When should we review an inbound marketing strategy?

Setting up an inbound marketing strategy is a new experience for many companies. True trend, the rise of the methodology leads to the establishment of a structuring project for the company, that of achieving the digital transformation of the marketing - sales axis. In this context, the implementation of production follows a fairly simple mechanism: definition of the strategy, technological implementation and deployment of campaigns. If the first step is a lot of attention, it is important to keep a little perspective on the whole process.

Our inbound marketing strategy is over: place to efforts!

You have defined your objectives, your personas, your content strategy and you are ready to activate the different levers of inbound marketing through a successful action plan.

Blog posts to produce, white papers to complete and landing pages to create, tweets to broadcast ... the actions are not lacking, and again, this is just the beginning. A common mistake is to continually knock you out of operational tasks to get the maximum results. While it is important to make efforts, you should not lose sight of the analytical side of the process and "get out of the way". On the other hand, you will have to put in a lot of effort and avoid spending 80% of your time scrutinizing your dashboards. 

Continuous improvement at the center of all inbound practices

To the question "When should we review or adjust an inbound marketing strategy. Indeed, if your initial action plan took you on 6 months with a listing of blog articles, campaigns, white papers to produce, do not forbid you to review things along the way. Inbound marketing is based on the principle of continuous improvement and depending on your results, do not hesitate to adjust your actions for "a little more" of what works well and "a little less" of what works badly. By dint of going in this direction, your results will go in the right direction.

No magic recipe, but an effective framework

Defining the operation / analysis / adjustment ratio is not so easy and you will realize that it is not constant throughout the life of the project. Start by doing a (true) strategy and document it with real PowerPoint and excel deliverable, then share it to the maximum with everyone involved for maximum feedback. Then launch actions in the form of campaigns, focusing on 2 or 3 priority themes for your buyer’s personas. Deliver a maximum and then opt for three levels of analysis:

Day by Day: Give yourself a moment to set a goal in terms of deliverable for the day. Take a look at your social media performance and commitment to your articles. Adjust the schedule for the next day to stay on course and reach planned activity levels.

Weekly: Over a week, you have obtained some results that you can compare with the previous week. Take a look here at the performance of your different audience channels (social, organic ...) and conversion indicators (landing page, forms, blog posts, webpages ...). Based on the results plan operational adjustments for the next week and add them to the list (to do next week).

Monthly: It's a little near the scale of a campaign. Analyze traffic, conversions, overall success of the campaign and topics covered. This is also the time horizon on which the SEO could evolve in an interesting way. Take the opportunity to contact sales representatives to evaluate the quality of your leads and if adjustments can be made (scoring, alerts, segmentation ...). Add these actions to the list (to do next month).

Quarterly: You have 2 to 3 retreat campaigns and an interesting return to plan more substantive actions and (re) prioritize your campaigns. If important actions need to be performed or new levers activated (space purchase, basic purchases, redesign web ...) add them to the backlog. It's also a good time to present these results to your management to get feedback and align with the company's strategy.