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Creating an Inbound Strategy

Creating an Inbound Strategy

Creating an Inbound Strategy

The HubSpot software lives and breathes on Inbound Methodology - what we consider to be the best way to turn strangers into customers and promoters of your business. Basically, this breaks down to a set of actions that several HubSpot tools help you implement.
The steps below will go over your visitor's journey into becoming a lead and, eventually, a customer and promoter of your business. Each step will also show you which HubSpot tool(s) you can use to implement these actions.
Take a look at the image below to see this laid out:

Conduct Research & Define Your Buyer Personas:

    • Developing your buyer personas will help you to understand exactly who you're marketing to as well as what their challenges and goals are.  Defining your target customer will help to drive the direction of your content creation as well as your overall inbound strategy.

Run a Content Audit:

    • Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing other content pieces, consider which ones you want to make. For instance, if you've been doing weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be a one way to offer information in a different format. We'll go over several different types of content you can use further down on the list.

      If you've been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and be sure your SMART Goals are aligned.
    • Pro Tip: Audit your current content for your personas and for each stage of the buyer’s journey

Start creating new content:

    • A big problem with outbound marketing is that you're pushing content for anyone to look at, but what's the point if they're not the right audience? The idea isn't just to get any old traffic to your website, but the right traffic based on your specific Buyer Personas. The better you know your audience, the better you can understand what kind of content will attract them to your website. Once your goals are defined, you’ll want to determine the types of content you want to create that will attract your Buyer Personas, check out the list below for some ideas:


Search Engine Optimization:

    • Considering the advancements in the ways that both the search engines and searchers are evolving, there needs to be a shift in the way marketers determine their content strategy — especially when focused on driving organic search.

      The way we approach this at HubSpot is to look at our visibility across a topic, as opposed to a specific keyword. By organizing content within topic clusters instead of individual disjointed posts, we’re able to capture a large amount of search traffic across an ever-increasing pool of relevant keywords. This also allows us to align our brand with several recognizable core topics. Embracing the topic cluster model has allowed us to completely transform how we create and organize our content. Here is a how-to guide that you can follow to use the new content strategy tool in HubSpot to create a topic cluster as well as a really helpful blog post which outlines best practices related to creating effective content with HubSpot’s content strategy tool.

Pillar Pages & Topic Clusters

Not sure how much traffic is enough traffic? Here’s a guideline:

  • If you have under 1,000 visits per month, you should focus your efforts on driving more traffic to your website. Statistically 1,000 visits per month should = approximately 10 leads per month = 1 customer per month