WHAT IS INBOUND MARKETING?
Inbound marketing is about building relationships that last with prospects and customers. You are providing value while empowering them to reach their own objectives. This can be done through creating a blog post that answers questions; an engaging social media post; or even a video that gives them easy to understand information that answers their question.
Inbound Marketing is powerful as it creates raving fans that are willing to vouch for you to anyone that is looking for your service.
There are 3 core parts of the inbound marketing method:
Usually, when they have found success and feel great about using you, they help attract more prospects to your business. This is how you can set the foundation for your marketing efforts to snowball and bring in more clients.
One of the ways business fail to continue the momentum, is through communication. Communication helps each part of the inbound marketing process succeed. Each team throughout the process needs to be aligned with each other to continue the ball rolling. Let’s figure out some strategies to help you with inbound marketing.
What are the Different Methods of Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing can be easy by making a plan. This way, when you attract prospects and they are interested in what you’re doing, you will know what to do for them to convert them into clients.
Attracting Strategies
Inbound marketing strategies start with attracting your target audience through content creation and development. This can be through creating blog articles, presenting a value proposition through discounts, and social media posts that enlighten them.
Attracting strategy #1: SEO
Your Search Engine Optimization strategy includes many factors. Your website’s page speed, keyword research, topics chosen, and more can influence how well your reach is. Having a solid SEO plan can help you reach the people you want to reach slowly at first but with effort, you can have your target audience asking for more.
A simple SEO strategy can include three parts. The first is on-page SEO. On-page SEO works on the front end of the webpage. It’s the keywords and the topics you work on for your target audience to enjoy. The second is off-page SEO which works on the backlinking structure of the website. If you can build a strong backlinking structure you can be seen as an authority on the internet. The last is technical SEO which is about how well the webpage is optimized for each device the webpage is on.
If you take a standard SEO strategy you can build a good webpage and continue to build good webpages. These webpages will provide value to your target audience and will build interest in what provide. If you’d like to learn more on SEO click here.
Let’s find out how you can interact with your target audience as they’ll want to engage with you.
Attracting strategy #2: Social Media
Social Media allows companies to interact with their target audience. It allows the company to feel more human rather than just a big impersonal company. So having a good social media strategy will help warm your target audience up to you.
Social media works alongside your targeting strategy. If you have the demographics, keywords, and phrases, and other stuff from your SEO research then building a strategy for social media will be easy. You’ll already have the keywords and from the topics you write on so having the topics for social media posts will come from that.
If not, build out your keyword list and from that work on topics, you can go over with your audience. You can check out our Instagram for ideas on how to format your posts for Instagram.
As you start gaining momentum, one of the biggest pushes you can give your attracting strategy is search engine marketing.
Attracting strategy #3: Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing is about creating killer ads that boost your website and (or) your posts on social media. SEM can also be known as pay-per-click ads or social ads. You can find ads on any platform where people gather. Now with your other 2 strategies in place, you can build ads based on the information you receive from both strategies. As said in the social media strategy, if you don’t plan on having the other 2, create a list of keywords that you’d want to target and a demographic where your ads would live.
SEM integrates with your other strategies as they can boost your SEO writing and social media postings to the top or in front of people that are highly likely to be interested in them. Ads help build momentum faster than if the other two were by themselves but of course, they cost money.
Ads can be simple as you take what you want to promote, work on the targeting aspects of the platform, put down your ad budget for the ad, and voilà, you have your ad. This is an oversimplified version of creating ads as you’d have to do more research beforehand and to know how to use the data you gain from your tests to make great ads that convert.
Now that you have an idea of how to form your attracting strategies, let’s work on engaging with your target audience to nurture them into paying clients.
Engaging strategies
Attracting strangers is the biggest hurdle as if you can’t attract an audience, you won’t have many people to engage with.
Now your engagement strategy can be worked around how you would usually interact with people. Calls, comments and direct messages, and emails are the main examples we will work on here.
When a person calls you through your inbound marketing efforts, it usually means they have an interest in your brand or just have a complaint. If you don’t have a help desk that handles your consumer’s complaint or request, they’ll for sure use what they can do to reach you. Calls are important as this allows you to have direct contact with the person that is calling. If this is a call concerning your services, you have a direct chance work with a potential client. Calls can be a different experience for your engagement strategy on social media. Let’s check that out!
Your engagement strategy on social media is just as important as making valuable posts for your target audience. This is how you will interact with them and form relationships with the online community. You can jump into different hashtags and comment on their post and direct message them to get more of their attention. Another strategy for engagement can be building a list of big-name brands in your industry and up-and-coming brands that are building huge momentum and interacting with their audiences. This will get clicks from their audiences to yours.
Getting clicks is a big booster for your social media and your website. How do you get more clicks besides what was already talked about? Emails! A great email follow up sequence with valuable content can be delivered to an audience that signed up for your emails.
An email strategy you can use is to grab the content you already have and give tidbits of it on your emails. You can push them to learn more if they’d like to on your website and boom, you have people coming more often.
It’s not as easy as it sounds anymore as marketers all over the world are trying to reach people in their inboxes. This is why you should work on other engagement strategies to help boost their interest in your emails. Once you do, people will be waiting to hear from an online sensation that is you!
Captivating strategies
Once you have engaged with your audience and have helped them move from having their attention to keeping their interest, you captivate them with your calls to action with every blog, post, and promotion. This is where you change them from a prospect to a client.
This is also where you provide them with the best customer services they’ve ever had. When they do have great customer service from you and you satisfy them with amazing work, they’ll be more than happy to be your promoter. People that love your work will be happy to give you a testimonial and sometimes are willing to participate in a survey. This gives you even more social proof that helps your company explode (in a good way)!
From there you then continue to create the amazing content they found you with and will continue to consume your content and share it with others. You listen to your target audience and they’ll grow your brand for you.
There are a ton of great tools to help you streamline these strategies and make it easier to get done.
How do You Use Inbound Marketing?
From what we read above, we have the means of getting started with inbound marketing but let’s round it out with tools and tips to getting a cleaner inbound marketing strategy.
Tools:
There are different tools that we can use when it comes to each part of the inbound marketing strategy.
Attract tools and tips
These tools are going to help you get more precise for targeting the people who will most likely become prospects. You use content strategy to develop your ideas for the attraction process. Then from there, you’d create content for blog posts that develops into different content you can use everywhere else.
Engage tools and tips
These tools help you connect your team with your audience. There are circumstances where you get a ton of the same questions. So from those, you can create automated responses that help you work through those questions.
Your engagement management system will help you reach people through hashtags, comment sections of your social media, direct messages, and other places where you can interact with your audience.
Your lead management system can have tools like a landing page and a chatbot that works with them to help convert them into a lead.
Captivate tools and tips
These tools help you work with the clients you already have. Have a phone number your clients can call to help them directly so they feel like you care for them.
After you work with them, create a follow-up system that continues to build a relationship with them. This way when they need a similar type of work done or they know another person that would be interested in what you do, they point to you.
Continuing to create great content that they can continually consume will help them continue to have the best idea of you as you are still being the expert in that field. This includes email marketing to them and the targeted content.
Use Inbound Marketing to Grow your Business
Combine what you just learned about inbound marketing methodology and you’ll have a system that generates continually generates leads.
Got questions? Comments? Or any way to make this better? Contact us or shoot us a comment!