Implementing inbound marketing is as well a management task as a project, because it changes the management structure, processes, internal collaboration, and job profiles of the involved employees.
With inbound marketing, you implement fast and flexible processes (workflows) in marketing. Decentralized decisions about customer engagement, campaigns, and content ideas are made much more frequently and promptly than before.
Create clear responsibilities within the inbound marketing team
As an experienced marketer, you are already familiar with the typical management tasks involved in implementing inbound marketing. Three main tasks will challenge you in adapting your marketing resources, processes, and organizational setup:
- Training your existing employees and possibly strengthening your teams with new talents who bring complementary skills and experience.
- Adjusting your organization, competencies, and interdepartmental rules to achieve both - high individual autonomy and maximum team success.
- Revising your design and decision-making processes.
With inbound marketing, you will establish automated workflows and intensive, software-supported collaboration within your teams. You will utilize elements of Agile Marketing as a proven management style.
The implementation of your inbound marketing, from planning through team setup and budgeting to visible campaign successes, will take approximately 3-6 months. Consider temporarily expanding your team capacity by engaging experienced external consultants – this can significantly shorten the project timeline.
The three management tasks of inbound marketing
Task 1: Organization & Team Spirit
Many marketing organizations are still functionally structured. There are separate teams for advertising and media, direct mail, social media marketing, blogging, SEO, email marketing, etc.
The strength of inbound marketing lies in merging these team competencies into a powerful unit. Each team member contributes their classic marketing strengths while also gaining a unified and comprehensive generalist expertise in all relevant marketing disciplines. This enables the entire team to achieve quick successes.
First, assess how satisfied you are with the current team organization. Analyze the performance of individual teams and the future viability of the marketing organization.
- Do the various marketing tools work together and are campaigns executed in an integrated manner?
- Is the marketing staff focused on customer acquisition, lead generation, and content marketing?
- Does the mindset exist to attract potential new customers? Would marketing employees even consider personally supporting customers to advise them during the purchase decision process?
Decide how extensively you want to adjust the organizational structure of your marketing department for the implementation of inbound marketing.
- Alternative 1: Establish inbound marketing as a separate team while maintaining the functional division within marketing. This is advisable if there is still a significant reliance on traditional advertising or direct mail.
- Alternative 2: Integrate inbound marketing as an additional responsibility for the entire marketing department, so that everyone is involved. This approach allows for quick integration of inbound marketing, the ability to address various market segments, and the management of complex sales channels..
The path to organizational integration of inbound marketing will be as unique as your company, its marketing strategy, and customer requirements.
- Example 1: You integrate inbound marketing into an existing functional structure by setting up a Campaign Management Team for inbound marketing activities.
- Example 2: You establish autonomous inbound marketing teams that directly address the needs of customers and sales across different business areas (e.g., B2B/B2C, customer industries, business units, countries).
Task 2: Training & Recruiting
The right training for your marketing team determines whether and how successfully your company will implement inbound marketing. We know of large companies that spent two years selecting and technically implementing the appropriate marketing automation software for their inbound marketing. The training for employees then seriously lasted only two days—resulting in no one being either able or motivated to use the new software system at all.
You can find a lot of basic information about inbound marketing for free on the internet. However, the flood of blog posts, whitepapers, and case studies online initially provides only theoretical knowledge- essentially the know-how for an inbound marketing driver's license.
To become a good driver, you also need plenty of practical experience. Therefore, consider directly engaging an experienced consulting partner or a service agency specializing in inbound marketing services to assist with the implementation of your inbound marketing solution.
- All software providers for marketing automation offer extensive certifications, paid training, and endless amounts of online content (webinars, whitepapers, etc.). These trainings are almost exclusively focused on technical competencies and serve as a good starting point.
- Appoint an experienced marketing employee as the training manager, who, either alone or with the support of an experienced inbound marketing consultant, will define job profiles, compare the current competency profiles with the future requirements of employees, and, if necessary, coach employees or teams.
- Do not rely solely on the technical training provided by software vendors. Consider consulting with an external business consultancy or academy to assess how existing marketing tools (e.g., email, blog, social media marketing, SEO) can be integrated or migrated into the new inbound marketing strategy and identify any new competencies required.
An inbound marketing team should have competencies such as:
- Technical Skills: Specifically, email marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing. Market knowledge in these areas evolves rapidly, requiring ongoing, but individually varied, updates for each team member.
- Design & Editorial Skills: Such as blogging, creative writing, content production, and campaign management. Expertise in these areas deepens with increasing practical experience.
- Customer Intelligence Skills: Including buyer persona creation, customer engagement, and lead generation. These abilities are crucial for long-term success and are often built up slowly internally. It is usually beneficial to initially engage a specialized consultant in these areas.
How do you train and establish inbound marketing within the team?
- Route 1: You initially train a small team within marketing and make it the "inbound marketing team." You gather experience with this team and then use the team members for broader implementation.
- Route 2: You train a wide segment of the marketing department in the fundamentals and migrate initial marketing tools to inbound on a broad scale (e.g., email marketing, social media marketing). You gradually expand the integrated marketing tools and continue to train the entire team simultaneously..
- Route 3: In organizations that are strongly divided into units, you can also train a specific business unit (e.g., a business division, country subsidiary) as a pilot initially.
The role of Marketing Technology Manager is in its early stages here. So, be unconventional in your search:
- If you want to quickly close significant knowledge gaps in your team and accelerate inbound marketing, consider looking for external, experienced inbound marketing professionals. You can find them in startups or online marketing companies. You might also use recruitment networks of experienced market experts like Thought Leader Systems.
- If you have time, look for young talent in the market that you can train internally. The most important aspects of high potentials are their enthusiasm for the subject and their commitment to your company.
Task 3: Workflows & Process Management
Adjust your internal processes for the integration of Inbound Marketing. Define the processes and workflows as clearly as possible—just as you envision optimal collaboration among all involved parties.
- Consider this workflow documentation as a kind of “Revolving Document,” meaning it should be a living summary of all learnings from your ongoing operations.
- Appoint a member of your team as a temporary “Inbound Integration Manager” who will gather, evaluate, and suggest improvements based on team experiences and implement changes.
- Be flexible. Adapt the processes to the people—not the other way around. Your inbound software will provide standard workflows. Match these with the individual competencies and working styles of the team.
Professional marketing automation software like HubSpot or Marketo already provides excellent support for setting up automated workflows for communication with leads and customers.
Involve your entire team in designing these workflows and create a sense of “ownership” for them. The entire team should continuously question and optimize your marketing workflows.
Agile marketing is a leadership principle derived from software development that helps marketing organizations meet the demands of the digital age.
Especially in inbound marketing, your marketing team works with digital speed. You see the results of your ongoing marketing campaigns in real time and continuously optimize in collaboration with colleagues from all teams.
With a marketing automation software, you integrate your email marketing, social media activities, blog, and web customer acquisition processes into an efficiently connected system. Every employee using your inbound marketing software shapes the real-time customer communication of your company.
Therefore, ensure in your planning phase that you and your leadership team are prepared for quick response times and high delegation. Integrate key elements of agile project management into your marketing with agile marketing:
- Prioritize Current Learnings: Weight your team's current learnings higher than your experiences and preconceptions about customer behavior.
- Customer-Centric Collaboration: Place the customer-focused collaboration of all involved parties in the company above departmental interests.
- Replace Big Campaigns: Replace large, traditional campaigns (Big Bang campaigns) with a multitude of simultaneously running, segmented campaigns. Optimize campaigns iteratively.
- Ongoing Exploration: Treat exploring customer needs as an ongoing, never-ending learning process. Remain open to constant changes in customer behavior.
- Adaptability in Planning: Adapt your marketing planning and incorporate much more flexibility than before. Discuss these changes with your controlling and sales teams. Your marketing plan should be as adaptable as the business environment in your market.
- Respond to Changes: Prefer reacting to visible changes over rigidly following an existing plan. Work with your team in small steps (so-called sprints) and review the results.
- Conduct Small Experiments: Initiate many small, worthwhile experiments in your inbound marketing. This will provide a higher learning curve and better results in customer acquisition.