8 Inbound Marketing ideas your Brand will want to use
76% of marketers use inbound marketing approach as their primary strategy. Inbound marketing is that marketing approach that considers a customer-centric or buyer-driven perspective. This enables the businesses to organically attract prospective clients.
In this approach, the businesses focus on attracting customers through content and engagement. Inbound marketing heavily relies on organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), whereas the traditional outbound marketing relies on paid advertising like advertising on billboards. Hence, it is heavily cost effective.
For someone new to the concept of implementing inbound marketing, here are the ten tips that would come handy:
1. Strategize a Marketing Workflow
Strategizing the marketing workflow should be the first step in inbound marketing. It is important to define your goals and plan marketing strategies based on them. You can follow these 3 steps to understand the strategic marketing workflow:
- Attract: Craft useful content to draw traffic to your website or social media platforms through videos, blog posts, podcasts, and more.
- Engage: Look for ways to create long-lasting connections with your audience b capturing information about them. Collect their emails through sign-up forums or landing pages.
- Delight: Offer trusted information and relevant content to the right audience, retain them as loyal customers, and thus, promoters. This would involve being in constant touch via regular emails and social media platforms.
Keeping in mind these 3 steps, develop a strategy depending on your products/services to attract and engage with your target audience.
2. Defining Your Ideal Customer Criteria
It is important to curate compelling content to attract your targeted audience. In order to understand your audience, it is essential to an in-depth research to identify the prospective clients. You can do so by using the following:
- Social Media Insights: A buyer persona can be created using social media insights. These insights help to learn more about the people engaging with your content.
- Create Surveys: Surveys are the best ways to get information from the customers. Ask about their needs, suggestions, problems, and more. This will give you a clear picture through your customers’ POV and help create content accordingly.
- Use of Non-Intrusive Chatbots: The use of chatbots can help you receive real-time customer feedback. This will assist you in improving your services and craft more focused and useful content.
3. Attractive Website and Web Design
A user-friendly website is the backbone of inbound marketing. A website is your business’ online home and base that acts as the first point of contact between you and the visitors, that attract prospective clients and therefore converting them into potential clients. The website must be intuitive and unique in regards to design and navigation, with easy access to the business’ information.
However, if the website is not able to attract, engage and delight prospective clients, then it’s time to redesign a website while keeping in mind all the parameters.
4. Mobile Friendly Web Pages
You need to mobilize your website as the internet searches in this era are made more on mobile phones. It has been observed, that most of the internet queries are made through mobile phones, and nor via laptops and PCs. Therefore, you must ensure that your website should be easily accessible on mobile devices.
Any mobile-friendly website tends to decrease the friction of the user buying experience and increases consumer satisfaction with their buying pattern, and so, your business.
5. Content Distribution and Promotion
Content creation is just one part of inbound marketing. Your goal should be to distribute your content in a way that allows your audience to easily find you. Content distribution can either make or break your business’ online presence.
The following are important at the time of content distribution and promotion:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- Social Media Platforms
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Important factors that contribute to generating optimized content:
- Using appropriate metadata
- Including variations of keywords
- Adding internal and external backlinks
- Creating competitive content
- Keeping the content to the point
6. Utilize Social Paid Ads
Social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter offer paid advertising to obtain leads via Pay-Per-Click. The importance of curating catchy ads with engaging headlines is essential. You also have to keep in mind the demographic, geographic and contextual parameters based on the audience. You should also calculate social media ad success, optimize ads to obtain lead generation and ensure that the PPCs are tested.
- LinkedIn:On LinkedIn, you can choose between an Ad, that is a banner with a picture and text, and a Sponsored Update. The Sponsored Updates are of two types: Direct Sponsored Content, that shows up on the users’ feeds, and the standard Sponsored Post, that appears on your page as well as on the users’ feeds.
Tracking tokens are used with direct sponsored content to find out which leads are coming through paid channels, to probe into the targeted audience, and to test various ads to calculate performance. - Twitter:Paid advertising on Twitter includes: Promoted Tweets, Followers (Promoted Account), Apps, and Videos.
To increase views on a blog posts or increase web traffic, promoted tweets are useful. Followers (Promoted Account) are the best to increase brand awareness by getting more followers.
7. Convert Prospects with Email Marketing
Another key part of inbound marketing is apprehending your prospective clients’ emails. Emails are the way of connecting with your audience in a more personalized manner. These enable you to stay in constant touch with your clients by means of newsletters, products/service announcements, and more. So, when the clients receive regular emails from you, they will tend to remember you when they are in need of particular product/service. Email marketing is an indirect way of promoting your business to prospective clients and show them that they can contact you when their need arises.
8. Record Customer Feedback
The Voice of the Customer (VoC) tools are used to record the customer feedback about your products, services, and even your business. This will help evaluate the satisfaction level of the customer and if the services or the products are up to the mark and where can you improve in terms of quality, service, delivery time, discounts, and more. VoC tools are essential for customer retention.