CEO's: Do you have a defined online marketing strategy?

Posted by Mike Coombs on September 8,2014

This week three members of our team are preparing for travel to Inbound 2014 in Boston, the fastest growing conference for Inbound Marketers.  It’s way cool.  We’ll “sharpen our saws” in hundreds of sessions with thousands of marketers of like mind.MarkStrat_jpg-136729-edited

These are professionals who create measurable business marketing strategies.

At lots of companies, the marketing crafts, old school or inbound, are barely connected to business strategy, and often tactical. So where do all the elements of digital e-marketing or inbound marketing fit?

Are they strategic?  Or a “bag o' tactics?”

I’ll cut to the chase:  At many SMB's online marketing efforts ARE disconnected tactics.  But today, it’s essential that marketing becomes strategic to provide sales.

Inbound Marketing is essential.

It’s like sales.

Is sales strategic or tactical?  It’s both.  And essential.

You need Inbound Marketing as a strategic base of your entire marketing effort.

Experience has taught me that in every marketing engagement there is a high level of variability.  Marketing managers can’t be expert at every craft.  And frankly, in smaller companies they are often overworked tacticians and not really part of the top level strategic team.  In the company hierarchy they are sales support: valuable as hell, but probably not setting larger effective strategies. Sound familiar?

When the senior business management team senses they need to bake up some “more and better” modern marketing, everyone (sort of) knows what the ingredients are.  But they do not have a good recipe.

Inbound Marketing vendors collaborate to establish a workable, measurable  recipe.

That’s different than most traditional marketing engagements where there is a more finite tactical job to do.

But here’s my point about Inbound Marketing and marketing strategy.

One: It’s essential… because

Two: It requires you have, and improve, an integrated marketing and sales strategy.

If you hire an Inbound Marketing firm, it must be part of your business and sales strategy.  And hell, it might BE your marketing strategy.

Why?

Inbound marketing produces tangible results.
Inbound Marketing is based on measurement of goals and key performance indicators.  All the elements from web to email, to content, and social are measurable, and our Inbound_Methodology detailssoftware platform measures them automatically.  If your outbound advertising or trade show budget drives people to your website… inbound measures that.  So, figuring out those measures and improvements leads to leads and sales.
We are producing tangible, measurable, leads. And a data history that can be acted on to make your business more valuable.
The foundational metric is the value of a lead.  To know that..., we have to know the lifetime value of a customer, and how often the sales team can close a qualified lead.
From there we figure out a strategy and tactics we can implement and measure.
So…again…here’s the pitch:
Inbound Marketing will improve lead generation.

And…it will put a vendor-partner-collaborator on your team who asks really good questions of your marketing and sales people. It will help measure everyone’s results and make everyone better at selling your product or service. 

Inbound Marketing is essential.

Have a strategy.  If we do A... and B..., then C will happen.  Create key performance indicators. Measure them.

Don’t miss out on valuable online leads by doing sales and marketing without an inbound marketing strategy.

If you want to learn more, download our FREE The Complete Guide To Unifying Your Sales & Marketing Efforts.

 

 

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