Inbound
Marketing
By harnessing the potential of inbound marketing, businesses can effectively attract, engage, and delight their target audience. This holistic approach focuses on creating valuable content, establishing strong online presence, and building meaningful relationships with potential customers. Inbound marketing not only helps businesses reach their target audience more efficiently but also enables them to establish trust and credibility, ultimately driving higher conversion rates and business growth.
Let's face it... waiting for them to come sucks!
And what's worse is when they aren't even the right person, or they ignore you entirely... or... what if they never come back! If your marketing feels like that, a great inbound strategy can help!
What You Need to Succeed in Inbound Marketing
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Well-defined brand guidelines. For optimal success in your content marketing program, it is essential to involve contributors from every department and functional area within your company. However, this can sometimes lead to a muddled brand "voice." Avoid this by ensuring your brand guidelines remain well-defined and consistent throughout your program.
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Clear marketing goals. When someone announces, "Guess what? We're getting into inbound marketing!" the crucial question to ask is, "Why? What do you hope to accomplish?" Often, individuals possess the enthusiasm to embark on content marketing but lack the necessary focus and objectives for success.
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Comprehensive and current intel on your target market. To truly maximize the potential of your inbound marketing efforts, it is crucial to stay informed about the key players, their unique value propositions, and the latest industry trends. By keeping your finger on the pulse of every vertical you serve, you can ensure that your inbound marketing strategy is tailored to meet the specific needs and expectations of your target audience.
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An in-depth understanding of customer personas and pain points. Inbound marketing is successful because it strives to enhance and improve the lives of individuals. However, if you are unaware of who you are assisting and what you are assisting them with, your content marketing efforts will not deliver the desired results.
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A carefully considered customer journey map. What does each interaction with your prospect look like, the moment they start researching to the point they are buying buying to advocating for you? You need to have plotted out a roadmap for every step of that process.
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An efficient and effective content development process. To satisfy the appetite of the audience you are aiming to build, it is essential to consistently generate top-notch content. This doesn't occur by chance. While each piece will possess its own uniqueness, the process must be refined and repeatable.
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Buy-in from all stakeholders. It only takes one person to hinder the progress of your inbound marketing program and prevent it from gaining the momentum it needs. To ensure success, it is crucial to find a way to get those who doubt or oppose your program on board. By doing so, you can guarantee that your program delivers the desired results.
Inbound Marketing Elements
Content Creation
Consumers are tired of being inundated with "pushy" sales-speak. So by focusing on providing valuable, strings-free information, the trusting relationships that result are not only more likely to result in sales, but can produce fanatical evangelists for your brand.
Landing Pages
Your potential customers are busier than ever. When they arrive at your website, you’ve got just seconds to grab their attention.
Microsites
Second cousin to landing pages, a microsite is a small, specialized website that exists independently or as a supplementary site to its larger parent website. It is typically created for a specific campaign, promotion, or purpose and is designed to provide narrowly-targeted information or functionality to a particular audience.
Email & Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects, with the goal of earning their business once they are ready. You do this by being helpful and relevant, providing value beyond what you sell. After all, nurturing is exactly what it sounds like — helping someone grow.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation helps companies engage with potential customers in new and powerful ways by using real-time marketing data to automatically craft a series of personalized interactions.
Social Media
Social media can be viewed as two different, yet equally important realms. 1. Customer care and 2. Marketing. Both are equally important.
Search Engine Elements
Search Engine Optimization
According to recent research report, marketers ranked growing their search engine organic presence (SEO) as their top inbound marketing priority. There's good reason for that! If your website is your most valuable marketing asset (and it should be), search engine optimization is your most important tactic, because it is the most cost-effective way of driving traffic/leads to your website. Organic results are 8.5 times more likely to be clicked on than paid search ads.
Paid Search
Paid search has the power to target specific users who search for specific things, placing your content at the top and bottom of Google. It has other benefits including:
- you can customize and control what searchers see
- you can focus on geographic regions and segment your audience.
- paid search is quantifiable and metric driven
- it holds a slight edge in conversion rates over SEO, as visitors are 1.5x more likely to convert due to the fact that with paid search, the ad and landing page content are optimized
- it allows anyone to compete for the top placement in search engines if they are willing to compete on price