Inbound Marketing Insights

Marketing includes strategy, design, implementation, and everything in between.  Marketing operations ensure those components work together to optimize your organization’s unique approach and tactics to streamline, systematize, and analyze marketing efforts. If you've already developed your inbound marketing strategy, it’s time to review how to wrap a process around the many facets of inbound marketing to make it operational and sustainable as a long-term program.

Marketing operations help organizations build a solid foundation by strengthening their marketing strategy with data, processes, infrastructure, and best practices. Marketing operations is a systematized and data-driven method to support marketing campaigns, implementation, and a results-focused program consisting of campaign planning and process mapping. Let’s review how you can plan and map your inbound marketing process to make it more efficient and work for you.

Why Do You Need Marketing Operations?

Marketing has many components. Your marketing operations plan supports the organization of your marketing program to ensure your campaigns don’t fall short of delivery. In addition, it improves your efficiency so that your campaigns will run smoothly. With a structured plan and process, you can become highly efficient, reduce your time to complete campaign tactics, and lower costs. Having a process will also help drive more measurable results and improve your ROI. Marketing operations also enable you to build a sustainable and repeatable process. By having a system of repeatability, your team can create methods that can be replicated for future campaigns. This helps improve the timeliness of campaigns, allowing you to be more effective in your execution. A comprehensive marketing operations plan will always include campaign planning.

Marketing operations start with successful campaign planning. Without campaign planning, your marketing programs will not be as impactful as possible. By planning your campaign and all of the potential marketing tactics you want to leverage, you ensure that each campaign follows the same thought process and that no steps are missed. The primary concepts to consider in your campaign planning are:

• Audience or Buyer Persona: Every campaign needs a target audience or buyer persona. I often hear that the “world” is someone’s audience. That’s simply not the case. A focused target audience ensures that your campaign messaging and delivery reach your ideal demographic. Look at each buyer persona and determine the audience your campaign should target. Remember, not all personas will respond to a single campaign because each persona has different needs and goals.
• Content Assets: Determine the content assets you will need for the campaign and the content you may already have created. This includes blog posts, website content, sales collateral, creative assets, videos, and more. Consider this review of your existing content assets as a mini-content audit for each campaign.
• Delivery Method: Decide how you want to communicate your campaign across many channels. You must determine the channels that best align with your persona. This includes social media, email marketing, pop-ups on your website, phone calls, direct mail, paid advertising, and much more. Remember, using the right analytics and tracking tools, even your traditional marketing methods can tie back to your inbound marketing goals.
• Timeframe: Identify how long you want your campaign to run. For example, if it is centered around a specific event, determine the amount of time you need to promote it and how you want to follow up with prospects after the event. The initiative could last several months if it is a longer branding campaign.
• Goals: Determine the goals of your campaign. Are you looking to drive brand awareness, increase leads, improve your customer acquisition rate, or combine all these things? The goals you set will help align your content, delivery, and timeframe to ensure you maximize your campaign’s potential.
• Team: Identify who on your team will be responsible for each campaign portion. This could be your internal team or an outsourced partner. The “who” is critical because it places accountability on the people and teams responsible for driving results for their portion of the campaign. You should also have one central marketing project manager who ensures everyone stays on time and on task to complete the campaign.

These principles provide an ideal starting point for campaign planning. While you may adjust and modify your process over time, you will see greater success if you use the same method for every campaign, large or small.

Are you looking for ways to optimize your inbound strategy? The "book "Mastering Inbound Marketing: Your Complete Guide to Building a Results-Driven Inbound Strategy," written by Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner & Founder of Prism Global Marketing Solutions, covers every aspect of the inbound marketing methodology, including the revenue generation trifecta of marketing, sales, and the customer experience. Check out the book to see how to most efficiently and effectively develop, implement, and maintain your inbound strategy.