Inbound Marketing: How to Make the Most Out of It

For a decade, inbound marketing has proven to be the most effective marketing method for doing business online. It is all about creating and sharing content with the world, through the creation of content that is specifically designed to appeal to your targeted customers. Inbound marketing brightens your business prospects and keeps your customers coming back for more. When the right content gets published in the right place and at the right time, your marketing strikes the right chord with your customers by becoming more relevant and helpful. Some of the major themes of inbound marketing include:

• Creation of targeted content that answers prospects' and customers' basic questions and needs, and the sharing of that content far and wide.

• Lifecycle marketing in the sense that promoters don’t just materialize from thin air. They initially are just strangers, visitors, contacts, and customers. Specific marketing actions and tools help to transform them into promoters.

• Tailoring your content to the requirements of the people who are viewing it. As you keep learning more about your leads with the passage of time, you can better personalize your messages to their specific needs.

• Inbound marketing is multi-channel by nature. It approaches people where they are located and in the channel where they want to interact with you.

• Content creation, publishing, and analytics tools all work together in harmony, which allows you to focus on publishing the right content in the right place at the right time.

There are four marketing actions for inbound marketing:

1. Attract through blogging, SEO, optimizing your website pages, and social publishing.

2. Convert with the help of forms, calls-to-action, landing pages, and keeping track of contacts.

3. Closing customers through CRM, closed-loop reporting, emails, and marketing automation.

4. Customer delights through surveys, smart calls-to-action, smart text, and social monitoring.

For in-depth information on the above-mentioned points, please see this post on HubSpot.

Read Also: Four Reasons To Use Transcription Services To Grow Your Email List

What Makes Inbound Marketing Important

Traditional outbound marketing campaigns such as cold emails, cold calls, snail mail and trade shows are no longer as effective as before. Consumers now receive constant information from all ends by marketers; therefore, there’s a need for strategic, well-planned inbound campaigns to outshine the competition and gain significant recognition.

Inbound marketing offers a wide array of new and effective techniques that help us envision unprecedented growth. What makes inbound marketing essential today is that outbound strategies no longer work. Today, when the consumers are confronted by outbound strategies all the time, they have become a lot more desensitized to it. Moreover, gone are the days when customers had to rely on sales people for information on a company or product, as now they can access it online immediately. Thus, your outbound techniques are not their first experience or opinion about your product, so having a lesser impact.

A warm lead, to draw a comparison, is always better than a cold lead. A customer coming to you has a more powerful marketing angle to it than a cold outreach for the sheer reason that they already have shown interest in your product. A lead created through inbound marketing is much more likely to close and become a customer than a cold lead you reach out to.

Inbound Lead Generation Builds Trust

When your customers understand that you are creating useful content and are professional and knowledgeable that earns you more respect from their side. If a customer seeks you out, then it shows they have a degree of trust for you. This rapport built with a customer is important for closing the deal and building a relationship. Plus, inbound is also more efficient in the sense that the money you are spending on a low-efficiency outbound team can be divided into your inbound efforts.

Inbound strategies that are effective will generate more lead flow than any amount of outbound marketing. Customers look for a company who they can trust and this is a reason why inbound content doesn’t just go away. There is a cumulative effect of inbound marketing since the inbound content will compound and add value to previous as well as future content that will be created. This can help you gain momentum. With inbound marketing, leads will be drawn in due course of time through a steady buildup of inbound content and recognition.

Inbound marketing techniques you can use to grow your business:

1. Giving Away Free Guides That Are Directly Related To Your Business - The guides should be thousands of words in length, which would make them a huge source of organic traffic. They need to be informative, providing marketers with solid information. HubSpot is understood to be one of the best publishers of free guides and resources and is aptly called the grandfather of inbound marketing. You need to ensure that the guide is relevant to your business and is as specific as possible since you are using it to gain a particular type of visitor who is likely to convert to become a customer.

2. Pick One Or A Couple of Keywords, And Optimize to the fullest - One of the salient features of SEO is the power of keywords. To successfully gain traffic for relevant keywords, you have to use them on your site. You should ideally focus on a few keywords that are valuable, and create specific pages on your website specifically for those keywords. A nice example of this is Practical ECommerce, which targeted the keyword “A/B testing tools for small businesses.” They chose a long-tail keyword that was relevant to their business, optimized for that word, and came out on top as is evident from Google search results: when you eliminate ad results, they rank number one.

3. Personal Brand-Building Helps– If you want to be a successful marketer, you’ll need to build your personal brand. The personal brand approach is worth a recommendation for anyone who’s involved in marketing, more so for startups. Today’s startup culture is dominated by personalities who successfully leverage advertising to project themselves as leaders, even as they advertise their companies as innovators.

4. Interact On Social Media - Social media turned inbound marketing into a viral interactive experience. Now, rather than merely hearing about companies and going to them, potential customers found companies, followed them, and interacted with them. Engaging socially is a powerful method of inbound marketing. Although it may not bring conversions, it does a lot more to enhance your brand. The catch is not merely having a presence on the social media platforms, but engaging on these platforms. There are real people behind every like and follower. To connect with them, you need to ask and answer questions, respond to tweets, and recognize +1s, thereby marking your presence.

5. Create An Email Popup – Using email opt-in to build your email list is definitely worth a try. An email list is a very important factor in building a business. If you really want to grow your email list, using a popup opt-in form is recommended. The results can be quite staggering. ShopifyNation is one great example.

6. Guest Blogging - Guest blogging provides powerful linkbacks, and a bigger audience, and does a lot in personal brand building. The list of publishing brands on the landing pages adds to the prestige and brand value. As an example, a mention on Marketing Land, New York Times, Huffington Post, etc., makes one believe you’re pretty important.