Carolyn Edgecomb in Checklists writes…

You wouldn’t just jump on a plane and start your holiday on the fly, would you?

Your holiday may come together if you take this approach, but it certainly would not be enjoyable. In fact, it would probably be a mess and lead to quite a few headaches.

The key to success in any large process is starting with a solid plan.

Treat your inbound marketing campaign exactly as you would treat the process of planning your vacation. Take time to carefully plan the various aspects of your campaign to ensure that in the end you are relaxing on the beach rather than begging for a room at a motel.

If you are looking for a starting point, we have the perfect planner for you. Check out our checklist for planning your campaign, an excerpt from our new Ebook,  The Ultimate Inbound Marketing Checklist , below:

10 Point Checklist for Planning Your Campaign :

1.Know Your Goals

Before starting any inbound marketing program, it’s important that you know your goals. If your company has moderate goals, then you need to develop a moderate inbound marketing program and allocate resources accordingly. If you have aggressive goals, then you should opt for a more aggressive inbound marketing strategy.

2. Know your Prospects’ Sales Cycle

The goal of your inbound marketing campaign is to fill your sales funnel, assist in the sales process, and ultimately improve sales. Analyze your prospects ‘ typical sales cycle, as well as your company’s typical sales process in order to identify how content can help educate prospects, assist sales efforts, and improve sales readiness.

3. Market with Your Strengths

When building your campaign, identify what you do well and implement it into your marketing process. If you’re a good speaker, create videos of yourself. If you’re a strong writer, build a campaign that’s content heavy to prove your expertise. If you’re a strong graphic designer, build visual content. Be creative and market with your strengths.

4. Collect Your Assets

You don’t have to start from scratch. If you’re a business that’s been around for a few years, collect any assets you may have to include in your inbound marketing campaign. This can include old brochures, recorded videos, pictures, case studies, customer testimonials, slideshows, whitepapers, software demos and trials, coupons and discounts, etc. This can all be repurposed and implemented into your inbound marketing campaign.

5. Analyze Competition

Your competitors play a big role in your inbound marketing efforts. Performing a thorough analysis of your competitors’ websites, content, social media strategies, and search presence will provide you with valuable insight. You can use this insight to develop your inbound marketing strategies, differentiate yourself, and overtake your competition.

6. Develop Value Proposition

Your value proposition tells customers and prospective customers how you can solve a problem. You should put your message on every marketing channel . It should clearly state why someone would make a purchase from your company, among the many others out there that appear to do similar things.

7. Identify KPI’s & Set Benchmarks

You won’t know how effective your inbound marketing campaign is if you’re not using marketing analytics to monitor your KPI’s and achieving your benchmarks. Not every metric is going to work; identify the key performance indicators for your company that are critical in determining the overall success of your campaign.

8. Develop a Content Creation Strategy

Content is king . It’s critical that you build your strategy for creating content on an ongoing and routine basis. Will you be writing it? Will other members of your team? Are you going to outsource it? Remember – just because business is getting busy does not mean you can stop creating content.

9. Create Buyer Personas

You cannot attract prospects with your content if you don’t know anything about them. Take the time to develop your fictional representation of your ideal prospect. What do they look like? What are their goals and pain points? How do they consume information and how do they buy? It’s a lot easier to develop lead generating content when you know who you are writing for and what affects their purchase behavior. Need help? Learn how to create profitable buyer personas .

10. Implement Marketing Software

If you haven’t tried implementing marketing software to assist with your marketing activities, you don’t know what you’re missing. A software like HubSpot will help improve your efficiency , automate tedious activities, and provide you with the data you need to be a better marketer.We often make the analogy that HubSpot to a marketer is like Quickbooks to an accountant.