Each and every quarter, it’s important to look at your completed inbound marketing strategy and review key components, as a lot can change in the online world in three months. For example, the keywords that were receiving high traffic might be too competitive and a new social media platform might have launched that’s worth investigating.
Here are the 10 steps you should be reviewing:
Step 1 – Identify your keywords.
Step 2 – Optimise your website
Step 3 – Targeted online advertising
Step 4 – Create a blog
Step 5 – Time to get social
Step 6 – Conversion
Step 7 – Email marketing
Step 8 – Mobile friendly
Step 9 – Measure and manage
Step 10 – Review and repeat
Now, here’s a look at the six key areas you should review approximately once per quarter (depending on if you are in a fast or slow moving industry):
1. Keywords
Run an overall assessment of your keywords: Are the same ones bringing targeted traffic to your your website and are they not too competitive? Is there new terminology or products in your industry that people are searching for online? If you need to replace any of your keyword phrases with others, do that now in this review.
2. On-Page SEO
Check if making a simple change on one of the pages of your website can help boost the number of visitors, like your page title or meta description.
3. Conversion
Try new things with your landing pages and sign up forms. You could move the layout around, add different images, make bigger buttons or have new font colours. Change, test and measure all the time.
4. Content
We recommend building a complete content calendar to plan what you are going to share online and when. Reviewing which blogs caused a traffic spike will give you an indication that you should create more content about that topic in other formats like video, audio, images etc.
5. Promotions via social media
Are you seeing better results from LinkedIn for your business than from Twitter? If you are, increase the time spent on this platform and spend less time on ones that aren’t delivering the better result.
6. Lead nurturing and email marketing
Are you sending too many emails and too often? Or perhaps you are not sending them enough? You will be able to asses this by looking at your unsubscribe numbers and the number of people who click through your call to action in your eMarketing.
Try not to tackle your entire inbound marketing plan in one go, but rather, take each step one by one over a few weeks and implement as you learn. With practice, it will get easier every day. I like to remind people to think back to when they didn’t have email at all, then remember when they first got an email address and used to wait a few days to check their account. Now, consider how in today’s digital world, we all have multiple email accounts. The world is changing and if you embrace inbound marketing today, in your own way at your own speed, you’re giving yourself and your business the best chance of success today, tomorrow and well into the future.
If you would like some help creating your own inbound marketing strategy, we have a workbook called Inbound Marketing for Small Business coming soon.
This is the final post in Clodagh’s 12-article series on building an inbound marketing strategy. To go back to the beginning and read the series, click here.
