How We Develop a "Quick Win" Approach for our New Inbound Clients

I don’t think you’ll ever hear anyone at any inbound agency say that their clients are completely happy with how fast things are moving. When it comes to inbound marketing: good things do come to those that wait. But when your new client has made a significant investment in time, money and resources, the waiting game can be painful.

Even more so for B2B organizations with their longer sales cycles and often a more complex buyer’s journey.  

In order to start the relationship off on the right foot and prove our worth from the start, Flawless has some “quick win” strategies to provide real, measurable results while the heavy lifting of persona creation, keyword research, SEO best practices, content creation and website optimization is taking place. 

We all know first impressions are critical in creating trust and solidifying a healthy client-agency relationship. It’s our job to build that trust with open and clear communication of expectations and deliverables, but also to have some wins early on. We never want to sacrifice foundational inbound marketing work like HubSpot set up and onboarding tasks — but do want to ensure the honeymoon phase with our new clients last the entire engagement. We want to empower our clients with the confidence of powerful HubSpot tools, but we work to prove ourselves first. 

Early Validation: 

Beach days can turn to stormy skies early on without some preemptive work and early validation. We never want our clients to ask, “What am I paying all this money for?”

Our account managers use a repertoire of quick wins to show immediate value during what we call the purchase validation phase.   

Our Quick Win Best Practices: 

  • We avoid time-intensive activities 

  • We don’t sacrifice foundational work 

  • We always make results visible to clients 

  • We document successes and failures 

  • We rinse and repeat throughout the engagement 

Our number one rule is to always default to lead generation. Here’s a few things we focus on to make that happen quickly: 

Gated Offers / CTA Placement:  

After an evaluation of available content, we assess all conversion opportunities — including looking for an offer to gate. We review all existing live landing pages and any content that can be repurposed into an offer — there's usually something a B2B has. Ideally, a decision-stage offer is what we’re looking for. Often the sales team is the go-to source for this information. 

Optimize CTAs: 

We also focus on any call to actions (CTAs) through the client’s site. Where are they placed and how are they worded? Quick tweaks to CTAs often result in increased lead generation and conversion. The CTA must speak to what’s being offered and we generally move away from the default “submit” or “send” and prefer something more compelling and human such as “Send me my free eBook” or “I want to learn more”.  

New Contact Conversion:  

How can we increase our client’s conversion rate? Here’s a few tricks: 

  • Embed CTAs leading to Landing Page Offers on all possible pages;
  • Using the HubSpot page performance tool, we prioritize pages with over 1,000 site views; and 
  • Incorporate lead flows (or pop ups) onto appropriate pages. 

Segment and Engage the Client’s Email List: 

An email campaign as soon as possible can help to begin to drive traffic to our B2B client’s website in the early days. We prefer a segmented database for more targeted messaging but in lieu of that we can implement a simple segmentation based on: 

  • last email send (approximately)
  • job title/role
  • blog subscribers vs. others

We will then create several versions of an email for each segment and driving contacts to a specific landing page. If our client is unsure of opt-in status, we can start with a permission pass email to ensure a healthy, clean database — critical in inbound marketing.

Leverage their Social Following: 

We always evaluate and assess their social following for the biggest relevant channels — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. We then, when possible, create an awareness landing page offer, while scheduling additional posts according to the 10:4:1 rule.  

The 10-4-1 rule is basically a ratio stating that over a 15-post period, 10 should come from third-party sources, 4 should come from your companies’ blogs, and 1 should be a landing page or sales pitch. The 10:4:1 rule is a way to balance social posts between the company’s own content and sourced content.  

Create A Short Video:  

A video is often a quick and very effective way to convey a message and be perceived as a thought leader. Here’s some tips on leveraging a client’s video content: 

  • Decide between a thought leadership video vs. middle-of-the-funnel or bottom-of-the-funnel content; 
  • There are many free software options for our clients to easily create short videos, such as Soapbox.  
  • Set up a Facebook Live/LinkedIn video post with client stakeholders; 
  • How-to videos and listicles work nicely on social channels, as well. 

Other Tips and Tricks: 

Below is a list of some additional tools in the Flawless Team’s inbound marketing toolbox to get results within the first 30-60 days of a new client’s engagement with us: 

  • Pay-Per-Click / Social Ad Spend; 
  • Repurpose past successful blog posts; 
  • Run a Facebook Lookalike Campaign; 
  • Structure existing content into Pillar Pages; 
  • Optimize main site pages and high traffic pages for SEO; 
  • Optimize their pages for local search, if relevant; 
  • Run a referral program to past customers; 
  • Look for low hanging backlinks;  
  • Build a “hot” list in HubSpot based off recent engagement.

Do you have your own tricks? Want some of ours? Flawless Inbound is an award-winning expert inbound team capable of enabling growth for struggling B2Bs. We've helped more than 75 organizations across Canada and the US. Check out some of those success stories right here.