Growth Hacking With Inbound Marketing - How Do I Start?

Kennedy Andersson AB www.kennedyandersson.com
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Inbound Marketing – a “go-to-market” strategy – the first stage.
Introduction
To have an impact with your business in today’s dynamic market place, the more attractive you can make your brand or
company to customers the more likely you will be able to drive visitor traffic to your website, create leads and nurture
opportunities to make a sale. Whether you are a start-up, an established or mature business it is important to plan and
document a strategy on what you are going to do, how and why. Inbound marketing is a methodology that looks to attract
rather than distract customers, and it does this by drawing customers onto your website by helping leads find you through
educational and informative content.
When you are starting out with a plan there are a few simple questions that you need to address:
o Why does my company/brand exist?
o Why would customers use you?
o How will we change the market and the world around us?
o What are the values and beliefs that drive my company and guide my brand?
Now that you have started to think about the DNA of your business, it is vital to identify, understand and address what are
your customer’s pains, challenges, problems or goals. What is it that your customers are trying to solve by purchasing your
product or service?

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In this document we have created a few templates to help you get started on this planning stage. If you are looking to
address a “go-to-market” strategy, or maybe just hit your sales goal, walk through the following exercise to help you
identify what are those Critical Success Factors and take time to detail what your Buyer Personas are so that you can
understand the pain and target your solution.
At Kennedy Andersson we have adopted a growth hacking mentality, using our knowledge and experience of marketing,
sales and distribution, with a touch of creativity and technology to bring about growth in companies. A good growth hacker
will understand lead generation, sales funnels and that there are different stages and approaches to be made along the
sales funnel. They will understand the importance of a buyer persona, and know what kind of content and strategy is
needed to ignite growth combining it with inbound marketing.

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What were the factors
that created the
Inbound Marketing
methodology?

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1. Critical Success Factors exercise:
Why do customers use you? (How do you meet their needs?)
• Agree 5 reasons why your customers buy from you, what benefits do you bring – based on Product, Price, Location
and Promotion?
• Decide how important each factor is and give it a score (weighting) out of 100. Highest importance gets 100.
For example:
Critical success factor = “EXAMPLE Product a running shoe” Weighting (out of 100)
1 (Factor 1 – impact on running performance) 100
2 (Factor 2 - motion control) 95
3 (Factor 3 – natural fit) 85
4 (Factor 4 – engineered manufacturing) 95
5 (Factor 5– country of design) 75

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Your turn to try:
• Remember these can be any factors that you feel are responsible for your success.
• And weight the most important to you with 100.
Critical success factors for your business = Weighting (out of 100)
1 Factor 1
2 Factor 2
3 Factor 3
4 Factor 4
5 Factor 5

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Next:
• Agree how you would score your product and then score how you think your customer or buyer would rate you (out
of 10) for each of the factors that you gave.
• Then multiply each score by the weighting you gave each of them (the out of 10 score). Compare scores to see if you
can identify if there are any areas you need to address or gaps.
For example:
Example: running shoe Your score Customer / Buyer
scoring
Factor 1.
(performance)
10 x 100 = 1000 9 x 100 = 900
Factor 2.
(control)
8 x 95 = 760 7 x 95 = 665
Factor 3.
(fit)
8 x 85 = 680 9 x 85 = 765
Factor 4.
(engineering)
9 x 95 = 855 8 x 95 = 760
Factor 5.
(designers)
6 x 75 = 450 5 x 75 = 375
Total score 3745 3465

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Your turn:
Critical factors for your
business (from above)
Your score How Customer /
Buyer would
score you
Factor 1. ( ?/10) x
weighting = xx
( ?/10) x
weighting = xx
Factor 2.
Factor 3.
Factor 4.
Factor 5.
Total score
• Review the differences in scores to see where your product is better or worse compared to what you think and your
customers.
The idea is for you to try and see your business from a different perspective, to think more about your customer or buyer
rather than a bias view you will have about your own product and services.

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2. Buyer personas
Buyer personas
It is important to invest time developing your unique buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of
your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Without knowing who your ideal customers are, their backgrounds, goals, pain and how your product or service will benefit
them it’s very difficult to create content (or in fact, an effective overall marketing strategy).
Creating content for the buyer’s journey
Once we understand the buyer persona and their pain, it’s time to create content that helps accomplish your business
goals. To make a campaign successful, we will need to use content that the target persona will find valuable enough to
download in exchange for their contact details.
The main thing to remember is that it must be perceived as valuable enough that the persona is willing to “pay” for it with
their personal information i.e. an email address.

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Buyer persona (answer these questions to build your persona)
Background (buyer role, type of job, etc.)
Demographics (male / female, age, location where they live, seniority in work, etc.)
Firmographics (industry type, company size, location, number of employees, etc.)
What are their Goals (Primary and secondary)?
What is the Pain they are looking to address (Primary and secondary)?
What do we offer as a company to help them achieve their goals or overcome specific pain?
Objections (why would they not buy your product or service?)
Short message we would give them (how would you describe your solution).
Where would they search for information? The type of information, keywords, channels they would use, etc.?
(Most companies would have between 1 – 4 personas.)

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To understand the Buyer‘s Journey
(sales funnel) think about:
Do you have a Customer Lifecycle
definition (suspects, prospects, leads,
contacted, converted, lapsed or lost)?
What is your industry, are there
particular buying patterns, preferred
contact channels, decision maker
profiles?
Do you communicate differently as
customers go through the various stages
in the funnel?
Do you know how to qualify a lead, and
when to pass it on to the sales team?
(MQL = Marketing Qualified Lead)
(SQL = Sales Qualified Lead)
Buyers'Journey' Buying'Experience'(Funnel)'
Sales&funnel

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Review the journey below (customer touch points) and digital shopping experience of your personas, where do you have
contact with them and in what order, and where could you influence them most?
Example of customer touch points:
Keywords SEO Website Video Emails Telephone Face-to-
Face
Social
media
Display
ads
Re-
marketing
Webinars
Who are your competitors (local, regional, national or International)? Where is the industry as a whole going in your area?
Which groups are becoming opinion formers or influencers in your industry?
Do you have a competitor strategy (proactive, reactive, copy, run away, etc.)?
What are the trends (type of business, customer requests, new source markets, etc.) seen recently?

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Summary
So for any opportunity to work as a start-up, or maturing business you need to understand some basics:
1) What kind of customers will you sell to?
2) What problems do they have that you can solve?
3) What will be the particular features that are going to resonate with them from your product or service?
4) Which channels will they visit to search for a solution?
5) As a small to medium sized business will you want to trigger sales without potentially having to handle each
individual customer?
6) Focus on your website to convert leads
7) Use marketing automation to nurture those leads
8) Use great content, keywords and SEO to drive traffic to your website
9) Align strategy with the target customer (buyer personas), make sure the company culture, cost structure and skill
set are aligned to your customers
So for this first stage when you are planning, your need to:
1. Identify your target market and buyer personas
2. Define your competitive advantage and what your selling proposition will be
3. Establish brand positioning for your business

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Any questions or comments?
John Kennedy
CEO/VD Kennedy Andersson AB
Örebro / Stockholm
www.kennedyandersson.com
0705 78 42 66

Growth Hacking With Inbound Marketing - How Do I Start?

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