2012 Inbound Marketing Handbook – Marketing Sherpa

Synchronize search, social, and content to get found more often, more effectively by more customers

• Step-by-step guide for creating an effective inbound marketing strategy
• 177 pages on how to get found by your ideal customer
• More than 20 worksheets and exercises
• 23 charts with analytical commentary
• 10 case studies and “case briefings – tactics in action”
• Learn how to execute SEO, social, and content marketing tactics
• Aligning buyer personas to the customer engagement cycle
• Planning and justifying budgets in terms of ROI
• Q & A sections in every chapter
• Action steps to inbound marketing success

This publication is sponsored by Marketo

Rethink Your Marketing – From Finding Customers to being Found

Sprinkled all over the planet are individuals and/or companies that need your products and services. Some of them are in your database, but many are not. You may have hundreds, thousands or millions of ideal customers that have no idea you exist.

Inbound marketing provides an opportunity for marketers: to get found by your ideal customers.

Integrating SEO, social media tactics and content creation – also known as inbound marketing, has transformed the way marketers engage with their audience. Organizations long accustomed to “finding customers” are now adjusting their strategies to focus on more inbound tactics to help them “get found by customers”.

This new focus is causing marketers to rethink and adjust their engagement strategies. Buyers no longer wait for Sales to get involved to discover options or research product alternatives, now more customers’ research answers to their questions long before meeting with sales, and receive instant access to more content from multiple sources. The bar for customer satisfaction, loyalty, awareness and involvement continues to rise.

To be successful companies must take the necessary steps to synchronize their search, social, and content to significantly reduce costs, increases sales, and improve ROI.

According to the new MarketingSherpa 2012 Inbound Marketing Handbook, these results don’t just happen. Organizations must develop a scalable and repeatable process for synchronizing tactics. This new handbook will guide you through the development of an effective process that can scale to meet the growing, ongoing need for inbound marketing across your organization.

You’ll learn:

• How inbound channels help customers find and choose you.
• How search, social and content marketing interact with each other to produce ongoing enhanced results.
• How inbound marketing powers the customer engagement cycle across awareness, consideration, inquiry, purchase and retention.

These are just some of the many strategic process components, outfitting marketers with a comprehensive and systematic approach to inbound marketing.

10 Steps for Success: Synchronizing Search, Social and Content

Inside the 177-page handbook will equip you with a 10-step, research-supported process for synchronizing search, social and content to create a transformative, scalable inbound marketing strategy, including how to:

1. Rethink end-to-end engagement
2. Understand your target market’s behaviors on the path to purchase
3. Establish SMART objectives to achieve optimum ROI
4. Attract attention with relevant and timely search results
5. Build and engage social networks
6. Create and share engaging content
7. Construct and inbound marketing architecture to synchronize channels
8. Collect and measure actionable insights on data
9. Budget time and money wisely
10. Commit to ongoing improvement

Also built-in are best practices, worksheets and Sherpa case studies – developed through extensive interviews with brand-side marketing VPs and directors – to illustrate and reinforce these steps.

2012 Inbound Marketing Handbook – What it IS and what it ISN’T

The goal of this handbook is not to be the “be-all-end-all” on the topics of SEO, social and content; rather, its purpose is to outline practical steps organizations can take today across all three areas to get found more often, more effectively, by more customers. We’ll help you:

• Understand the needs and behaviors of their target audience
• Align buyer personas to the customer engagement cycle
• Establish SMART – specific; measurable; actionable; realistic, and time-bound – objectives
• Map goals to best-suited tactics
• Execute SEO, social, and content marketing tactics
• Evaluate, reassess and take actionable insights on data
• Plan and justify budgets in terms of ROI
• Commit to continual learning and improvement

Not to mention 10 in-depth chapters with a glossary devoted to making sure your inbound marketing objects are met.

Case Studies, Exercises, Charts and Insights Included in the Handbook:

• With a hub-and-spoke architecture, leads converge on a conversion point – p. 124
• Without an architecture, leads are lost before reaching a conversion point – p.125
• Power the customer engagement cycle with inbound marketing – p.11
• Craft an inbound buyer persona in 6 steps – p.25
• Dissect your inbound marketing challenges – p.34
• Tie objectives to personas – p.42
• Link analysis – p.76
• Increase your social reach – p.95
• Repurposing existing content – p. 109
• Define a plan and purpose for sites in the inbound marketing architecture – p. 131
• Develop a criteria-based matrix for prioritizing actions – p.151
• Making a SMART objective SMARTER – p.153
• Assess whether outsourcing is right for you – p. 175
• Identify your skills and knowledge gaps – p. 181
• Most marketers agree on importance of integration, but don’t always practice it – p.18
• Three-dimensional view of SEO tactics (usage, effectiveness, difficulty) – p.50
• Usage and effectiveness of social media platforms for marketing purposes – p. 87
• The effect of content creation on lead quality and conversion rates – p. 106
• Three-dimensional view of content effectiveness, difficulty and usage – p. 107
• Expected 12-month changes in SEO and social marketing budgets – p.174
• How the average SEO and social marketing budgets are allocated – p.171

Authors

Kaci Bower
Senior Research Analyst

Kaci Bower is a Senior Research Analyst at MarketingSherpa covering Search Marketing where she is responsible for compiling benchmark data and insights that can be used to guide marketers’ strategic decisions and tactical planning. She is also the lead author of 2012 Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report. Prior to this, she spent a large portion of her career in the telecom industry in roles spanning strategic planning to Web marketing. As a Web marketer, she gained her online marketing experience as the Manager of Web Content Development and Web Marketing for Verizon’s small business and medium business customer segments. Kaci also continues to moonlight as an independent consultant to non-profits and small businesses by helping them develop and execute growth strategies in a creative, cost-controlled and resource-efficient manner. She holds a degree in Accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from Johns Hopkins University.