How to Make Your Inbound Marketing Team Work for You
Realistically speaking, virtually no online business could ever generate enough leads to earn a living on the outside of inbound marketing alone. The average inbound marketing service today brings in over $80k per year. But if you’re seeking a high ROI, you’d probably expect to pay as much as $45,000 or so. So why do people keep skipping this important step in their businesses? There’s too much money to be made and too many opportunities to miss. It’s up to you to make it work.
Your first goal is to identify the exact functions your inbound marketing team should perform. You need to split the team into functional groups. For example, there might be someone to be responsible for creating your website, optimizing it for search engines, writing articles relevant to your niche, and so on. Someone else may be responsible for link building, PPC, and so on. Separate tasks according to how much they entail and who is best suited for each.
Once you’ve determined the specific roles, you need to assign those roles to individual team members. For example, you might want to try and get a keyword research firm to perform the link-building task and focus on writing articles for your site. But if you have no SEO specialists, you won’t be able to accomplish this task without any one of those team members performing it. You can assign a certain amount of time each day or week to each role. If your inbound marketing team finds that the keyword research task takes most of their time, assign them something else to do. You want to use as little work as possible on what’s really important.
Once you have assigned the specific duties to each member of your inbound marketing team, make sure that each person knows what his or her responsibility is. Give each person some leeway to perform his or her job effectively, but make sure that the overall direction is clear. Allow inbound specialists to have input into the tasks that are delegated, but make sure that the overall direction is still under your control. If you don’t give people the freedom to act how they wish to, you’ll wind up with an inbound business that’s poorly coordinated and ineffective.
The final thing that you need to do is to let these new team members get to know each other. One of the best ways to do this is to send them out for lunch or get-together. Invite them to join your inbound marketing forum or group. Encourage them to socialize with others in your target market and learn from the successes and failures of others in your industry. This will make the inbound marketing consultant feel as if he or she is a valuable member of the team, and they will quickly begin to develop trust.
To ensure that your inbound marketing team has a successful experience with your company, you should also integrate them into your Google Analytics initiative. Most companies that are successful utilize the Google Analytics Content Network to track and manage their online marketing. This is because the Content Network offers so many tools that are necessary for monitoring, organizing, and is targeting visitors to your website. By integrating your website and your Google Analytics Content Network, you can not only get a better understanding of which keywords your visitors are finding most useful, but you can also learn which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site.
In the next part of this two-part article series, we’ll take a look at how you can use your inbound marketing team to your benefit. In the first part of this series, we gave you a basic overview of who you need to hire for this new and exciting venture, and what you need to do to properly employ them within your company. In this second article, we’ll take a look at how you can make sure that they are truly effective. We’ll also go over the importance of using Google Analytics and the Content Network to manage your inbound marketing funnel, as well as how you can make sure you completely track and organize everything that your team does.
If you’re ready to launch an effective marketing strategy, but aren’t sure where to start, I encourage you to start by hiring an inbound marketing consultant. Don’t waste any more time thinking about what you should be doing instead go ahead and hire one today. They will help you develop a plan that can increase your revenue dramatically while teaching you all of the basics as far as internet marketing goes. If you’re ready to get started now, this is the perfect time to implement an inbound marketing strategy. Go after these top three tips, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your business will grow!