Three key steps to creating in-house inbound marketing

As your organisation ‘grows up’ from a start-up to a more mature company, you have a tremendous opportunity to build an in-house inbound marketing function.

Imagine running a team where everybody is ‘in marketing’ because the smarts of all your people are being shared.

As your entire team helps create more useful and helpful content to educate customers you will begin to attract more leads, customers and revenue.

The goal is to build an in-house inbound marketing function where your whole team is social media enabled and everyone is contributing to the content marketing efforts of the organisation.  This is known as a ‘social business’.

To get this stage, there are three major paradigms that must adjust.

1. Management must empower

It’s much easier building a ‘social business’ from the ground up than it is to implement widespread change later. Fortunately for you, as a start-up entrepreneur, this plays to your strengths because you have the ability to handpick your team and mould your culture.

When you trust your team to do their best, it means you can start to realise the potential of their collective brain power and personal networks.  And this obviously compounds as your team grows.

2. Marketing must make it easy

The marketing team’s job is to extract the content from the organisation’s in-house subject matter expert, and use it to help educate prospective customers.

Education is definitely the way to drive sales and business growth.  As I’ve said before, informed people buy, not confused or ignorant people.  And your role as marketer is to unleash the knowledge that is sitting the heads and computers of the people within your organisation.

Your existing team, or future team if you are just one person right now, have all the marketing ideas, content and tools that you could ever need.  Your responsibility is to identify it, extract it and then harness the power of your team’s collective personal networks to share it.

3. Subject matter experts are the ‘new marketing heroes’!

Turn your technical boffins and in-house experts into the stars of your marketing efforts.

Whilst they may not necessarily be natural writers, content creators or marketers, you can simply interview these experts and then use your skills to turn that interview into a YouTube video, an audio file, a blog post, e-book or template.

You can then hand it back to the subject matter expert for final approval and share it out via your social networks!

In my opinion, this is the future of web marketing and the direction you should be leading your organisation.

If you’re interested in building your marketing function from the ground up, this free Inbound Marketing Flight Plan provides a step by step process for building a permanent web asset for your organisation.