You’re ready to embark on your Inbound Marketing journey. You’ve identified the right team members to support your new strategy and they are thrilled to get going. The only issue: you don’t know where to start and how long it’ll take you. Thankfully, HubSpot’s Spencer Powell has a few handy tips for you, which he outlines in his blog post titled How to Build an Inbound Marketing Strategy in 24 Hours.
Identify Pains, Problems, Questions
Ok, just to re-cap. We now know:
- Our goal
- Who we're targeting
- Where they live online
Now, it's time to dig for pain. As you're doing your research and visiting groups, websites and blogs with your audience, start listening. What does that mean, really? How do you listen? What are you listening for?
What you want to do is listen to the problems that your audience is expressing. You want to write down the questions they are asking. Write down the things they are complaining about. You want to be able to speak their language.
You'll start to see different discussion questions, comments on blogs, or frustrations. Here are a few sample discussion topics I pulled from a LinkedIn Group full of roofers.
What resources are a must-do do for skilled professionals in contracting?
Are you getting traction out of your website?
After a long winter delay, business has finally started to boom again. How is your business doing?
Have you conducted a direct mail campaign for your business? How did that go?
Obviously, you want to identify challenges and pains around the product or service you offer, but sometimes you can get some really powerful insight just by writing down any common questions or problems. You'll start to see some trends.
As you'll see in the next section, we want to use these questions, pains and problems in our content and messaging.
Action Steps for Identifying Pains, Problems and Questions:
- Go to 10-20 places on your master list and start copying and pasting your audience's discussions and questions.
Time Estimate: 2 hours
- This should take you about 2 hours, but don't be afraid to spend 3 or 4 if you feel you're not seeing any trends.
Inbound is a fantastic, cost-effective way to get your product out there and increase your leads in no time, so don’t shy away from taking the first steps.
If this excerpt has made you curious, you can read the full article on the HubSpot blog here.
And if you want to learn more about getting your marketing out of the Dark Ages, download our free ebook below.
