The essential elements of an inbound marketing campaign

[Shakhawat]

If content is king, then content promotion is queen. This can come in many different forms, but generally takes the shape of these core tactics:

Social media
Relationship building
Influencer outreach
Online community engagement
Social media promotion has been table stakes for years, but over paytm database the past year or two we've seen the importance of the relationship-building side of content promotion take off. This is epitomized by the rise of tools designed specifically to help marketers manage it, such as ContentMarketer.io and paid content promotion on platforms such as Outbrain or Zemanta.

If you're looking for a great repository of actionable content-promotion strategies, I recommend starting with this post from KissMetrics.

Invest in a social media ad campaign and sponsored content
Paid social advertising and content promotion are great ways to jumpstart your content promotion, as well as get it in front of a targeted audience. It has also proven a more effective acquisition channel than traditional advertising for B2B companies. For example, NewsCred was able to generate 50 percent more valuable leads using LinkedIn sponsored content than Native Ads or Google Adwords.

social-media-ad-campaign-metrics

Use your email
Email marketing is a great tool to generate demand and promote your content. According to the State of Pipeline Marketing report, email is actually the most used marketing channel to generate demand, and is used by nearly 90 percent of B2B marketers.

marketing- channels-used-to-generate-demand-graph

There are a few important considerations when utilizing email marketing as part of your inbound strategy. The first is to segment your contacts database. This will help to categorize your recipients by geography, industry and job title to create a more personalized message, ensuring that viewers are receiving relevant content. Also make sure that when you're sending an email, it's coming from an actual person's name and email address. This will help to increase your open rates and reduce the chance that your email will get stuck in someone's spam folder.

Nurture leads
Now that you have the leads, what do you plan on doing with them? This is where a lead-nurturing plan comes into play. According to HubSpot, “50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy.” If you are not nurturing your leads then you are missing out on a valuable opportunity.

There are two speeds of lead nurturing, the first being accelerated product-focused campaigns, the second being focused on awareness- and consideration-stage content geared towards long-term nurturing. It's this second speed where your inbound campaign will be most effective.

Start by building your blog subscriber list, and then move on to build targeted topic, pain-point or persona-specific nurture streams that will continue to engage prospects down the funnel by reselling your value proposition over time. When you start with this type of initiative, think of a nurture stream length with touchpoints at 1, 4, 7, 14, 21, 30 and 45 days and then every two weeks after that.