How does one create a solid inbound marketing strategy?
In the past, mass marketing or “push” advertising was very effective. However, times and consumer preferences are changing.
This is especially true when consumers are faced with multiple options. They will do their homework before buying something online.
Customers are using Google to find information about products and relying on social media to get suggestions from friends and family.
With inbound marketing, you are able to create content that is useful to your target audience, and this content draws customers to your website. Inbound marketing is more important than outbound marketing because it allows you to create content that is useful to your target audience, and this content draws customers to your website.
You will need to create an inbound marketing strategy that gets you on the radar of “aware” consumers.
There’s no doubt that consumers today want to:
- Be given priority and get educated about their problems.
- Do business with brands that they are familiar with.
- Know your history and how you’ve helped others in the past.
- Get more comfortable with the solution they are buying into.
It’s engaging customers through their individual needs in a one-to-one relationship This is a new era of marketing which is much more personalised and intimate than before. It involves engaging customers on an individual level, catering to their specific needs.
Which means:
- If you are building a relationship with your target audience, you are increasing the chances of getting more sales.
- You are educating them beforehand and giving them the information they need to make a decision.
- You are making it easy for them to do business with you.
- If you are delivering value first, you’re giving them a reason to trust your brand.
- If you are pulling consumers towards your brand instead of pushing your products on them, you’re winning their attention.
Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that helps bring customers to you, rather than you going to them. It’s a way of creating and sharing content that attracts customers and leads them through a sales funnel to becoming customers.
Standing out from the competition can be achieved by ensuring your marketing efforts are as effective as possible.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that helps people improve in a chosen area while making your business look different from the rest.
It’s about finding the right people and making a good impression on them.
This creates a cycle of trust and positive word-of-mouth that can benefit your business.
Creating relevant content is the most obvious first step in inbound marketing.
This includes people who you want to turn into customers, as well as customers who you want to keep buying from you.
When website visitors come to your site, they expect you to offer more value than other websites. You can engage them with email, which promises more value.
After they are engaged, the next step is to provide more value by sharing your useful expertise to make them happy.
Inbound marketing generates significantly more leads than outbound marketing, making it a more efficient and effective use of your marketing budget.
You’re not forcing yourself to win your prospect’s attention.
You are not simply creating content. The content you create is valuable and helps your customers to not only understand their problem, but also find the ideal solution.
Using inbound marketing, your business can consistently:
- Attract prospects
- Create trust
- Build credibility
- Improve sales
- Grow consistently
Now that we have a basic understanding of inbound marketing, let’s take a closer look at how it works and the components that make it up.
How Does Inbound Marketing Work?
A sound inbound marketing strategy is beneficial for all businesses, big or small.
Selling online is more effective and reliable than selling in-person because it gives customers the experience they deserve.
Marketing that is beneficial to both you and your customers is the key to getting higher quality results in the long run.
But before creating an inbound marketing strategy, you must understand the inbound methodology, which comprises four stages:
A successful inbound marketing strategy will help you deliver value to your customers and make progress at each stage of their journey.
If you want your business to succeed, it’s important to build trust with your employees. This will help your business grow.
The Stages of Inbound Marketing
Attract
With outbound marketing, you can target anyone, even if they’re not interested.
Inbound marketing allows you to attract people who want to do business with you.
A strong inbound marketing strategy will help you to identify your ideal buyer, rather than attracting anyone randomly.
Then, create personas that represent your customers and their challenges.
By understanding who your potential buyers are, you can use inbound marketing tactics to reach them more effectively.
You create content that is designed to not only educate your potential customers, but also provide them with the answers they are looking for.
It’s ever-fluctuating. Tell people what your brand can do for them, not how much it costs. The cost is always changing, so it’s not a reliable number to share.
Even though competitor prices may sometimes change, if you invest in developing your brand value, you will be more successful in attracting customers.
Other companies will not be able to appropriate your brand’s value for themselves.
If you want to show your audience how your brand can improve their lives, give them content that is valuable to them.
Convert
After attracting people who are interested in what you have to offer to your website, you focus on converting them into leads.
In exchange for a valuable piece of content like an ebook or case study, you ask for their contact information.
You use two tools to convert visitors into leads:
- Calls to Action
- Landing Pages
Your call to action should encourage visitors to click through to your offer. For example, signing up for a webinar.
After clicking on your CTA, the visitor is taken to a landing page where they learn more about the offer and can sign up for it by providing their contact information.
This will add them to your list of leads that you can interact with.
Close
The next step is to use inbound marketing techniques to convert new leads into prospects, such as marketing automation and lead nurturing.
As your leads are educated further, they are pushed down your marketing funnel over time.
The point is to get your potential customers closer to buying from you.
Delight
Inbound marketing goes beyond just closing the sale.
It’s not just about making a sale; it’s about giving your customers an experience that will make them remember you after they buy from you.
You use tools like email marketing and social media marketing to give your existing customers the required support, as well as to reach new potential customers.
But also engage with them consistently.
The main advantage of making your customers happy is that they will talk about you to other people.
Satisfied customers who feel positively about your brand are likely to tell others about their good experiences, becoming unofficial promoters of your company.
This means that customers will keep coming back to buy from you in the future.
Ways to Promote Your Inbound Marketing Campaign
It is not as much fun to promote your content as it is to create it, but it is very important to be loud about your campaign if you want to be successful in content marketing. You would not spend months making the best chocolate bar in the world only to sell it out of a crate on your front porch in the hopes that someone might see you; so you should not treat your great content the same way.
Many experienced marketers suggest spending far more time on the promotion of your campaign than you do on the creation of it. Derek Halpern, blogging expert and founder of Social Triggers, recommends:
Instead of spending all your time creating new content, it is more effective to spend 80% of your time promoting the content you have already created. This will help you reach a larger audience and get more people to consume your content.
This 20/80 rule is interesting because it makes you think about how often this is the case at your business. It’s easy to get caught up in creating new content and forgetting about the old content that is just as good. In this post, we’re focusing on promoting campaigns and exploring what makes a success.
Pillar Pages and Topic Clusters
If you haven’t tried using pillar pages yet, we have a guide that can help you get started. The reason they’re effective at promoting your content is because they create a lot of links between different pieces of content, making it easier for Google to find. This increases the amount of organic traffic to your content, bringing in new prospects.
How it works:
- A pillar page is a long, expert webpage where you house all your knowledge on a given topic. You link this page to other blog posts you’ve created on all the subtopics (or ‘topic clusters’) to do with your topic. From these blog posts, you add a link to the pillar page so a two-way bond is formed between the two pieces of content.
- Not only is it mechanically a great system, but it also helps show off your brand as a thought leader in your field. This long-form content can be added over time, building a one-stop shop on your topic and confirming you as an expert.
- The reason this is great for promotion is that Google will love the organization of your content and move your well-ordered content up search rankings, unlike other businesses’ messy and unanchored content.
- Promote your content offer on a pillar page – behind a great, enticing CTA – to increase conversions.
Blog
In order to promote your content, you need to have a lot of blog posts. By including many relevant keywords, Google will improve your content’s ranking on the search engine. You should also let your current customers and prospects know about any new campaigns through email automation.
How it works:
- HubSpot recommends writing at least 3-5 posts about your new campaign, published around the time your content offer goes live. These can vary from general posts, offering an overview of the topics associated with your content offer, to more specialized posts that inspect a particular aspect of the topic closely.
- By publishing blog posts that support your content around the time of its release, you create a push in awareness around the offer, using keywords, relevant links to other content, and, most importantly, a CTA that will drive readers to your landing page.
- The length of your posts counts: if you can, write long-form posts for maximum engagement – BuzzSumo found that content between 3,000-10,000 words is perceived as the most valuable and thus shared the most
- By offering engaging, useful content, prospects will be driven to other pages on your site – including the landing page to your content offer. With persuasive titles and eye-catching, relevant images, your blog posts can become a place for readers to expect high-quality content. Mention advice from influencers where possible and remember: always be helping.
What about your existing contacts? You’ve set up an automated follow-up email for new leads who submit a form on the campaign landing page, but what about the people who are already on your contact list? HubSpot suggests saying something like this:
Please share this offer with your friends and colleagues by clicking the social sharing button below. The more people that see it, the better!
How it works:
- By sending out an email to the customer segments in your database who you think will enjoy this piece, you gain further exposure, and show audiences you understand their pain points and want to offer solutions. If you already send out a weekly email to your mailing list, include a link to your new content offer in this.
- Include a pre-written tweet in the email, so that people can simply click once to share the tweet with their networks.
- Make use of your network. Reach out directly to some friends and influencers in your industry, and ask them to share the content with their audience if they find it valuable – you could always ask them for a quote to put directly into the email as a testimonial, promoting how worthwhile the content offer is, too.