How to Prepare for Working with an Inbound Marketing Provider

Yesterday's blog post was about getting started with inbound marketing. Hopefully your business has already made that decision and are ready to move forward.

Most businesses and organizations will likely be hiring an agency to handle many of the inbound marketing tasks and strategy. So, if you've decided to work with an inbound marketing provider, there are some things that you can do to make the transition effective and efficient.

1. Educate yourself and have your internal team that will be involved get up-to-speed on inbound marketing. Here's a basic inbound marketing glossary for beginners so you can speak and understand the lingo. When getting started, you really only need to know the basics, but here are a few specific topics that are helpful to understand:

• Buyer Personas
• The Buyer's Journey
• The Inbound Marketing Funnel or Methodology
• Content Marketing

2. Determine your internal team. Before choosing the team, do step 1 for yourself. Your understanding of inbound marketing will likely impact how you choose the best people for the team. Provide the inbound marketing agency of the individuals on the team, their role at the business, and their expected role with the inbound marketing initiatives.

3. Provide your inbound marketing provider with information about your business, products, and services. This might be sales sheets, product demos, typical customers, buying cycles, current online & offline sales process, etc. The more knowledgeable they are about you, the more efficient things will run.

3. Draft an outline of what you are hoping to accomplish by adopting an inbound marketing strategy. This does not have to be set in stone, but it should be a bit more detailed than "get more sales".

4. Gather information about your website technology. You don't have to know what these things mean, but...

• Know what CMS (content management system) you have
• Find out if you have or will be able to provide FTP access
• Any non-apparent technical details about the website that you are aware of
• Any technology changes you are planning as a result of the inbound marketing strategy (new website, Hubspot, etc.)
• Your email marketing platform (if it already exists)
• Your CRM (customer relationship management) (if you have one)

5. Provide access to your Google Analytics and any other relevant analytics software you might have.

This should be enough to get started and these things can all easily be gathered before your initial inbound marketing kick-off. Some of these things would be helpful to know in the RFP stage when you are interviewing candidates as well.