There are other, less expensive ways to reach potential clients.
You can use inbound marketing to attract customers to your business instead of reaching out to them. Inbound marketing is a marketing approach that is customer-centric or buyer-driven.
This means that businesses which use inbound marketing focus on attracting customers by providing engaging content. Inbound marketing relies heavily on organic search engine optimization (SEO), making it more cost-effective than traditional outbound marketing strategies such as paid advertising.
So you’ve covered all of the basics of your inbound marketing program:
- You know your audience. You created buyer personas and your website and content has been developed to be persona-centric.
- You’re creating great content. You have blog posts going live twice a week and several members of your organization have bought-in to creating educational content with you.
- You’re doing everything you’re told you need to do to attract prospects. You know your keywords, you’ve got all of the basic SEO covered, you’re active on social, all of your content is very shareable, and you’ve submitted some guest posts on sites where your personas hang out.
- You’ve set up all of your conversion paths. Every page has CTAs, especially at the end of your blog articles, and you have dozens of landing pages offering great premium content. You’ve also made subscribing to your blog easy, attractive, and valuable.
- You’re set up to work your inbound leads. You know how to define, segment, and nurture MQLs and SQLs, you’ve got your workflows ready to go, and you send out strong marketing emails.
- You know your KPIs and how to use your analytics. You have HubSpot setup and you know how to use the data to make smart marketing decisions.
It’s common to feel like inbound marketing isn’t working after investing time and resources into it, but it may just take longer to see results than other marketing methods.
Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. With inbound marketing now widely accepted, businesses need more than just a blog or eBook to stand out from their competition and attract the attention of their potential customers. They need something unexpected, something with the wow factor that inspires leads to convert and, in turn, tell their friends about it.
Here are some trade secrets that we use to help our clients’ businesses succeed.
10 Inbound Marketing Tips to Follow
Inbound marketing is a way of marketing that is focused on building authority in your business area over time. You provide valuable information and solutions to your prospects, address their pain points, and solve their problems. This builds trust with your prospects and converts them into paying customers.
In order to be successful, you may need to do more than just have an optimized blog. Inbound marketing, when done correctly, can provide more opportunities for lead generation than any outbound marketing tactic.
For someone new to the idea of implementing inbound marketing, here are ten tips that you should follow:
1. Strategize a marketing workflow.
The first step in planning an inbound marketing campaign is to strategize the workflow. This means setting goals and planning marketing strategies based on what you want to achieve.
Here is a 3-step workflow for strategic marketing.
- Attract: Create valuable content to draw your audience to your website or social media network through blog posts, videos, and more.
- Engage: Find a way to create a lasting connection with your visitors by capturing information about them. For example, collect their emails through sign-up forms or landing pages.
- Delight: Provide trusted information and relevant content to the right people, making them loyal customers and, eventually, promoters. This can involve being in touch with your audience through regular emails or social media interactions
Your first step is to understand each phase of the buyer’s journey and develop a strategy for it. Depending on the products or services your offer, you need to create an overview of how you plan to attract and engage your target audience in each stage.
2. Create detailed buyer personas.
The first step in the inbound marketing process is creating At the heart of inbound marketing is creating compelling content that attracts your ideal customer. However, in order to create content that is relevant to your audience, you need to first understand more about your audience. In-depth research and analysis is necessary to identify prospects who are likely to buy from you.
You can create a detailed buyer persona by answering the following questions:
- Who are they? Their gender, age, marital status, designation, and so on.
- Where do they reside? Do they stay in small cities or metropolitan areas, or mostly travel?
- What type of problems do they have that you can solve?
- What will interest them in your content?
- Which platform are they likely to be on?
If you have a customer base or an email list, use surveys to collect more information about them. Ask about their needs, problems, expectations, etc. This will help you not only get a better understanding of your ideal customers, but also identify specific pain points. This information can then be used to create content addressing these problem areas.
3. Develop a loyalty program.
Building a loyalty program is a strategic way to develop trust with your target audience. B2B referral software programs allow you to capture customer enthusiasm and use it to boost your marketing and sales efforts.
The company incentivizes customers, partners, and employees to promote the brand to the target community by offering rewards for completing challenges, such as creating content, posting online reviews, participating in forums, and commenting on blogs. This generates additional interest in the brand and creates new opportunities for business engagement. The advocates who earn points and badges can redeem them for various benefits.
Programs that interface directly with CRMs can provide sales teams with additional visibility and engagement opportunities, which can lead to new business and revenue opportunities.
4. Beyond adwords, utilize social paid ads.
PPC ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be effective in gaining new sales leads, but only if you have the budget for it.
Since you’re still creating content that people will love, a paid social ad strategy should align with your inbound strategy. It’s important to create attention-grabbing ads with engaging headlines, and to target specific audiences. You can also fine-tune and target your ads to achieve increased relevancy.
When planning your social ad strategy, be sure to create clear benchmarks for success. In addition, optimize your ads for continuous lead and customer generation. Finally, test the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns regularly to ensure that you are not wasting money on irrelevant keywords.
5. Utilize retargeting campaigns.
Retargeting ads are a form of paid display advertising that are served to people who have already visited your website or are a contact in your database. Retargeting uses cookies to anonymously follow your online audience around the Web after they leave your site. If a visitor leaves your site but does not convert, retargeting ads can be placed on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google to drive these same people to view another blog post on your site about the same topic.
Most people who visit a website do not convert on their first visit. Retargeting helps businesses focus on the people who have already been to the site and encourages them to return and convert.
To get the most relevant ads for your retargeting campaign, target your ads based on demographic, geographic, and contextual variables. You can use buyer personas to make sure your ads are targeted to the right people. Test your ads to see what works best and make sure you’re not wasting money on ads that no one will see.
6. Use paid content distribution.
Paid content discovery and delivery platforms like Outbrain and Taboola are effective ways to increase traffic to your site. These platforms work by displaying links to your content as recommendations on popular websites, including CNN.com, Slate, and ESPN. You can set a budget and pay per click, similar to how Google Adwords works.
The delivery platforms listed above make use of behavioral targeting to increase engagement and encourage visitors to stay on your site longer. They recommend interesting articles, slideshows, blog posts, photos, or videos to your readers in a way that does a more effective job than the more basic related item widget.
Content discovery platforms allow you to target content to specific websites where you know your personas are present, so you can present them with your best sales opportunities.
7. Run a contest.
Creating a contest is an effective method of acquiring leads and boosting sales. Online platforms such as Shortstack make it easy to create contests that will improve your online presence. The IMPACT team used Shortstack to create a contest for a client last fall, which resulted in increased web traffic and lead conversion.
Stag Arms collected 53,945 submissions and 21,456 new contacts during the contest, which caused their total contact database to rise by 13.9%. This in turn caused website traffic to rise by 43.25% during the month the campaign was run.
8. Optimize for search engines.
Search engine optimization is critical for inbound marketing success since search engines are a main source of organic traffic.
Even if your content is excellent, it will be challenging for people to locate it if you do not optimize your content for search engines. Your blog post or content must appear near the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a given search query for people to have a chance of finding it.
In addition to well-researched keyword usage, many other factors affect SEO. Some of them are:
- Site speed
- Image alt-text
- Website’s user interface and user experience
- Site navigation and architecture
9. Align sales and marketing
Sales and marketing are the two most important aspects of inbound marketing. In order for inbound marketing to be effective, sales and marketing must work together to convert leads into customers.
When planning your inbound marketing strategy, always keep your sales goals in mind. You may not be directly advertising your products or services, but you can build authority and trust with your audience by providing valuable information and solutions that match your sales goals. This will ensure that your inbound strategies generate a good return on investment.
10. Record customer feedback using Voice of the Customer (VoC) tools
VoC tools help you understand what your customers think of your business. This customer feedback can be used to help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Search engine optimization (SEO) can help improve your brand’s organic reach and online visibility. Tagging content assets with long-tail keywords can also build brand awareness and improve SEO. In many cases, content from other websites may rank higher in search results than content from your own website. Outsourcing content creation to freelancers can free up your time to exploit every available off-site opportunity.
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