30 Oct
When it comes to marketing on digital channels, inbound marketing is the most effective approach for converting web traffic into loyal customers.
Inbound marketing is a more cost-effective way to reach your customers where and when it counts and to see what marketing efforts are working. Inbound marketing allows your business to be discovered by potential customers when they are searching for the types of products and services you offer. Your goal is to create the kind of content that converts a first-time visitor into someone who is familiar with your business and ready to call.
If you want to get the best results and drive more qualified leads in your sales funnel from your digital campaigns then you need to make sure to include these essential inbound marketing tactics in your strategy.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing, in simple terms, is the process of helping potential customers find your company. This frequently happens before the customer is even ready to make a purchase, but making contact early can turn into brand preference and, ultimately, leads and revenue. Inbound marketing is a strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing content marketing, blogs, events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and more to create brand awareness and attract new business.
Whereas outbound marketing seeks out customers, inbound marketing focuses on visibility, so potential buyers come to you. Instead of “renting attention,” companies employing inbound marketing focus on new methods geared toward building awareness, developing relationships, and generating leads.
Inbound marketing has the powerful ability to put customers in the driver’s seat, connecting you with people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. Aside from lead conversions and customer retention, inbound marketing can do wonders for social media shares, brand awareness, and search engine optimization efforts. A robust inbound marketing program allows customers to engage with your brand at any time.
Inbound marketing and SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in the success of your inbound marketing. Everything you publish online for your business needs to be optimized to help your customers find your content via search.
Inbound marketing refers to strategies that target “right-fit customers.” These are people that already have an interest in the things you and your company are providing. It can mean that they’ve previously purchased from your site already, have followed you on social media, or searched for similar products/services to what you offer. It could mean that they’re already actively looking for services or products in your niche.
Inbound marketing strategies try to target these customers by engaging with them. You’re trying to draw your ideal customers to your site by offering things they’re already interested in. This is where inbound marketing and SEO align. Both rely on attracting customers with good content. In fact SEO is a form of inbound marketing.
What about SEO, what is it?
SEO or “search engine optimization” focuses on specifically improving organic traffic from web search engine results (namely dominate search engines like Google or Bing). Search engine algorithms are designed to read the code and content on a site and determine their rankings based on relevancy. But SEO isn’t just about traffic, after all the ultimate goal is still turning visitors into customers.
Just like with inbound marketing.
To use a fishing term, inbound marketing is more about using the right kind of bait, rather than using the widest net. While it’s true that a more personalized approach like this might reach fewer total people, those you are engaging with are much more likely to make a purchase or use your services. Many classic SEO strategies work on this sort of approach – metadata, keywords in content, and link growth are all ways to signal to search engines what your site has to offer.
How to improve your inbound marketing
Here are actionable tips that will help you increase the effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategy.
1. Create educational content for your customers
To get inspiration for your inbound content library, browse your top competitors’ websites, specifically the competitors that rank well in search for the keywords your business targets. To create the most comprehensive content, be sure to analyze:
- The main topics your competitor’s cover on their blog, ebooks, white papers, videos,etc.
- The length, images, and main points that are covered within top-ranking pieces of content.
- Posts made to competitor social media and local business profiles.
Your goal isn’t to copy your competitor’s content, but to make a more comprehensive content resource for your potential customers that reflects the terms, information, and answers they are searching for. If visitors to your website can find all of the information they need to make a purchasing decision, they will be more likely to convert into a call or lead.
2. Optimize for search
In addition, each piece of content you create should be optimized for search engines. By including your targeted keywords in specific places throughout your content, you help Google understand what your content is about. This increases the chance that your content will be included in search results pages.
This doesn’t mean you need to (or should!) write your content for search engines. Your first goal should be to create valuable content for your customers that is more comprehensive than what your competitors have to offer.
Once you have created your content, you can optimize it by making sure your target keyword appears in key locations, such as the title, first paragraph, and in image file names, meta descriptions, alt text, or captions. Related keywords should also appear throughout the rest of the content in a natural, meaningful way.
The same applies to social media posts, emails, and other marketing campaigns. Know your target keyword and make sure it’s included.
If you want search engines like Google to rank your content above your competitors in search engine results pages, you need more than just high quality content. You need to create an excellent user experience that allows your website visitors to access your content quickly and seamlessly on any device.
To measure your website’s current performance, you can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool will check the user experience metrics and performance on your website pages, such as:
- Largest Contentful Paint: Measures the time it takes for the main body of content to load for the first time.
- First Input Delay: Measures the time it takes for your server to respond when a user interacts with your website.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: Measures any major shifts of the main content during loading that would cause a poor user experience, such as losing your place on the page or clicking on the wrong link.
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to test your top pages and see how well your website performs compared to your competitor’s websites. If you find your pages are underperforming, Google offers advice on how to improve your user experience metrics.
3. Include strong calls to action
Every piece of content you create should include one strong call to action, whether it’s published on your blog or on your social media. With the right content, you can guide prospective customers through your sales funnel.
Start with blog posts that create brand awareness: introduce visitors to your business, products, and services. Blog posts should end with a call to action to download a relevant piece of in-depth content, such as an ebook or white paper.
Your in-depth content should give visitors a better understanding of the benefits of your business’s products and services. They should end with a call to action that encourages visitors to call or set up an appointment.
4. Incorporate video content
You need to use video if you want to increase a return on investment (ROI) from your inbound marketing efforts. That’s according to a survey conducted of marketing professionals and online consumers, which found that:
- 86% of marketers found that video increased traffic to their website.
- 83% of marketers saw an increase in the average time on pages with video.
- 84% of marketers saw an increase in leads from pages with video.
There are several ways marketers can incorporate video into an inbound marketing strategy. To increase traffic to your website, build a library of video content that is optimized for search.
To increase the average time spent on page, add supplementary video content and commentary to blog posts. This will ensure that people with different types of learning styles can find useful content on your page.
To increase leads, add videos to your product and service landing pages. Videos that can boost leads include video sales letters, product demo and explainer videos, and testimonials for your services.
5. Use social media
Social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter allow you to create different types of content – long-form posts, video, live video, audio chat, etc. to help people get to know the people within your business, your products, and your services.
Most importantly, creating a space for your brand on each of the top social media platforms increases visibility for your brand in front of new audiences. You can also use social media to promote blog posts and educational content from your website in your updates, stories, and direct messages. This will help drive traffic and new leads from social media.
6. Search engine optimization (SEO)
Plenty of businesses confuse SEO with paid advertisements such as Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. A simple reminder for you is that SEO delivers free organic web traffic to your website. SEO revolves around optimizing the structure and content of your website and receiving relevant external links to your website. By having an optimized website and content, search engines will use this to identify and index your website to appear in searching engine ranking pages (SERPs) at no cost.
You won’t get business if you can’t be found, which is why SEO is an important tactic for your inbound marketing strategy. Your visibility online will either make or break your online marketing efforts. So make sure you know the technical aspects to use to optimize your content because it can be crucial to your success.
Recently Google launched a revamped SEO guide that details everything you need to know to get your website optimized and found.
7. Pay-per-click (PPC)
PPC is a paid advertising tactic that falls under inbound marketing because it targets specific searchers who are actively searching for solutions that your brand can provide. A faster way to get your content or product in front of this specific audience is by incorporating PPC into your inbound marketing strategy.
With PPC, you are able to pay digital channels for top placements in search results by utilizing specific keywords and messaging to attract qualified leads to click on your ad. Once you focus on a strategy that combines SEO with PPC, this will deliver the best insights needed to better search positioning, maximize your web traffic and conversion opportunities.
8. Growth-driven website design (GDD)
We all know how traditional marketing is outdated, so you can say the same with how websites are designed without taking into account tailoring the customer experience around your buyer persona. Huge investments are given into website development but the majority of websites aren’t scalable to adapt from insights derived from your buyer persona to deliver a better user experience and convert more sales.
Thus, the need for a growth-driven design that uses the agile methodology to produce better inbound results through data-driven planning and continuous improvement, rather than launching a full-scale website based entirely on assumption.
9. Email marketing
Not every lead will come across a content marketing offer via your website or their social media newsfeed. How do you make sure to reach and engage them – through a dynamic newsletter where you know the tailored message will be delivered to their inbox. This is where email marketing can be a great way to deliver news, blog posts and offers to leads and customers in your contact list who have opted-in to receive your newsletter.
From the insights you receive from each segment, you will be able to create better communications to delight and retain your customers. Email marketing is one of the best ways to nurture your leads through the sales funnel and it delivers the best ROI at 3800%. If you plan on closing more sales, make sure you have email marketing in your inbound marketing strategy to accomplish this task.
10. Retargeting ads
It fits well in your inbound marketing strategy because retargeting is simply lead nurturing on external channels. Retargeting works by using cookies on your website to track a visitor’s activity. Once they leave your website, you can now send targeted ads to them on other websites to lure them back to your website in hopes of converting them into a customer. This is where relevant, quality content comes into play because without it you’re luring a visitor back to a landing page that doesn’t add value to them.
Retargeting is an effective tactic because you will be spending your time advertising relevant content to visitors who are aware of your brand and what you have to offer. Since they have shown interest in your content or offer, you should consider this visitor to be a highly qualified lead worthy to receive your targeted ad.
Conclusion
The investment in inbound marketing can truly deliver on effectively targeting audiences who are already looking for your product or service to solve their problem. By creating quality content that adds value to these potential customers using the tactics above, inbound marketing will deliver more qualified leads, a better ROI and help you to reach your sales goals.
Having a few of the tactics aren’t enough. You need to align all of these tactics if you would like to receive the best results when it comes to converting web traffic into loyal customers, and continuously receiving a fresh stream of qualified leads into your sales funnel.