How Strategic Planning Software Complements Inbound Marketing

Image Source: Flickr/Creative Commons/David Kinney

Inbound marketing has become a highly effective marketing strategy for generating online business. Instead of the traditional outbound marketing methods of buying email lists, running ads, and sifting through leads, inbound marketing is about creating compelling content and messages that passively attract your target customers to your platform, where they feel comfortable. By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests, you generate inbound traffic that you can then convert, close, and serve over time.

Examples of inbound marketing strategies include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of fine-tuning your website text in order for search engines to find and deliver targeted visitors to your website.


• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC), using paid keywords to guarantee that the ad is placed.


• Social media, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. These sites are two way-streets that allow you to both present content to your audience and get feedback from consumers about how your products perform and what buyers want.


• Blogs, which create and share useful content with a target audience. People who read a blog choose to do so because they’re getting value out of reading the content.

Inbound marketing is multi-channel by nature because it approaches people where they are, in the channel where they want to interact with you. Visitors access your content from multiple devices. There’s not likely to be just one portal that your customers and prospects enter, and not just one channel through which you connect with them. For example, in the old days you could print a coupon in the local newspaper and ask your customers to bring the coupon to the store for a discount. It was easy to see how effective the coupon campaign was because you could simply count all the coupons that had been redeemed. In contrast, the digital universe is so vast and so complex that there’s no way to easily manage inbound marketing information without powerful strategic planning software that links your marketing strategy to your agile company strategy.

Inbound Marketing and Strategic Planning Software

To take advantage of inbound marketing opportunities, you need to create a lot of content, collect reams of data, and interpret mountains of information. Most traditional marketing tools are completely separate from each other, with their own analytics, their own reports, and their own formats. The right strategic planning software puts everything together seamlessly, allowing you to mold your content around the devices your website visitors use. Merging data from all tools, all in one place, allows you to compare and analyze across all channels.

As customers interact with your company, they go through marketing lifecycle stages, and each stage requires its own marketing action. By leveraging the power of your strategic planning software, as you learn more about your leads over time, you can tailor your messages to their specific needs. You can see who clicked through, what they saw on your website, and what they did over time, all in one contact view.

With networked strategic planning software managing the digital information flow, your publishing and analytics tools all work together, enabling you to focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.

In tandem with your inbound marketing program, strategic planning software allows you to create clear responsibilities and accountabilities, adopt an agile management approach, and make sure that everyone in the company is seeing the same data and working toward the same goals.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1kGYegB