?

We covered this in a recent post, so we won’t give you the full dive here, but Inbound Marketing, is, essentially, putting information out there that your customers find that leads them to you. You might think of it like fishing. However, we prefer to compare it to hunting because in fishing, you’re putting out a net and may catch anything, even fish too small for you. Hunting is more strategic and focused on particular types of animals — in this case, the customers that fit your product or service. If you’re still confused about inbound marketing terms and types of content, check out our Inbound Marketing Dictionary for more info.

Creating a Campaign

A campaign is a specific inbound marketing path. A company might run multiple campaigns at the same time, each one targeting a different audience. You might have several inbound marketing campaigns, but many small companies start with one. Your campaign actions include multiple steps and pieces. You’ll need:

• A landing page on your website where people fill out a form so you can get their email address and continue to communicate with them.
• A piece of content or some other giveaway or free sample in exchange for filling out that form.
• Automatic emails set up to go out to those people once you have their address so you can stay in front of them.
• A way to track your leads so that you can identify those who buy, those who might buy, and those who aren’t worth the time.

First Steps

In future posts, we’ll explain more about automation, buyer personas, and blogging, as well as new Internet rules that will affect your campaign. The main takeaway here is to realize that your marketing should come with a strategy, a plan for reaching a specific audience of people. As you outline your inbound marketing campaign, start with some questions:

• Whom would I like to reach?
• What appeals to those people?
• What content or thing can I give away or create that will help my potential customer somehow?
• What hurdles, struggles, or challenges is my potential customer facing that I can solve?
• What messages do I want to send people who are considering my service or product that may encourage them to buy?  
• Do I have the tools I need (website, blog, other content, email software) to create a campaign?  

Getting it Done - How Print and Web Designer Can Help

Business owners also say it’s too much work. While they are correct that inbound marketing takes some work, the usefulness of it outweighs those efforts. Our team can not only set this up for you, but do so fairly easily by tying it to your Joomla!-based website. Our program includes setting up landing pages, automating the process, and then generating reports so that you can worry less about the campaign and more about the new customers coming your way.