Plan – Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the purpose of this marketing strategy?
• What are some of the challenges that your organization has faced in the past?
• Who is your ideal customer, and what is the best way to attract them?
• Where do potential customers or clients search when they are looking for a company like yours?
• How much time and money should you be investing in marketing?

Create – Build and maintain a website that is:

• Simple to navigate or operate
• Professional and polished
• Search engine optimization-friendly
• Easily viewable on mobile devices
• Easy to update and repair when necessary

Distribute – The following activities will be sure to increase traffic to your organization’s website:

• Blogging: Write blog posts that are directed toward your target audience. A well-written blog can easily double your website’s traffic.
• Social Media: Develop a loyal following across all of your social media pages. Share your blog posts to these pages and engage your stakeholders in conversation.
• Search Engine Optimization: Identify the keywords for your company, and created targeted content that includes those words. Build quality links to your website that will attract customers.

Capture – Create interesting offers and calls to action that appeal to potential customers:

• Build landing pages that describe your offer and provide a form in which to collect information from these sources.
• When the form has been completed, the user will gain access to your offer, be entered in your CRM system, and then receive an automatic email.

Analyze – Leads should be segmented into lists based on the form that the customer completed, or the way in which the lead came in. Understand where your leads came from so that you know whom to contact first.

Cultivate – Continue to develop lead-nurturing campaigns that will further educate your leads and take them down the sales funnel. Using methods such as email marketing should be utilized to stay in touch with all of the contacts in your CRM.

Convert – In order to convert traffic into actual sales leads, it is important to understand which content to provide them with in the first place. This means that throughout each stage of the process, you want to tailor your content accordingly. This will naturally guide your leads from the information-gathering stage to the point at which they become your customer.

Content should be organized in the following fashion:

• Awareness – Blogs, Advertisements, Public Relations, Articles
• Educational Offers – eBooks, White Papers, Videos
• Validation Offers – Webinars, Podcasts, Seminars
• Sales – Proposals, Meetings, Demos

This article is Part One of a six-part series. Check out Part Five.