I often meet companies that want to start with Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation, but are not sure how to do it. how. What should be done and in what order? 

So here I'm going to write down a step-by-step guide on exactly what you need to do to get started.

The guide is based on my own experience with over 30 companies in the capacity of marketing manager at a small Swedish company, my previous life as a Hubspot consultant, and now with the team at FunnelBud where we help companies implement SharpSpring. The focus is B2B but the guide can probably also work for B2C with some modifications. The goal is to quickly and easily provide results in the form of leads, meetings and business.

So read on for a complete guide on how to get started with Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation!

The components: What is included in your complete Marketing Automation implementation?

I will start by listing all the individual components that should be in place when we are done. Then I will make a step-by-step checklist of what to do and in what order.

We start with the components, below:

You have optimized contact forms or buttons leading to contact pages on your website.

Surprisingly, many companies I meet still don't have contact forms. This is the lowest hanging fruit, so start with this! If you already have contact forms, consider placing them in more or more accessible places.

Here are standard recommendations that we "know" work well based on best practice and our own experience:

1. Directly on the home page, without forcing the visitor to scroll.
2. On the About us page
3. At the end on key pages

Follow and Conversionista's tips on how to make your contact forms easy to fill out.(SharpSpring helps you with many of their tips!)

When you have optimized your contact forms, you have ensured that you do not miss the potentially hottest leads when you increase the number of visits.

You have "Subscribe" forms on the website

Might seem strange, especially if you don't have a newsletter yet, but create a subscription form right away anyway! Put it on various pages, e.g. on all your blog posts (on the right-hand side and at the bottom), and in the middle of longer and more popular pages (e.g. on the homepage and in long blog posts).

The subscription form captures visitors who are curious and interested in passively staying in touch. Make sure you don't miss these people.

You have a basic conversion (e.g. white paper or trial request) with a subsequent drip on the website.

The purpose of this conversion point is to capture people who are more actively interested in solving their problem but are not yet ready to make contact.

Create a guide or white paper to help the customer better understand the problem and how to solve it. This helps the customer while increasing your credibility. If you have a software product, a trial can be an option or a complement.

Put your white paper (or trial request) on a landing page behind a form. Provide value in exchange for their email address. Then put clear calls-to-action (links in the form of clear buttons or images) on different parts of your website to drive visitors to the landing page.

After downloading your white paper (or signing up for a trial), you will receive a thank you email with the content. Then they can receive a drip (a series of subsequent emails) with further relevant and inspiring content and links. When your contacts click on the letters, you will see that they are interested and can make personal contact.

You have a regularly updated blog and social media with content that attracts your target audience.

A blog is an excellent, perhaps the best, way to attract new traffic. And it still works.

What doesn't work is spamming with uninteresting and ill-conceived blog posts just to get the most out of them. What works, and will probably continue to work for the foreseeable future, are articles about issues your customers are interested in.

Each blog post gives you potential new external links, new keywords that appear on Google, and strengthened internal SEO due to internal links.

Each new blog post also gives you the opportunity to publish a post with a link on social media. In this way, you also get a temporary boost in traffic, where some will like, share, subscribe and even go on to read more about your product and then ask for contact.

You have a regular newsletter that maintains existing contacts.

Many companies have hundreds or thousands of contacts that they never hear from. It could be contacts from previous meetings that are lying around in the CRM system, or people who downloaded some material that was never followed up.

Many of these are potential buyers. In a previous job where I was responsible for marketing, we accumulated new leads for 3 years, but if we didn't make a sale, they were just sitting in the system. One day we decided to call around to these leads. It turned out that many had bought competing solutions and we realized that we had lost a lot of big deals because we didn't keep in touch.

Therefore it is important to both maintain old contacts (be top-of-mind), and detect when the contact shows interest. A newsletter system with lead scoring mechanisms can help you do this.

Don't know what to write in your newsletter? Reuse content from your blog! Put a short introduction at the top where the CEO speaks, and then link different sections to your latest blog posts. This last bit can be fully automated, as a good newsletter tool can retrieve your latest blog posts and associated images from your website.

You have Adwords and social media ads with associated customized landing pages that generate new leads.

Many companies spend money on ads whose clicks lead to the website. This is a huge waste!

Instead, send each click to its own customized landing page that:

1. Talking about the same thing as the ad
2. Has a clear Call-to-Action (e.g. download a White Paper on the subject of the ad)
3. Is optimized to convert

If you have multiple ads targeting different keywords and segments, you should have multiple landing pages: one for each ad. This will dramatically increase the number of leads.

It is often difficult to create such standalone and custom-designed campaign pages as landing pages. SharpSpring's landing page feature makes it super easy! You just drag and drop modules and then change the content. Therefore, you can create as many landing pages as you want, one for each ad.

If we assume a click cost of $30 and a fairly low click-to-lead conversion of 4%, an ad budget of $3,000 per month would give you 100 clicks and 4 leads per month. How much new business would you get in a year if you got 4 leads every month who downloaded a white paper about your solution?

(Note that the click cost can vary greatly depending on the type of solution you are selling. In the above example, I am using an ad for an enterprise product with a long sales cycle. If you sell more transactionally, you can get much lower click costs and many more clicks).

The image below shows how one of our customers has already received 10x the money back in closed deals through this method, and has a pipeline with an expected business value of 30x the money:

You have Facebook Lead Ads that give you new leads straight from Facebook.

Facebook Lead Ads means you can capture leads from Facebook without even having to leave the platform. Your leads go straight into SharpSpring and get their follow-up.

It's a whole new way to capture new leads that makes the experience smoother for both you and your lead. Instead of having to click, leave Facebook and fill in their contact details on a new page, their details are already pre-filled in Facebook and they just press OK.

This is a complement to the method above to get even more leads.

You "extend" your face-to-face customer meetings with customized follow-up drips.

One of the biggest problems sellers have is that it often feels tedious to follow up and see how things are going after a meeting. How do you get around that?

By adding value!

You do this by having pre-built, inspiring feeds that are customized for different types of customers. During the meeting you ask "is it OK if I put you in our newsletter and send some material I think might be interesting?". If the contact is interested, you usually get a yes.

Then you put them into one of your ready-made drip campaigns with inspiring and useful content. Some emails might be about how other customers in their situation solved the same problem. Others link to various blog posts and materials on your website that answer common questions.

You can make this drip as long as you want, as long as you have enough interesting material. If you want to be more advanced, you can adjust the frequency so that if you don't click, the waiting time for the next email increases. And when they click, you get a notification and can check if it is time to resume contact.

Now we have listed all the components. In the next step, we will look at exactly what to do, and in what order.

Your checklist: How to get started with inbound marketing and marketing automation

When creating this list, I assume that we are starting from scratch. But if you have already done any of the steps below, you can skip them.

That said, here are the steps I recommend to get started with Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation in the quickest and easiest way possible:

1. start with basic fixes on the website

Put contact forms and subscription forms on the website. This is the lowest hanging fruit and can be done in just one day.

Think about all the pages where you could have a contact form. Include subscription letters on all longer and popular blog posts. If possible, put a "subscribe" form on the right-hand column of all blog posts and at the bottom.

Also think about putting a big button called "Contact us" on the right-hand column of all pages (including the first one you see on the homepage) and linking it to your contact page where you have a contact form.

Feel free to use forms from a Marketing Automation system like SharpSpring for this purpose to collect all the history of where they came from and what they did on your website from the start, and prepare for the next steps down the line.

With this done, you won't miss potentially hot business opportunities and we can move on to the next step.

2. Import all the contacts from any other systems.

Why have several different systems when you can have all your marketing and sales in one tool?

We help you create lists and fields that segment and make it easy to distinguish, for example, customers from non-customers, contacts who have shown interest in different product groups, and other types of segments.

You can now shut down your old systems and hopefully save money and avoid having different data in different systems. Furthermore, we have laid the foundation for your future newsletters, and you can start using SharpSprings CRM to manage all your contacts and business opportunities in one place.

If you prefer to keep your old CRM, we set up a sync so that hot contacts from SharpSpring go into your CRM automatically and are kept up to date in both systems.

3. Create your basic conversion (white paper or guide) and send it out in your first newsletter!

Create a white paper or guide following the recommendations above. Make it simple at first, just to get it done! You can improve it later when you see people actually start downloading it.

If you want to create a great looking guide right from the start, one of our Content Marketing partners can help you. Let us know and we'll put you in touch.

Then send out a newsletter to all contacts in the system and tell them about your new guide! If you haven't sent newsletters before, start with an introduction explaining why they are receiving the newsletter and how they can unsubscribe. This is a great way to clear your list. For those who do click and read the guide, you can then follow up manually. Ask "what did you think of the guide?" and thus reopen the dialog.

Now you've cleared your list and made sure you don't miss any old business opportunities that have been left in the system since before.

4. Create an ad and link to a landing page

Choose a target audience or a specific keyword. Then create a landing page specifically for them. Put a clear call-to-action on the page, such as downloading a white paper that explains how to solve their problem.

Then launch an Adwords ad and set a budget of €2,000/month to measure the results.

If it works well, you can add LinkedIn and Facebook. And then increase the budget.

Now you have your first lead generator. This will sit there and generate new leads (and maybe already business?) for you, and collect data while you work on the next steps.

5. Create your first two drip automations (one for white papers and one for sales meetings).

You now receive leads on a regular basis, and it can be good to maintain them. You might also consider how you can use your new system to ensure that new contacts from sales meetings you've attended are not forgotten.

That's why we are now creating our first drip automations: one automatically for white paper downloads, and one that you manually add contacts to after sales meetings.

Start with a few simple emails and follow up with tips on other material that may be of interest to your contacts. If you don't have enough material yourself, it's perfectly OK to link to external sources, as long as they are relevant and reinforce your point. The aim is to keep in touch in a helpful and pleasant way, provide value, and be top-of-mind.

Now you make sure that the leads that come in are actually followed up, and you maximize the impact of your sales meetings. At the same time, you can see what the leads are doing and which ones are worth (re)contacting.

BONUS: Turn on Facebook Lead Ads to boost the number of leads.

Now that you have good lead tracking, it doesn't hurt to boost the number of leads you get. We link to Facebook Lead Ads which can give you a good boost at a low cost.

You can reuse the same materials and drips you built in the previous steps.

BONUS: Create retargeting ads.

Now you are getting leads regularly, you are using the CRM tool, and you have updated information about your contacts in the system. Why not use the information you collect about your contacts to keep in touch on other channels as well?

Start by creating new lists containing different types of contacts:

1. Contacts with business opportunities
2. Contacts that are existing customers
3. Divide the above lists further based on what they read on the website and what product they own.

Then create several different ads on Facebook - one ad for each individual list. For example, customers who own product A but not B, and business opportunities that have shown interest in different products.

Now connect your lists with your Facebook ads, so that each contact sees ads tailored to them!

Now you have a new way to be top-of-mind in a relevant way outside of email. When a contact clicks on an ad and returns, you receive an email and can resume the dialog.

6. Start blogging, posting on social media and sending out regular newsletters!

Now that you have all the basic components in place, it's time to start "doing marketing" in earnest.

Start writing good content. Publish it on your blog. Link to each new blog post on different social media. Ask your employees to spread the word. And send out a newsletter once a month summarizing your latest blog posts.

Create clear internal processes for how often you will blog (ideally once every two weeks, but once or twice a week is best). Also create clear processes for how you will share your blog posts on social media and how you will send out newsletters.

Learn over time what content is interesting for your target audience. The longer you continue and the better the content you write, the greater the impact will be. And with all the basic components from the previous steps now in place, you will maximize the results of your work.

7. repeat and improve!

Now you've made an iteration. You have a basic marketing machine that creates buzz, generates leads on a regular basis, and constantly increases in effectiveness (through your regular blogging).

Now it's time to take it a step further. Go through all the points above and think about which components you can improve and optimize:

• Are there any other white papers or guides you could write?
• Are there other topics you should talk about?
• Can you personalize the content of your newsletters?
• Are the ads giving ROI? Which ones should you replace and which ones can you improve?
• Can the landing pages that ads lead to be improved with new calls-to-action or more and better content?
• Can you update your drips with better material now that you have created many more blog posts and perhaps more white papers to link to?
• Can you make your drips more advanced, such as lowering the frequency when contacts don't click and increasing it when they do?
• Can you change the Lead Scoring model so that only leads that are interesting end up in your CRM?

The end result: What your finished Inbound and Marketing Automation machine looks like!

With the checklist above, I've tried to create a step-by-step guide that explains the easiest way to get started with Inbound Marketing using a Marketing Automation system.

Your final result should now look something like this:

• You have many and clear conversion points on your website (white paper, newsletter, contact form).
• You have many inputs from different media (blog, social media, ads) that bring new visits and lead them to the conversion points.
• You have an inspiring newsletter that keeps you top-of-mind and detects when a contact is interested.
• You have follow-up sequences to provide continued inspiration for both new leads and after customer meetings.
• All your contacts and information about your contacts are gathered in one place, you have clear segments of contacts in different lists, and you can measure the results.
• Your customer care feels more professional, valuable and inspiring.
• You have peace of mind because you know that your routines and automations ensure that no deals are missed or forgotten.

I hope this guide has been helpful!

Would you like to try an example of one of the drip campaigns I mentioned above? Below you can see a fun example of what a drip campaign might look like!