What Does Football Have to do With Your Inbound Marketing Plan?

It all happens in four quarters.

Two teams take the field, each with the same goal—pass, throw, and hand-off a ball to score more touchdowns than the opposing team. Does this sound like your regular autumn Sunday full of football (minus the yelling and celebrating, of course)?

Before your start drafting your hall-of-fame team, let’s consider your campaigns and customers. Think of each of your campaigns as a football game and your consumers as the football. Like in football, your goal with consumers is to strategically carry and guide them down the field and ultimately, score, in your case, not a touchdown, but a lead conversion! But prior to taking the field each week, teams develop a strategy to defeat their opponent. To do so, they need strong a strong game plan and players. Choosing elements of your inbound marketing plan is a lot like building a Superbowl-winning team.

Every team has a set of unique plays that make up their game plan. Each week, they study their opponents and piece together plays, defenses, and tactics to build their game strategy. As a business owner, you too have need to study your competition to see how you can differentiate yourself and build a strategy that will help consumers choose you over competitors. The best way to do this is by performing a  analysis, which reveals your business’s internal strengths and weaknesses in addition to external opportunities and threats. From there, you can begin selecting your players.

The Quarterback is the leader of the offensive team. He calls the plays and ultimately, starts the football’s (or in this case, your consumers’) journey down the field. Your inbound marketing plan quarterback takes several forms, in the shape of your marketing vehicles, ranging from social media posts, to blogs, and other online media. It calls the plays, which are your call-to-actions (CTAs). Your CTAs, like plays, tell consumers what to do next—visit your website, sign up for an emailing list, etc.

A team’s offensive line is the front line of protection for the quarterback and the football. Along with other players, they help block the opponents and clear a path for the football to move farther up the field. Your inbound offensive line is made up of your landing pages, which are web pages that offer premium content in exchange for a consumer’s personal contact information. These web pages clear a path for web visitors, and once they’ve given some of their personal information, they’ll then be able to move up the field and download or view your premium content.

A first down indicates that a team has moved the ball 10 yards up the field. It gives the team chance to implement new strategy and gives them at least four more plays to get closer to the end zone and score. Think of gaining a new lead as getting a first down. While it’s by no means a scoring play, it means you’re one step closer to your goal. At this point, you can look back at your inbound marketing plan playbook and select plays, such as an email drip campaign, to nurture your leads and move them farther up the field.

Each time an offense steps on the field, their goal is to score a touchdown. This is the same for inbound marketing. Each time you engage in an inbound marketing plan, your goal is to score by gaining new consumers. A converted lead means that you’ve successfully navigated your way down the marketing field and made it to the end zone with your consumer.

Building your inbound marketing plan takes time and careful examination of your business and consumers. By analyzing your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, you can recruit a group of inbound marketing tools and build a strong playbook that will ultimately help you attract new leads, convert them into sales, and ultimately become inbound marketing Superbowl Champions!

Want to learn more about drafting your inbound marketing team? Check out more of our inbound marketing .

As a in Denver, we strive to captivate your audience and elevate your brand through Smart Design and Creative Solutions. We believe marketing is a collaborative effort, achieved by practicing agility and working cohesively with your team, not for it. Using data-driven solutions, we implement the best practices necessary to help your business exceed KPIs. 

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