What is Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is also known as “permission marketing”. For many decades, promotional marketing followed its traditional form, known as “outbound marketing”, which means the actions were directed at the audiences, and advertisers had to “go after the target buyers”, try to make them interested, no matter their previous receptivity.

Outbound actions are still used, but they are directed to massive audiences. They even allow you to use a limited segmentation strategy, but we’re talking mainly about mass media like TV, radio, billboards, and million-dollar budgets. It’s just not a reality for 90% of businesses on this planet.

The first author to use the term “Permission Marketing” was Seth Godin, in his 1999 book with this name. Brian Halligan, the co-founder of Hubspot, started to use the term “Inbound Marketing”.

Why is Inbound Marketing Essential to Create and Deliver Value?

Inbound marketing means finding the customers who are likely to want your product(s), then making appropriate offers. Nobody said it’s easy, but it’s possible and there are many successful techniques being tested and shared every day online.

The concept of inbound marketing, today, is deeply connected to creating and sharing valuable content to a specific target audience, to generate trust and long-term brand relation with your brand. So, don’t think that we’re talking about a playful 100-meter dash, it’s a professional half-marathon!

Ok, what the hell does Scrum has to do with Inbound? The Scrum workframe is the basis for the project management tool you’ll need to plan, execute, monitor, and evaluate your Inbound marketing actions. Plan Inbound marketing actions with GitScrum

Planning Inbound Marketing with Scrum

Before you start planning actions, the first step of your marketing strategy, in case you haven’t done it yet, is to define your target audiences and buyer personas – to whom your actions will be directed at. You can use your project management tool’s visual resource like Gitscrum Mind Mapping to list them.

You can also use Gitscrum Mind Mapping to plan a wide range of Inbound Marketing actions, like:

• Your Blog editorial calendar;
• Social media yearly posts and instant message -Whatsapp / Telegram – lists and groups;
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): map your audience main interests;
• Conversion Actions: landing pages, forms, newsletters;
• CRM plan;
• Sales: automation, email marketing, lead nutrition (email sequences), lead scoring (lead prioritization), paid traffic (Adwords).

After mapping all necessary actions, it’s time for budgeting. To define an order for execution, you’ll need to set every item’s investments, considering options of campaign geographic reach and exposition, finding the most cost-effective option to fit the client’s budget.

GitScrum Spreadsheet is the feature to integrate budgets into your projects.

Putting Inbound Actions into Practive with Scrum

Now that you’ve planned all necessary actions, you’ll transform them into projects and tasks with Kanban boards with your project management tool. You can create a GitScrum Board for each project or group of tasks you can sort by them, to facilitate your work, and customize colored columns according to your needs, so you’ll monitor work progress visually:

For each task, you will assign one or more responsible collaborators. As soon as they complete it, they will update its status, and you’ll be able to check them up. You can add references such as benchmarking examples from your competitors and other companies, to guide execution.

This collaborative working board will facilitate your interaction with your multi-talented teams, since they can work cross-functionally in multiple projects, from anywhere (even remotely) and still keep in charge of everything that’s happening with task progressions.

GitScrum Board is the tool to manage dynamic inbound campaigns

Get an Overview of all Current Inbound Actions

When you have numerous clients and simultaneous campaigns going on at a time, it seems easy to get lost. Can you provide a prompt response to your clients about all actions that are beginning, and all the ones to end at any time? Yes, you can! With Gitscrum Gantt Charts you get a complete overview of all your inbound actions, to be prepared to be responsive and efficient.

Make Better Inbound actions with User Stories

Since content is one of the most important elements to attract your audience and target customers in inbound strategies, it’s essential to keep in touch with them, maintaining a number of open channels for them to communicate with you. Make sure there are people on your staff, committed to paying attention and collecting all info that comes from users, customers, and viewers from all means – website, cell apps, social media, smoke signal…

What’s impressive is that some companies do all the work to collect a great amount of this feedback, store them, but do nothing about it. Others, send them forward to the marketing department, but take too long to implement anything, or are resistant to suggestions. We’re not saying there is a magical formula, but your project management can help this process become more agile. Customer feedback must be ordered, filtered, and sent forward according to their priority, directly to marketing and developing teams, so content and product improvements can be done.

GitScrum User Stories are short forms that allow you to know your end user’s needs with objective requests on a product or service (primary or secondary, so it could be the content related to a product, too). Also, by acknowledging customers’ requests on products, you will be able to identify trends and write relevant content for them.

As well as your clients’ products, the purpose of content creation is to make customers’ life better somehow and create a strong relationship based on delivering high value.

GitScrum User Stories Examples (products end-users standpoint):
“As an online broker app user, Jon (21) would like to open an account in fewer steps/screens.”
“Ashley (32), as a cook, would like to have a unique pepper grinder.”
“As an elderly, Joan (84) needs a package easier to open.”

GitScrum User Stories help you create relevant inbound marketing

Advantages of Inbound Marketing

Increasing your persuasion power:

Reaching your target audience and establishing a close relationship with them.

Shortening the sales cycle:

Spend less time in stages from the first contact to final selling, considering the segmentation.

Cost reduction:

Compared to outbound actions.

Increasing of average ticket sale:

Possibility to sell more products with segmented content.

Audience receptivity / Spontaneous engagement:

Continuous communication, without interruptions (unlike uninvited “commercials”).

Reaching a wider public:

According to Content Trends, companies that adopt Content Marketing reach 2.2 times more visits compared to those that do not use it.

Assertiveness:

Attracting the right public, the ones who are really likely to buy from you, instead of bringing random traffic.

Qualified traffic:

Through highly segmented actions.

Excellent to build customer loyalty:

Turn your audience into brand advocates: they share your valuable content and spread the word about your products and services by themselves

Highly measurable:

determine the relevant KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for you to monitor all your actions’ progress and ROI (return on investment).

Creating KPIs to Monitor your Inbound Marketing

Here are some KPIs you should monitor to reach your inbound objectives and must be relevant to your clients:

PRIMARI KPIs:

Leads, traffic, cost per lead acquisition, conversion rate, total income, income per sale.

SECONDARY KPIs:

Cost/lead on each funnel stage, newsletter/ blog subscribers, blog recurring visitors, cost /visitor, % of traffic sources (paid, SEO, social media, emails), the average price on sale.

PRACTICAL KPIs:

Page views, page rank, top search keywords, top-ranked contents, monthly traffic, engagement data.

Use GitScrum to update your project data constantly and skyrocket your marketing results!