First, Get the Right Tools

The best thing about gazpacho is that it’s fresh. There’s no fire involved, so every ingredient is front and center with nothing to bake or char to mask flavorings. You have to get the right combination and blend everything precisely to taste. Whether it’s smooth and silky or unconventionally chunky, if you use the right ingredients for the right appetites, you can’t go wrong.

Listen to your personas. Does your audience like things simple and frill-free? Create a lead generation plan that gives them short-but-sweet content they’ll keep coming back for. Does your customer persona indicate that storytelling goes a long way? Give them storytelling content relevant to their stage in the buying journey, and make sure you share the stories on your social channels.

The most crucial aspect of a moon pie is the cookie sandwich. Soft yet substantial, the cookies are like your subject lines and your CTAs, the most crucial part of your marketing emails.

If you don’t have an irresistible subject line and CTA, your whole email marketing plan will fall apart and just be a bunch of hard-to-grasp goo. The perfect cookies will turn email into that sweet, delicious marshmallow center—but it can’t stand on its own. It needs the subject line and CTA to make it stick.

The sweet and shiny layer of chocolate is like your entire campaign strategy, including your segmented list, personalization efforts, and optimization for mobile. Smooth and precise, making sure everything stays on course.

Like a good web page, on its own a good waffle will get the job done: You can eat it and it will provide sustenance. But will you enjoy it and want to come back for more? Heck, no. Who wants naked waffles?

As with waffles, please don’t leave your web pages naked. Add the right amount of syrup, but don’t pour a forest of maple trees on your waffles. Much like too-large images that take a long time to load, too much syrup can be a real turnoff.

When there are so many good things you can add to waffles—and web pages—to optimize them for consumption, there’s no reason to just do the bare minimum and hope that’s enough. Remember to optimize for mobile. At the very least, make sure your headlines are sprinkled with relevant keywords used in mobile search.

Kick-up your SEO strategy, and make sure that every aspect of your site that includes words is optimized, including:

• Page URL and title
• Alt text and meta description
• H1 headings
• Body copy

Once your keyword game is on point, people can actually find you. Then you’ll need to make sure your site is a quick and seamless experience, so use a CDN to improve page speed by using the smallest-sized images possible to improve page loading, and ensure your customers can do everything on mobile.

And please don’t skimp on security. Sure, your website will still exist without tight web security, but HTTPS sites are favored over HTTP sites in search engines so lock down your web security.

First, decide what variety of taco you’re going to serve. You’ll never be able to offer your customers something that’s nuanced and created with them in mind if you don’t ask what they want and create personas. Don’t serve meat tacos to vegans—know your audience, and you’ll know what they want to click.

Set your CRO goal. It doesn’t have to be lofty. If you’re starting from almost zero, literally any improvement is a big win. And remember, even a 1 percent improvement in conversions is a big victory. It’s just not realistic to improve 80 percent out of the gate, so take your CRO efforts in increments.

Then make a plan on how to reach your goal, and make sure it includes A/B testing. Sometimes your customers’ actions speak louder than their words. Testing will help you see what makes the decision to click easy.

There are as many different kinds of cupcakes as there are different kinds of customers. If you have strong data that shows your customers are crazy about carrot cake cupcakes, by all means, give them what they want and make sure there’s plenty of cream cheese frosting to go with it.

But never let what you know get in the way of improving your CTAs.

If your customers have flocked to your shiny red CTA buttons for years, but recently you’ve seen clicks drop, then your CTA strategy may need to change. With both CTAs and cupcakes, there are trends. Last year your customers couldn’t get enough of caramel cupcakes, but this year, it’s not tempting them as much. Do some A/B testing and let it guide you to what types of CTAs you offer, to who, and when.

Think of your customers like a typical family with kids. The whole family has always been a big fan of vanilla cupcakes—every birthday cake has been vanilla for more than a decade. Then the teenage daughter suddenly hates vanilla, insisting on hazelnut chai, and she wants it naked, sans icing.

Always plan for changing attitudes and behaviors—even if it’s just a segment of your larger audience—and continually test your CTAs to make sure you’re not trying to tempt customers with outdated flavors.

Crust makes or breaks a pizza, and the same is true about content offers and your landing pages. You can create the most beautiful landing page in the history of landing pages, but if your content offer is blah, there’s no topping that will make it perform. (Especially not pineapple, people!)

Start with relevant content your audience needs.

Next? The sauce. That’s the copy weaving throughout your design, executing your content strategy with persona-loving language and comforting CTAs. This includes sign-up forms that are as simple as possible but also smart, recognizing if that customer has visited the landing page before.

Design is all of that delicious cheese pulling everything together, making lead-capture forms irresistible, using color palettes that are easy to digest, and making any toppings fit and flow. This includes sharing buttons and testimonials.

You should always be prepping a new roux for your current customers. They deserve fresh batches of gumbo every time they interact with you, and that means actual, useful information—not selling.

Educate, don’t sell. At this point in their journey, your customers trust you and will buy from you. Keep that trust going by always perfecting your content strategy.

Just as important is making your current customers feel special. Nothing makes a current customer feel worse than a new customer getting better service just because they’re new. If you’re using inbound content marketing, you’re building relationships or you're not succeeding. Inbound without relationships is like trying to create gumbo from the roux without adding in any other ingredients.

Build up that roux—that customer relationship—with fresh vegetables and the best meats and sausages, and let it simmer until perfection and serve.

Once you’ve determined where your customers like to eat their cake—or leave their reviews—it’s time to create your profile. If you already have a profile, then refine your presence, making sure you’re using the right language for the right people. You don’t want to serve a gluten-sensitive customer a cake full of wheat flour. You’d use oat flour instead.

In the same vein, make sure your profile provides customers with correct and current company information, and anything else they require to be comfortable leaving you a review.

As with serving cake, your customers need the right approach. Depending on what your personas tell you or how many customers you have, it can be one-on-one, one-on-everyone, or you can leave the outreach to a third-party review site.

Then, determine who should get the review requests. You can do things like talk to your sales reps to see who’s the most pleased, or go by your net promoter score (NPS) and reach out from there. Once you’ve launched your review acquisition plan, monitor and adjust to the channels and customer groups that are giving the most valuable reviews.

Yes, things have changed. But classics like shrimp cocktail never go out of style, and neither does solid inbound marketing strategy.

The truth is, it’s really easy to screw up both marketing strategy and shrimp cocktail. Inbound marketers know that if your personas aren’t on point, your content will miss and fail like rubbery shrimp and cocktail sauce from a can.

If you haven’t updated your personas recently (if you can’t remember, it’s been too long), do it now and dive deep. Help them succeed so you can succeed—actively listen and actually hear feedback. (Every time your service helps a customer improve their service, an inbound marketer’s heart swells.)

Finally, the best thing you can do to increase customer success stories: Be super picky about your customers. Understand your target personas, and don’t be afraid to recognize when a customer should go to someone else.