In 2008, the term Inbound Marketing left its mark on the world of digital marketing. A new way of thinking, a new approach, to address a new paradigm. It was finally time to move from mass communication to more personalized, more targeted communication. The leitmotif? Deliver the right high-quality, relevant content, at the right time, on the right channel, to the right person. This completely reversed the trend, shifting from a push model to a pull model. The challenge was to attract prospects instead of overwhelming everyone and anyone with anything at all, at the risk of completely missing the mark. The evangelization did its work, and many organizations set about implementing what seemed to be the miracle solution.
It should be noted that an Inbound Marketing strategy cannot be improvised, otherwise failure is guaranteed. Among the essential steps are, of course, analyzing personas and the buyer journey, defining editorial guidelines, designing an editorial calendar including the main themes, the topics to cover, the formats, the types of content, creating a blog … Not to mention the social distribution strategy to give all the content created this way broad exposure so that it finds an audience and becomes a source of business. Inbound Marketing also means tools, and it is to meet the need for simplification and time savings, among other things, that marketing automation and social automation tools were born.
Many marketers who, convinced by the approach and the merits of Inbound Marketing, nevertheless quickly found themselves faced with a crucial question.
What about content ROI in all this?
We must be honest and straightforward. Once again, it cannot be improvised. Inbound Marketing requires regular, high-quality publication of content in all formats. This includes, for example, blog articles, the most obvious format, as well as video, infographics, not forgetting photography, and increasingly podcasts. This therefore implies an investment in time, human resources, and budget.
Just as an Excel spreadsheet has never made you an accountant, a tube of paint has never made you a Rembrandt. The tool alone is useless. This is what led some to say that Inbound Marketing, marketing automation, and social automation all sounded great but were just pretty buzzwords, not to say plain old bullshit…
So, what do we do? Ideally, we would be able to demonstrate that Inbound Marketing actions have made it possible to generate qualified leads and therefore business, and thus make the investment profitable. Except that content ROI has become something of the Holy Grail of the 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 marketer…. Everyone talks about it, everyone is looking for it, but no one seems to know where it really is!
What if the Marketing Automation + Social Automation duo were part of the solution?
Marketing Automation and Social Automation tools are somewhat the Yin and Yang of a successful Inbound Marketing strategy. Without Social Automation, no social reach for the content created and therefore less visibility, engagement, and opportunity detection. Without Marketing Automation, no tracking of the prospect’s journey, no email campaigns, no assessment of maturity level… and the list is not exhaustive.
Today, more advanced features and the possible links between the two tools make it possible to increasingly refine the data collected, analyze weak signals, but also and above all assess ROI for each piece of content.
How? That is what I invite you to discover during the workshop I will have the pleasure of leading on September 4 at Automationday in Lyon.
