Chapter 5
Applying Inbound Solutions: Executing Your Plan
In This Chapter
Developing a timeline for your inbound plan
Deciding who should do your inbound work
Delegating inbound marketing initiatives
Determining whether or not to outsource
Establishing and measuring milestones
The third inbound marketing step is applying your tactical inbound solutions. This follows the diagnosis you made in Chapter 3 and the strategic inbound plan you developed in Chapter 4. In this chapter, I cover the basics of applied solutions. You learn about developing a timeline, delegating your inbound initiatives, and establishing a method for choosing the most impactful inbound marketing applications.
I also introduce an important concept, the Shared Strategic Blueprint (SSB). SSBs are mini-marketing plans that break down a long-term strategy into pieces, usually into pieces that cover short, three-month periods. Implementing SSBs means you get better feedback and you’ll get it more quickly. SSBs help you focus on the important marketing attraction and conversion initiatives acting as inputs and affecting your ability to achieving your business objectives. You also learn about milestones and metrics and how your measurements contribute to optimal inbound marketing.
Implementing Your Strategic Inbound Plan
You’ve performed your initial assessment. You’ve written a plan. Now it’s time to execute. If you’re following my methodology of reverse-engineering your marketing initiatives from the objectives you’re attempting to achieve, the execution will be more clearly organized. By documenting your inbound strategy, you’re able to answer why you’re implementing certain inbound marketing efforts providing your team with context and meaning. Now you can drill down to the how — as in how you’re going to achieve your objectives.
Now it’s time to break down your inbound strategy into manageable pieces. First, outline your timeline. You can begin with a 12-month plan and break it down into 3-month marketing sprints by using our Shared Strategic Blueprints. By segmenting your timeline into shorter periods, you’ll have the flexibility to make adjustments as you collect and analyze your measurement data.
After you’ve set forth your timeline, it’s time to delegate. You’ll need to make an honest assessment as to what your organization has to offer in terms of time, talent, and budget. You may need to outsource to experts in order to avoid steep learning curves while shortening your time to achieve objectives.
Many of your milestones are outlined in your strategy. Now you’ll break those down into multiple metrics. By measuring, sharing, and reporting analytics on a regular and ongoing basis, you keep focused on your objectives and can make real-time adjustments if necessary.
Developing Your Inbound Timeline
In your inbound marketing plan, you’ve written a timeline overview that can be broken up into manageable segments. By breaking your annual plan into 3-month sprints and then working backward from your 12-month objectives, your inbound marketing efforts will be more nimble.
Here’s a simple way to break down your objectives:
- Annual: What objectives does your inbound marketing plan need to achieve in the next 12 months?
- Quarterly: Shared Strategic Blueprints (SSBs) — these three-month mini-plans are actually the most important components of your plan. What marketing milestones do you need to achieve in order to successfully achieve your annual goal?
- Monthly: Are you on track to achieve your three-month objectives? Which of your inbound marketing efforts are performing and which are under-achieving? Monitor the under-achievers to spot trends and adjust accordingly.
- Weekly: Develop a weekly report to track progress on each of your inbound efforts. Stay in front of any delays so you can substitute alternative initiatives if so required.
- Daily: Depending on your size, some inbound metrics should be tracked daily. At the very least, look at your inbound dashboard to see if your visitors, leads, and other conversion metrics are on course. Inbound initiatives like PPC should be monitored on a daily basis to track input.
Creating a Shared Strategic Blueprint (SSB)
In 2012, my team at Marketing Matters Inbound set out to simplify the inbound process. We discovered that proactively creating a flexible inbound plan actually reduced the traditional reactive nature of marketing. The way in which our team provides marketing solutions and communications for our clients changed and so did our digital marketing success. This restructuring of our internal processes gave rise to what we’ve coined as the Shared Strategic Blueprint (SSB).
An SSB is a mini three-month plan that helps you focus on achieving your business and marketing goals by breaking down your overall strategic plan into manageable parts. My business partner, Nathaniel Davidson, invented the SSB while working at Marketing Matters Inbound. It’s a method of mapping out your measurable action plan in short sprints. SSBs:
- Are written three-month action plans in which inbound initiatives are determined by their individual contribution to the milestone objectives
- Operate off the same SMART goals that you wrote in your inbound strategy
- Are usually specific to inbound campaigns but can also be applied to your other initiatives
- Can be used internally and externally when you’re working with outside consultants or inbound marketing firm
The SSB focuses on and brings to light not only what it is that we’re doing, but also forces us always to state why we’re doing it.
The SSB process revolves around four key meetings each year, one meeting every 90 days. During these meetings, your internal team collaborates with all key contributors (including your outsourced marketing team) to answer the following questions or address the following points (arranged here by topic):
- Reporting
- What does your IMA tell you are the critical, necessary, and “wish-list” priorities?
- Establish the metrics you’ll need to hit in order to successfully complete each quarterly SSB.
- Objectives
- When you break down your annual plan into concurrent three-month sections, what milestones do you need to achieve at the end of each quarter?
- Are each of your objectives SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound)?
- Establish the milestones that help you achieve each quarterly objective to ensure you’ve created a realistic plan to success.
- What tools and services do you need to help achieve these business goals?
- Ideation
- What creative campaigns are best at connecting with your target customers?
- Brainstorm and document the creative content you need to populate your campaigns?
- Which marketing initiatives best achieve your objectives? Think beyond the obvious.
- Consider which personas will be most responsive to your efforts, testing several ideas for bringing your message to market.
- What types of inbound marketing campaigns will contribute the most to successfully achieving your objectives?
- Measurement
- What constitutes success?
- How will you measure your success against quarterly and annual objectives?
- How will you determine if your choices from the “Ideation” phase impacted the business in the manner desired?
- Are the ideal marketing initiatives affordable?
- What adjustments need to be made?
After each SSB meeting, you’d ideally create a 30/60/90 SSB plan as to how your team will roll out the next set of initiatives to meet the shared objectives. You can see a sample summary in Figure 5-1. Effectively, this type of SSB creates an ongoing, monthly schedule to touch base and report back to stakeholders while allowing for larger, more in-depth meetings each year.
Figure 5-1: A sample SSB summary.
Your quarterly SSB breaks down tasks that contribute to a desired result after three months. If any task doesn’t contribute to the result, eliminate it. Be brutal in whittling away tasks that don’t contribute; they waste time, energy, and money, and detract from achieving your inbound marketing goals.
Delegating Ownership of the Work
You’re probably starting to realize that embracing inbound marketing within your organization can be quite an undertaking. Take a deep breath. Don’t worry. The inbound life is the good life; it just takes some time and hard work to get things started.
Now that you’ve performed a digital or inbound assessment and written a plan (or at least a plan outline with timeline), how are you going to get everything done? Who’s going to do all the work?
Now that you know your workload, it’s time to assign ownership. This is done on several levels, as follows:
- Organizational: Should you outsource or perform the work in-house? (Read below.)
- Departmental: The sales department is responsible for sales conversion metrics, and the marketing department for marketing metrics. So, each department has internal delegation of responsibilities while the common objectives are shared between the two departments. Doing so creates a common cause and mutual accountability.
- Individuals: Assign individual responsibility for activating initiatives, tracking the milestones/metrics associated with that initiative, and actually achieving the objective. This is imperative.
Outsourcing execution
Here’s a quick way to decide whether to perform inbound marketing in-house or to outsource. In reality, it’s usually a combination of the two, but this may help you (and your boss) make a more informed decision, in this order:
Have you established your desired result, usually defined in currency? In other words, did you generate the volume of planned revenues?
Answering “No” to this question means you don’t have a plan; go back to that step in the inbound-marketing process.
Do you have a realistic budget to achieve this result?
A “No” to this question means you’re on your own and you’ll need to invest a lot of time to achieve your results. Or it means you need to seek the budget you need to get the job done.
- Do you have the resources to achieve your desired result in the allotted timeframe?
- Does your organization have the available personnel to get the job done?
Do you, or does your internal team, have the expertise to get the job done?
Answering “Yes” to questions 3–5 means you can perform inbound marketing on your own. A “No” means you need to outsource.
In-house execution
The “R” in SMART refers to “relevant.” Your company’s desired outcome may be an ideal outcome. That’s fine, as long as you now apply the “A” which is “Attainable.”
It is your job as a marketer to determine whether or not the objectives created are achievable, no matter whether those objectives originated in your department, or they were handed to you. I may want to fly to the moon, but if I don’t have the time, money, and expertise to build a rocket ship, I’m not going to get there. It’s okay to shoot for the moon, but you’re going to need resources and expertise to get there. NASA has that; you don’t.
When executing a strategy to achieve your business goals, take an honest assessment of your in-house team so you don’t commit to unattainable objectives. Know your strengths and fill in identifiable gaps. You can do this by referring to gaps identified in your IMA and matching up your in-house skill-set, determining where you may need to outsource. This will be easy if you’re a one-person marketer; less so for larger organizations and marketing teams.
Establishing Your Inbound Metrics and Milestones
Milestones are significant points along the path of achieving your overall objective. Metrics are the important contributing factors to hitting milestones and eventually actualizing your objectives.
Let’s say you’re a B2B company whose annual objective is to sell 100 units in a year. In this case, your milestone might be 25 units per quarter. Your SSB plan might be to attract 2,500 visitors that convert to customers at a 1 percent rate each quarter via content marketing (1,000 visitors), organic traffic (1,000 visitors), and event marketing (500 visitors).
Your objective is to sell 100 units annually.
Your milestones are 25 units each quarter.
Your metrics are:
- Total visitors (2,500 visitors)
- Visitors by attraction source (1,000 by content marketing; 1,000 by organic traffic; and 500 by event marketing)
- Total customer conversion percentage (one percent)
- Conversion by attraction source (10 units by content marketing; 10 by organic traffic; and 5 by event marketing)
The numbers above are just a simple example. Of course there are other contributing factors to consider, such as:
- Time spent on purchase path from first visit to first purchase by source (for example, if trade show website leads take three months to convert whereas leads derived from organic search take six months)
- Content and offers that convert at a higher or lower percentage
- Cost-per-lead by source
- Cost-per-acquisition by source
You could break the metrics down even further by looking at each of these contributing factors. Based on historical data, for example, you might change your metrics to 833 organic visitors per quarter converting overall at 3 percent (contributing 25 units sold).
Measuring Your Success
Success isn’t defined by how much you report or even how many hours you worked. So, how do you measure success? The first question you need to answer is whether or not you achieved the business milestones set forth in your plan. Seek insight as to why you achieved success and solutions for the areas that underperformed.
Thick reports filled with detailed minutiae and graphs too complicated to digest encourage confusion rather than clarity. Be very clear as to what the important contributing metrics are and seek agreement up front on those metrics with all involved. Then build custom dashboards or use marketing automation software that report those KPIs.
Sharing your analytics
When sharing your analytics, do everyone involved a favor. Build your metrics dashboard based on what everyone collectively agrees are the important contributing factors to achieving success. Include the Customer Conversion Chain metrics. Don’t simply report by reading back the numbers that everyone in the room can clearly see. Be prepared to provide a more detailed analysis by doing your homework before the meeting as to the make-up of the dashboard numbers you’re reporting. In other words, report what happened through the dashboard metrics, but be prepared to answer why the numbers appear as they are.
When you uncover inconsistencies, or your inbound efforts are not measuring up to your hypothesis, be prepared to state openly what you’ve discovered as the likely or possible cause. Remember not to act evasive or defensive. Next, provide one to three thoughtful solutions to improve.
Lastly, when someone asks you to report on a metric other than the predefined contributing inputs, be prepared to ask how that metric contributes to successfully attaining your objective. Sometimes this leads to an insightful breakthrough. Most times, it is just noise. Stay focused on the inputs that matter; however, remain open to additional inputs that had not been previously considered.
Communicating your activity
You are responsible for how you allocate your marketing resources and should be willing to be held accountable. More importantly, the true value you bring to the table as a marketer is in streamlining activities so that you achieve your inbound goals and objectives efficiently, with as few resources as it takes to achieve success. You also create value when you overachieve milestones within acceptable costs of your company’s time and money. You’re most valuable when those streamlined activities are scalable because you can now replicate and communicate activity that has a more predictable outcome.
Activity alone doesn’t equal success. Just because you and your team are busy doesn’t mean you’re working on activities that contribute efficiently to the end goal. Don’t let your ad agency masquerade their “doing” as productivity, either. Instead, focus on the value your activities bring to achieving stated objectives. The marketing activities you and your team perform must be meaningful. In other words, there should be a measurable correlation between your inbound marketing activities and the end result.
Reporting your results
In an optimized inbound marketing program, the marketing and sales departments share goals and objectives up-front. Each department works together to achieve the end sales result. These goals should be shared with management and approved up-front. It follows that the marketing and sales departments are each held accountable for achieving their respective metrics and milestones and then report back on a regular basis.
The process of sharing and reporting objectives aligns your internal and external team towards achieving the overall business goals, clearly outlining expectations and accountability for both parties to achieve said goals.
Reporting your results based on the timeline outlined in the SSB portion of this chapter provides regular feedback allowing you time to make any necessary adjustments to your inbound marketing plans.
Tweaking links in your Customer Conversion Chain
The reason for accountability between marketing and sales isn’t so they each play the blame game. You’re trying to solve business problems here, not find who is at fault. So, when things aren’t quite going to plan, the aim is to fix the broken parts. The best method of discovering this is by evaluating the Customer Conversion Chain links.
By analyzing each conversion point in the customer purchase path and comparing your resulting metrics with the hypothesis that marketing and sales formed together before execution of tactics, you report and act on facts rather than blame and emotion.
So if the sales staff says the leads are weak, don’t get defensive. Review your company’s definition of a marketing qualified lead, check your lead scoring to see if there are some incorrect assumptions as to what constitutes a qualified lead, and model your premium customers in order to attract and convert.
Things You Can Do Now
- Estimate a realistic timeline to begin implementing inbound initiatives so you can share with others in your organization and manage expectations.
- Set your milestones and metrics for a 12-month period so it’s clear which marketing factors need to be measured and which marketing initiatives are important to implement first.
- Attempt to populate your first SSB so you have a clear understanding as to what marketing needs to accomplish in the next three months.