Inbound Marketing Cheat Sheet

Inbound Marketing Cheat Sheet Whether you’re a novice or seasoned inbound marketer, we have developed a quick cheat sheet that will help walk you through the different parts of your campaign. Use this sheet as a reference point as you build out your inbound marketing strategy and refer back to is as you hone your process and optimize your campaigns.

 Identify your buyer personas

A buyer persona is more than just knowing your target audience; it’s about truly gaining an intimate understanding of your customers and potential customers. For an inbound campaign to be effective you must take the time to identify exactly who your ideal customers are, and define a set of personas on which all of your inbound campaigns will be focused. You can have different campaigns for different personas, but each should map to a specific – or multiple – persona(s). It is essential to engage with your personas, understand their pain points, and the issues they face to accomplish their goals. Your campaign will never gain traction if you miss this crucial piece.

 Build a keyword strategy

Inbound means being found. For this to happen your keyword strategy must be in alignment with what your buyer personas are searching for. Your keyword strategy should begin with identifying low competition, medium to long-tail keywords which will be the foundation of the content you generate in order to drive qualified visitors to your website.

 Develop a content strategy

You must demonstrate thought leadership by providing content that is relevant and valuable. Start by mapping the buyer’s journey to a set of content offers that will pull them through your sales funnel. From top-of-funnel (Interest), to middle-of-funnel (Preference), to bottom-of-funnel (Trust). Each piece of content you produce should always be keyword optimized and align with your buyer personas. The goal is to spark conversations and present solutions that will address their pain points. You want to give them what they’re looking for.

 Write an editorial calendar & produce remarkable blog posts

If your content strategy is strong and optimized, your blog will draw highly qualified traffic to your website. But you must continue to publish blog posts that resonate with your audience in order to keep them engaged with your business. The best way to do this is to develop an editorial calendar.

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The editorial calendar should include:  Topic / Title  Bullet Points for Content  Keywords  Target Persona(s)  Offers / CTAs (see next step) With a fully fleshed out editorial calendar, your content team will be able to hit the ground running. You won’t miss a beat. You’re helping to ensure the success of your campaign by having a clearly laid out strategy that will not only resonate with your target audience, but also provide them with a path through your sales funnel, increasing your conversions.

 Produce premium content offers

Interest: Whitepapers, Ebooks, How-To Guides  Preference: Checklists, Templates, Webinars, Case Studies  Trust: Free Assessments / Consultations, Content / Website Review 

 Design calls-to-action that convert

The purpose of CTAs is to create leads. But that concept relies heavily on the fact that your site visitors need to actually click on the CTA in order to be become a lead. Let’s face it, your prospects aren’t going to click on a CTA if it isn’t interesting or appealing to them, which means you may have lost the opportunity to turn them into a lead.

Your premium content offers are designed to be “value-adds” for your prospects. When they come to your site and click on one of your CTAs (see below for tips on effective CTAs), you’re asking them for their personal information. This isn’t something most people will just hand out for free; they need something in return. They need to feel like they are getting value out of what you’re giving them in exchange for their information.

Design matters. Create something that is pleasing to the eye that draws them from what they’re reading and compels them to click. We like presenting an image of the cover of our content offers because it shows them what they’re getting in return for clicking. We don’t use a lot of text and market them very visually.

While it’s important that your content offers align with your blog posts, more importantly, your content offers should be tailored to your personas and the particular life cycle stage they are in (Interest, Preference, or Trust). For each campaign that you run, we recommend that you have a premium offer for each stage of the funnel. Here are some examples of what you could do:

The bottom line is you need to test, test, test. And test again. Tweak the design of your CTAs as you uncover how prospects are responding to them. For example, see which color drives the highest conversion rate. Change the language from “Click Here”, to “Download Now”, to “Learn More”. Luckily with a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, you’re able to conduct this sort of A/B testing easily, and clearly see what is creating the most conversions.



 Create effective conversion and thank you pages Take the time to design conversion and thank you pages that will convert. It’s not just how it looks, but also the copy that makes a huge difference in conversion rates. When a prospect gets to your conversion page, first and foremost, they need to know why they are there. What are they getting out of this? They most likely landed here from a CTA, so they’ve already expressed interest in your offer. Your conversion page is where you hook them. Have an image of the offer, a short paragraph or two about what the offer is and a list of bullet points (we list the key takeaways usually), so that they can scan

the page and still understand the value. When they get to the form, you don’t want to scare them away, so only ask for the information that you really need. If you’re using a platform like HubSpot, you’ll be able to change which form fields appear based on what information you already have on that person. At the very least, you want their name and their email. Once they’ve completed the form and download the asset, they should be immediately redirected to a thank you page. The thank you page not only contains the thank you message, but also an additional CTA (or offer), which gives them the opportunity to continue through the funnel.

 Set up a lead nurturing workflow

Now that you have a prospect’s contact information, design an email campaign that will present additional content to this lead. The content should align with their lifecycle stage, and help them

understand that you are aware of their pain points and have a solution that can address their needs. For example, when setting up a top-of-funnel offer, you want to have your middle and bottom-of-funnel offers in place, so that once a prospect gets through the first stage, they’re automatically being served the following stages. We recommend staggering the content so that it makes sense with the length of your sales cycle. The workflow is designed to nurture that prospect from a lead to a customer.

 Follow your best practices

There are right ways and wrong ways to structure your inbound campaign. Ask yourself questions like:  Is your conversion page optimized to drive that form submission?  Did you remove your top level website navigation?  Does it include social media sharing links?  Have you included the ideal number of CTAs on your blog pages? It’s the things that may seem trivial and unimportant, that can mean the difference between 0.5% conversion rate, and 5% conversion rate. Take the time to educate yourself on the best practices of inbound marketing and apply them to each campaign that you develop.



 Leverage social media

Determine which social networks your buyer personas use and optimize the content you share on each. Not only does social media provide you the opportunity to get your content in front of millions of people, it also helps with your SEO.

Major social media sites to pay attention to:  Facebook  Twitter  Google+  LinkedIn  Pinterest

Tailor you messages to each of the platforms you are using and don’t be afraid to dig into your archives and share older posts with your audience as well. Just because the content isn’t fresh off the press, doesn’t mean it’s not relevant or isn’t something your prospects are looking for.

For help implementing these inbound marketing strategies, contact our inbound marketing experts at newbreedmarketing.com, and make sure to check out our blog where you can find even more information about our inbound marketing methodology and best practices.



NEWBREEDMARKETING.COM P 802.655.0800 F 802.655.4631 20 Winooski Falls Way, Suite 306, The Champlain Mill, Winooski, VT, 05404