Inbound marketing is sweeping the business world as the latest innovation in connecting with customers – a recent Hubspot survey found respondents prioritizing inbound marketing over outbound at a 3:1 ratio. With this method becoming such a movement, it can be easy to get lost on how to best incorporate inbound marketing into your business strategy. Therefore, we have compiled some best practices to give ideas on how to get on-board the future of marketing.
Developing buyer personas
Inbound marketing is all about understanding your audience who already have an interest in your product or services. Therefore, getting to know their habits and attitudes is key to getting sales. A customer relationship management tool, such as HubSpot, can help your brand identify its target persona, track their activity and build campaign flows targeting each audience segment.
Besides this, auditing social media interactions, reading blog comments and reviewing LinkedIn profiles can help you gain a true sense of what the buyer is looking to achieve.
Content creation and marketing
A pivotal part of inbound marketing is based around content creation and marketing. Publishing educational content regularly will help at every stage of the funnel for sales. Recent studies showed that marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to get a positive ROI. However, being consistent is the key to carrying out the efficiency of this B2B and B2C interaction. The same research declared that those who publish blog content at least 16 times a month generated 3.5x more website traffic and 4.5x more leads compared to companies only updating their blogs a few times a month.
Search Engine Optimisations
SEOs can be sometimes confused as another term for inbound marketing [cite the blog I wrote about myths of inbound marketing]. Actually, it is more a component itself of inbound marketing that translates many strategies (such as blogging) into real results, often by using keywords and links. Fruitful and relevant content such as blogs or strategies through knowing your buyer persona can translate to nothing without your prospects actually finding you in organic search results. That means getting your content on page one through SEOs.
By optimizing content for particular keywords, you can ensure relevance when people search certain queries you want to address – think of what questions or problems your personas want answered or solved. Off-page SEOs are worth looking into as well for acquiring links to your content from reputable websites – a key ingredient to validating your own content and company.
Email targeting
One of the first things that may well come to mind when you think of inbound marketing – yet people often don’t realise the true benefits of this key method. Every dollar spent on email marketing returns an average of $38 – that is a huge ROI for a relatively simple method that is less time consuming than many of the above strategies. Email marketing, therefore, is a core ingredient all inbound marketers should maintain to sustain their company. Similar to the purpose of SEOs, your email content should be focused on relevant questions or concerns your subscribers/buyer personas have and the more you can personalise each email, the likelier you are to generate leads and encourage responses.
With offerings such as MailChimp, Marketo and Constant Contact, there is a large and growing choice of automated platforms to provide your company with automated email marketing. Interestingly, B2B companies are adopting this technology at a faster rate than B2C.
Retargeting
Perhaps a lesser known method of inbound marketing that bridges with outbound marketing yet is essential in prospective audience targeting. It’s estimated that 96 percent of first-time site visitors are not ready to buy. Retargeting means you can capture the traffic that came to your site but left and then hopefully convert those who are already familiar with the brand.
Using a small snippet of code (a cookie) on your site allows you to track the history and mobility of your web traffic and then serve them ads afterward. Having a strong retargeting campaign in your inbound marketing strategy means you’re able to stay in the forefront of visitors’ minds at all times and maintain a strong presence even to those who aren’t directly interested in your product or service, hopefully eventually converting them into sales through presence.
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