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The Inbound Marketing Dance

Denver Marketing Firm

Being a trained dancer for over 10 years, and a coach for a competitive high school dance team for the last 4 years has taught me a thing or two about hard work, perseverance, and dedication. Surprisingly, I’ve also made some major connections between the art of dance and the art of inbound marketing. It makes sense when you really think about it. After all, inbound marketing is just one giant dance between marketing and sales.

So, how can you get your lead successfully through the inbound marketing dance, including all of your content and conversion points, without missing a beat and out the other side to a coliseum full of clapping spectators and judges (your customers)? It’s not as easy as it sounds. Without further ado, I present to you the inbound marketing dance, choreographed by yours truly.

5, 6, 7, 8...

Choreographing Your Campaign

A well-danced routine is nothing without solid choreography. As a coach and choreographer, I change our competition routines daily. Sometimes, I have a really amazing picture in my head about what it’s all going to look like when 15 dancers are executing the choreography. I have to come up with different group parts, visuals, musicality, and technique. Then, when I teach my dancers, it falls apart. It looks terrible. I have to change it, or we will get marked down on our scoresheets and we won’t achieve the results we want. Inbound marketing is frighteningly similar. When you’re creating your overall campaign strategy, you’re going to have this big picture in your head, but it may not turn out the way you imagined. You constantly have to reassess and make adjustments, as the campaign continues and you begin seeing actual results (or lack thereof). A campaign has a lot of moving parts to account for, so make sure you’re constantly evaluating them with a critical eye. Again, a well-danced inbound campaign is nothing without solid strategy.

“Do it One More Time”

My dance girls are always groaning and complaining, “you said we only had to do it one more time!” Famous last words. I may say “one more time”, but what I mean is “keep doing it until you look better”. With inbound marketing, it can be frustrating and easy to become complacent when you aren’t seeing results right away. SEO and blogging are long-term strategies that will take time to generate results. But, keep chipping away, “do it one more time”, and eventually, you’ll get there!

A Sickled Foot is Like a Bad Blog Article

A dance teacher’s biggest pet peeve is a sickled foot. Well, okay, we have a lot of them but that’s a major one. A sickled foot is like a bad blog article. It’s so close to doing the right thing, but it’s not. So you should stop, right now. Every inbound marketer knows “I need to be blogging”, but producing blog content just for volume alone is not the solution, and can end up penalizing your credibility with leads and search engines alike. Make sure you’re putting out quality content. It takes time, but if you keep correcting and training yourself, you’ll be there in no time. And that goes for that sickled foot, too. Bleh!

Practice Makes Perfect

With anything in life, practice makes perfect. Perfecting a new technical skill in dance takes repetition and adjustments, over and over. Learning a new dance is the same thing. Eventually, you’ll get it into your muscle memory and it will become something that you can just do. Perfecting your inbound marketing skills is very similar. Continue to use best practices and it will eventually become ingrained in your inbound muscle memory.

It’s Showtime!

My dancers practice every day for 3 hours to prepare for competitions on top of games, fundraisers, school, and other performances. They put a lot of preparation in just to perform a 2-minute routine. But, boy, they sure do shine when it’s time. Inbound marketing is very similar. You spend weeks preparing to launch a campaign, making sure all of your ducks are in a row. Then, boom! It’s Showtime. Time to go out there and show those leads what you’ve got! Make it count. With the right choreography, technique, and practice, you can go out there and give one hell of a performance.