3 Easy Steps to Getting Started With Inbound Marketing

As the father of a 7-year old girl and a 11-year old boy, there is one thing that I have noticed that kids seem to have in common: their hobbies get more expensive each year. Recently, my son came home from school and asked if he could get a drone and said that he had picked out a few that he liked that he wanted me to look at. Wow… I didn’t realize some of these drones cost more than $500. I talked about this with my wife, and we decided that it was best if we bought him a $50 “beginner” drone so that he can learn to fly it and we could make sure he was really into it before making a substantial investment. Did we make the right decision on starting with a “beginner” drone? I think we did… we haven’t seen the drone in months and we are pretty sure that if we had purchased the $500 one we would have had the same outcome.

What does this have to do with inbound marketing? Actually, a lot. Many companies take the approach that my son did and become interested in something new and shiny every few weeks. One week it’s getting more active on Twitter, and the next it’s starting a Snapchat account—each with the hopes and dreams of connecting with new prospects and generating leads.   

I’ll admit that I’m the first person to look to innovative programs and software, but I am also a realist and understand that sometimes spending tens of thousands of dollars and lots of time without trying something else first doesn’t make a lot of sense. Sometimes it’s best to take baby steps and do some active learning while you are doing your due diligence and deciding how much time and money you want to invest.

If you are interested in getting started with inbound marketing and lead generation but don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars or invest hundreds of hours to get started, here are 3 easy steps to get started:

1. Start With a Plan
2. Create Some Content
3. Follow Up

Start With a Plan.

In a recent study, 46% surveyed said that the lack of an effective strategy and the creation of content are the most challenging obstacles to reaching the next level of inbound marketing performance. This lack of an effective strategy has doomed a number of lead generation efforts and is a warning to those who are attempting to get started without planning. But planning doesn’t have to be as complex as it’s sometimes made out to be. First, determine who you are trying to reach. Second, determine what type of content your target is interested in. And lastly, find a way to get your content in front of your target audience.  

Create Some Content.

One of the biggest myths surrounding lead generation and inbound marketing is that you need a 30+ page whitepaper that’s been written by a Ph.D. to get started. This is far from the truth. All you need is something that your website visitors deem valuable and that you can put on a landing page for visitors to fill out a form and download. You don’t need to have any sophisticated software to do this… you just need the ability to create a form that captures the information that you need to follow up with them.

Follow Up

Congratulations!!! Your planning has worked and the checklist or guide that you created has been downloaded by a few people and you have some real leads to follow up with. Now that you have these names, email addresses and phone numbers, what’s next?

Every lead generation and inbound marketing program needs more than just a way to capture leads. You need to also have a plan in place to nurture and follow up on these leads. Because not everyone is ready to buy something from you after they download a checklist or fill out a form, you need to be able to spend some time following up with emails, phone calls etc. Before you start generating leads, it’s best that you determine who will be responsible for following up on leads and how they will follow up.

Decision Time

After you have gone through the above steps and have generated a few leads, you need to make a decision on where you want to go with your inbound marketing and lead generation program. Do you want to continue to just dabble with inbound marketing, or do you want to double down and get serious about it? If you want to continue to dabble, your results will probably be in line with the resources you put into it. It’s at this point it becomes important to determine if generating more leads is important enough to your business to invest adequate resources of time and money into it to get the return you desire.   

This is the decision that many of us with hobbies (like flying drones) have to make… do we spend the additional time and resources and get more out of what we enjoy doing? Or do we continue to keep our hobby expenses low and just have fun?