Just because your marketing team is small enough to fit in a phone booth doesn’t mean you can’t focus on just the right stuff to produce sizable results. Many one-person or very small teams often ask what their main marketing priorities should be. Here’s what we tell them.
Priority No. 1: Content
If you only have time for a single task in your inbound marketing strategy, make sure that single task is producing new content. It’s integral to keep your website updated with fresh blogs and an ongoing slate of new e-books, guides, demos and other content offerings. Google constantly crawls sites in search of new content to add to its organic search results. If you keep feeding Google with new content, you’ll keep netting results in organic search traffic for years to come.
Priority No. 2: User Testing and Website Updates
Users may continue to visit your site for your steady stream of new content, but you may be able to prompt even greater interaction with a website refresh. This particularly applies if your website hasn’t had a facelift in quite some time. A number of user testing tools can give you the insight you need to make beneficial changes to your site without doing a complete overhaul. Check out tools like:
- Hotjar for heatmaps that visually represent visitor clicks, taps and scrolling habits
- Optimizely for A/B and other user testing
- UserTesting for live, on-demand user feedback on your website
Priority No. 3: Closed-Loop Marketing
Closed-loop marketing refers to marketing based on insights and data from closed-loop reporting. “Closing the loop” simply means the sales team lets the marketing team know what happens with their leads.
Closed-loop reporting lets you relate every single dollar, customer and lead back to the marketing strategy that produced them. And the best part is, you don’t have to do any of this manually.
You can gather these insights by integrating your customer relationship management (CRM) platform with the HubSpot portal. HubSpot’s open API allows companies to integrate CRM platforms like Salesforce, NetSuite and Zoho – just to name a few. Lead activity is seamlessly tracked and recorded for your review.
Tracing sales and lead metrics back to their marketing origins lets you see which marketing tactics are giving you the either the slimmest results and the heftiest ROI. You can then move forward using more of the latter.
Priority No. 4: Automation
For small or one-person marketing teams especially, automation can be your very best friend. And there’s no better way to experience it than with a marketing automation platform like HubSpot. Here you can create a lead nurturing campaign focusing on moving a buyer persona down the sales journey with a single campaign. Once you have that single campaign in place, you can schedule it to run with monitoring and make improvements over time.
Related: Download our 2016 Inbound Marketing Template
Priority No. 5: Building Reach and Outreach
The top two strategies we recommend for reach and outreach are social media and guest blogging. To avoid wasting precious time and fueling futility, focus your social media efforts only on channels that matter most to your company, or where you’ll find your buyer personas. If none of your personas frequent Twitter, don’t spend hours posting tweets that your personas will never see.
Guest blogging on third-party websites can be an ideal way to showcase your expertise and build your brand. Again, focus on websites your personas frequent. Look into industry related websites and news outlets that may feature the type of content that your business generally writes about.
When it comes to marketing, size does matter. But it’s not the size of your marketing department that’s your main concerns. It’s the sizable results you can achieve with an eagle-eyed focus on the top five inbound marketing priorities aimed at making your business soar.
