THE B2B
INBOUND
MARKETING
PLAYBOOK
WHAT EVERY INBOUND
MARKETING MANAGER
IN B2B SHOULD KNOW
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INTRO
This ebook will show you
the ins and outs of Inbound
Marketing, and everything
that the Inbound Marketing
Manager should be doing
and thinking about on a day
to day basis.
Before reading, it’s important to understand the attract, convert,
close, and delight sales structure.
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BUYER PERSONAS
Buyer personas are absolutely key to the success of any Inbound Tip: Use a buyer
Marketing campaign. Whether you work in B2B or B2C, the persona template
current marketing world is based around treating the consumer to build out your
as a human. personas, but
Building your buyer personas in very granular detail will allow you don’t rely on them
to understand the issues and challenges that your customers are exclusively. Make sure
facing, and use that insight to create content and information you speak to your
which provides value and helps them succeed. marketing team, your
Furthermore, even when you’re at the point of knowing the pain sales team, and your
points and main challenges your prospects face, you have to actual customers!
understand how they consume their content, in what format, and
where should you try and engage them. Everything should be set
up to make it as easy as possible for your perfect customer to find
your content and engage with it.
GENERATING AND MANAGING LEADS
Where is your next piece of business going to Your website must act as your best salesperson, as
come from, and how are you going to make sure well as the best friend of your website visitor. The
that it’s managed correctly? Inbound Marketing visitor should go away from your site feeling as if
management is all about lead generation and they’ve received the information they wanted to
lead management. research and appreciating your company as a leader
in the industry - ultimately as the perfect business for
Let’s start with lead generation: Are you creating them to deal with.
valuable content that will generate leads through
your website? Your website must be set up to In order to do this, you need to have valuable content.
ensure any unknown visitor coming onto your site is Well-considered and thought-out eBooks, white
provided with: papers and how-to-guides work well to engage your
visitors – but valuable content can also be video or
• Content they find valuable and educational graphics or process templates - anything that is going
• A pleasant user experience to help your potential customer in their day to day life.
• Opportunities to convert (tell you who
they are) and find out more
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WHAT IF YOU’RE ALREADY GENERATING A STEADY
AMOUNT OF LEADS EACH MONTH?
At this point, you need to ensure you’re managing might be as follows; Contact, lead, Marketing Qualified
these leads correctly. Many Marketing Managers Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, Customer;
believe that the responsibility of the CRM (Customer but at what stage should sales start managing leads?
Relationship Management) system is purely down to The sales cycle will also have its own stages depending
the sales teams, many Sales teams don’t believe that on the industry and company; things like demo, trial,
the Marketing team does very much at all! proposal sent, negotiations are all common things
to see.
However, the two need to work together to ensure
that marketing activity and sales activity are aligned. Where is that information stored and kept up to date?
‘Smarketing’ is a term that combines Marketing and Again it brings us back to the CRM system. From
same language, the same positioning, and providing the webpages a person has visited, which emails
a consistently high level of value. The management of have been sent, which industry they are in and what
this must start in the CRM system. their budget is, the CRM system is the central hub of
information that should provide as much information
One of the most important and effective things you as possible to make every single interaction with every
can do from the start is define your marketing and lead as relevant and as specific as possible.
sales lead stages. The standard marketing stages
Tip: If you’re looking to bring together your marketing and sales teams, have a workshop
meeting to agree the lead stages, this is one of the most important things you need to
agree and achieve.
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MARKETING AUTOMATION
HOW CAN IT HELP?
The number of different things an Inbound Marketing manager
has to think about and juggle at any one time is enormous.
Imagine that one 7.5 hour day will consist of anything from
checking the latest lead status, dealing with partners suppliers,
assessing the website performance to see whether another
call-to-action is needed, building website landing pages, writing
content, scheduling or engaging on social media, building
engagement emails, managing the internal communications
to different department heads, reporting on various campaign
performances and creating the overarching marketing
performance report for the Chief Exec’s board meetings.
WITHOUT WITH
MARKETING AUTOMATION MARKETING AUTOMATION
A visitor lands on your website, and downloads A visitor lands on your website, and downloads
an eBook. Without marketing automation you an eBook. Now, an automated email is sent to the
would get a notification of this, but then you’d prospect receiving the eBook, also offering other
have to remember two days later to follow up valuable pieces of content. The contact is put
with that visitor, as well as manually change the on a marketing workflow, which will offer them
CRM record to update their lifecycle stage to a piece of content every seven days for the next
MQL, as well as send an email to a sales person month, ensuring that they aren’t sent an asset
to keep an eye on them. which they’ve already read or downloaded. Their
CRM record is automatically updated, and the
Tip: Marketing Automation needs salesperson is assigned and notified. This person
planning and strategy, the most will also get notifications as and when the contact
comes back to the site. Lastly, if the visitor comes
successful marketing automation
back X times, the salesperson will automatically
tools are the ones that have had lots get an email advising them to make a call, with a
of planning and testing to see what list of the exact pages that they have visited and
works best for your company. Start content the content they viewed.
with a whiteboard, or something
called LucidChart, this will allow you
to draw our exactly what you want to
happen and when.
Which approach puts your sales team in a better position to sell?
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LEAD NURTURING AND SCORING
Remember, not every visitor to your website is ready to buy as soon as they land on your site:
LEAD NURTURING: As an Inbound Marketing Manager, you should be looking to nurture your leads
once they’ve shown interest; to nudge them along by providing piece after piece of valuable content
which enhances their opinion of your business.
LEAD SCORING: You’ve got a large number of leads coming through the system, and you’re
nurturing them accordingly to try and push them through the sales funnel, but how are you going to
know who to try and contact first? Who should you prioritize?
Lead scoring is a technique used to give each individual in your marketing contact database a score
based on their behavior and interaction with your business. For example, a contact who visits your
website regularly over several days, viewing the pricing page and also clicking on your emails is much
more qualified than a contact who last visited your site three months ago.
You need to set up a lead scoring system early, so that you can prioritize exactly how, when and who you
try and engage with in a structured order.
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CONTENT CREATION Secondly, consider the value of Search
Engine Optimization
Content creation is essential to inbound
marketing success. Creating great content is fantastic, but if no-
one is going to find it, what’s the point?
No exceptions. If your marketing tools are your
“
Ferrari, then your content creation is your fuel - A famous quote you’ll hear in the SEO world is:
it isn’t going anywhere unless it has something
moving it forward. “If you want to hide a dead
body, hide it on the second
BUT WHAT CONTENT SHOULD I page of Google”.
WRITE? WHO SHOULD WRITE IT? Tip: Use a content matrix and content
calendar to plan out everything. Your matrix
All valid questions, and while every organization
should focus on what content you have related
is different, there are some tips and advice we
to each persona, allowing you to identify any
can share.
gaps; while your calendar should focus on
what content you have going out over the
next three months, and exactly what steps
WHO’S CREATING THE CONTENT? need to be achieved to get the content live.
If you’re creating content in-house, the input
into ideas, themes and the content itself must
be spread across different people in different
roles. Use your sales team, use your product
team, use your board members. The amount
of different views and aspects you can get
the better. If they don’t have time to write it
themselves, make it easy for them, record them
talking about the topic, and then someone
else can write the actual copy and get them
to review it.
HOW DO I DECIDE WHAT CONTENT
TO CREATE?
Firstly, remember that buyer persona workshop
you did at the start? Use this as a starting point.
You need to ensure that your buyer persona’s
challenges or pain points are addressed in
the content that you create, otherwise it will
not resonate. Be specific with the content you
create, be it video, eBook, blog, white paper
or infographic.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
What is your instant reaction as soon as TV ads come on? You either fast forward, or if the remote is too far away,
you look at Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat for 3.5 minutes.
You HAVE to be where your potential customers are right now, not five years ago. If they’re on Facebook,
Instagram and Snapchat channels, you have to be on there too. Don’t write off Facebook because you think it
won’t work. Don’t write off Instagram because you think it won’t work to sell.
You need to be active on all of these channels in order to reach the highest audience possible. Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn all have different audiences, and you’ll see different levels of success when
using these different channels.
But what does that mean for an Inbound Marketing manager?
Firstly, you need to be creating social media posts successful posts. What time was it posted? How many
specifically tailored for each social media channel. characters were involved? Did you include an image
Don’t write one post and create one image and or a video? What was the topic of the post?
expect to use exactly the same thing on each
Once you have a better understanding of what is
platform. Secondly, you need to be monitoring
working well, you can base your next social posts on
performance constantly, checking what’s working
that information. Whereas previously you may have
and what isn’t. Having an understanding of what
been putting all your posts out at 9am, it may be the
tweet got the highest amount of clicks, or what
case that no-one is on social platforms that time, so a
Facebook post got the highest amount of likes
1pm lunch time post may gain more traction.
is crucial. It lets you then deep-dive into those
Tip: Use a social media matrix to get on top of your social accounts, this will allow
you to see exactly what is going out, and plan out your next posts on all channels.
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SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION
Getting SEO right can have huge benefits for your organization; being able to rank higher, and more frequently
on Google can bring new business right away. Initially, you want to decide what keywords you should be ranking
for, but remember that this needs to be focused not on the things that you think you should be ranking for, but
the things that your potential customers would be searching when conducting their awareness stage research.
Create a long list of short-tail keywords which explain what your business offers and the problems you can solve;
as well as long-tail keywords, which do the same thing, but are much more specific. For long-tail keywords you
want to be really specific so that you have a really good chance of ranking number one on Google if someone
searches that term.
Once you have this list you need to be creating the following based on those keywords:
• WEBSITE PAGES – have you heard of growth-driven design (GDD)? Rather than spend a huge amount of
time, energy and stress building 50 website pages all to go live on a certain date at a certain time, you spend
your time more wisely. Launch your new 15 page website and build up the new web pages you need over time;
For example build two web pages a month for the next year. This is a much more efficient, cost-effective and
less stressful way of building your website.
• BLOGS – your blogs need to focus on things that will help, educate and support your customers in a time of
need. But remember, they must be SEO focused. If they aren’t SEO optimized with the correct Headers, Page
Titles, Meta Data etc, who’s going to find them after the initial social media push?
REPORTING
If you are an Inbound Marketing Manager, or aspiring Spend the time mapping out your KPIs, looking
to become an Inbound Marketing Manager, we at exactly where you can get the information and
expect that a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) whether the information is really needed.
for your campaign goes a little bit like this:
• Web visits Tip: Set up your reporting so that it’s
• Landing page views easy to collate. Spend the time to
understand what data is relevant and
• Leads how your technology can help you
• Opportunities generate the reports you need. Learn
Google Analytics and set it up so that
• Customers each month or week you can simply
go in and pull the numbers you need.
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THE TOOLS
The tools you’re using for your Inbound Marketing journey could make or break your success.
As your business grows, you’ll start needing more and more bits of technology in order to grow. Starting off
with your website and social media tools, to your marketing automation and CRM tools, you’ll need to make
sure that all of these tools integrate well. There’s no point in using an awesome social media tool, if you can’t tell
within your CRM system if a potential customer has been interacting with you on Facebook.
These tools are just the start, as you grow, you’ll need email tools, creative tools, landing pages, forms, as well a
wide range of sales tools available.
Tip: Try and minimize the amount of tools that you have to integrate, or link together
to get the most out of them.
CONCLUSION
Inbound Marketing is great because it gives small and medium sized businesses real opportunities
to fight against the big players in the game. But it takes consistency, persistence, creativity, quality
and most importantly - investment. Not just financial investment, but the investment of time from
multiple stakeholders within the business.
Resist the temptation to cut corners in order to make short term financial gains. Make sure you
optimize absolutely everything you do, from a tweet, to a blog, to a piece of downloadable content.
The tools are out there to make sure that every single decision you make can be optimized using
your data, your knowledge and your experience. By using all of this data to make your marketing
decisions, you increase the chance of doing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
213 Loudoun Street, SW
Leesburg, Virginia 20175
[Link] Tel. 703-777-6280
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