Content Marketing

The Elements of Successful Inbound Marketing Strategy

July 26, 2021

A robust integrated marketing strategy is critical if you want to develop your company into a strong entity, get new customers and boost customer retention. The strategy will incorporate both outbound and inbound marketing. Many businesses like startups, small local businesses, and big companies with limited marketing budgets may struggle with outbound marketing risks and costs. In contrast, inbound marketing focuses on tactics that give people compelling reasons to find your brand, which is way more feasible.

Inbound marketing is a term invented by HubSpot in 2016 to describe how marketers can get new interested customers through the power of content marketing, SEO, and social media. As they put it, “Inbound marketing is about creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business.”

Consumer behavior patterns are evolving, and that explains the attention inbound marketing is getting. For example, Facebook currently has 79 percent of internet users, Snapchat has 229 million daily active users, and product videos can boost sales by 144 percent.

Using the inbound technique, which is a multi-phase process, strangers are converted into customers and, eventually, brand promoters. The framework for inbound marketing is further broken down into three steps: Attract, Delight, and Engage. In this post, you will find some important elements of developing an effective inbound marketing strategy.

Content Marketing

Many marketers will agree that content is the backbone of any successful marketing strategy. It is an important part of inbound content marketing. It is the creation of useful and instructional content that is targeted towards your consumers and buyer profiles.

According to 55 percent of marketers, creating blog content is their top inbound marketing goal. On the other hand, your material might take many various formats, including case studies, white papers, eBooks, cheat sheets, videos, podcasts, and infographics.

More visitors will visit your website if you have effective content marketing. According to a study, businesses that produced 16 or more blog posts per month received nearly 3.5 times the amount of traffic as businesses that produced zero to four posts per month. In addition, content marketing generates three times the number of leads as paid search advertising.

A content map is vital for coordinating your strategy and generating unique content that ranks high on SERPs. The first step entails gathering all of your content ideas, fine-tuning, and refining them. After developing the content map, use the ideas to tailor your content to your target audience, the buying journey, and the topic points. This will guide your social media plan, as well as your SEO strategy and keyword goals. Another important tool is a content calendar, which includes suggested ideas and the preferred structure.

Content management is a never-ending activity. As a result, you need to develop a long-term content strategy that will help you discover and organize your campaigns while also tracking your progress.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is changing, but it remains as effective as ever. The process deals with modifying and structuring the content and structure of your website to rank high and get an organic position on search engine result pages (SERPs). If your website’s quality is high and contains optimized content, you can be sure that search engine web crawlers will find your website and index the content for free visibility to people who might be searching. SEO is important to any inbound strategy because you will be losing good business if your brand is not visible online.

SEO is an intricate process and requires meticulousness because you cannot afford to leave a stone unturned. The first part is discovering and using the keywords that your potential leads might be interested in. these keywords also need to have acceptably high search volume and user intent to get any attention from the appropriate audience.

From the text on your page to the backlinks you have from other websites, there are numerous facets to SEO. Sometimes SEO is as simple as ensuring that your website is properly structured for search engines. Some of the critical elements to consider are on-page SEO, which covers page titles, heading tags, meta descriptions and images, technical SEO, and link building.

PPC

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an inbound marketing strategy where an amount is charged when someone clicks an ad. Google Ads remain the popular choice for online purchases, with up to a 65 percent clickthrough rate. PPC may not appear to fit with the inbound paradigm at first glance because it is a paid tactic. On the other hand, search advertisements are technically part of inbound content marketing because they show up when people input keywords related to your product or service. Simply put, PPC is not disruptive to user’s activities.

PPC marketing has several advantages. It is simple to monitor and track the results, and you can use it to target mobile searches. It also integrates nicely with other marketing channels, helps you enhance your search engine ranks, and gives a plethora of important data.

You will need to create a plan to keep leads engaged after visiting your site and indicating interest in your information, goods, or services. A successful tactic for this is retargeting. This strategy saves your site visitors’ information and follows them throughout the internet, displaying advertising to entice them to return. Remarketing can be done in different ways. Instances include remarketing to your website’s visitors, display certain ads to visitors who checked a certain page (or multiple pages), or even show an advertisement to someone who has added things to a shopping cart but has not made a buying decision.

Landing Page

Your website serves as both a digital storefront and a lead generation tool. To convert the traffic, make sure your website is inbound ready. You will need to generate meaningful content for each persona at each point of their journey to do this. For instance, because your homepage is the first page most visitors will see, it should appeal to your customer personas. Focus more on the visitor and how opting for your solution will help them instead of what you have to offer.

Your website should contain useful materials and have a clear call to action. To provide a seamless user experience, make sure your site is optimized for mobile devices and easy to navigate.

A landing page is a page that your leads arrive at after clicking on a ‘call-to-action.’ Whether it is a product page, a form submission page, a download page, or a simple subscription service page, your landing page need to be top-notch to avert the risk of losing possible conversions.

One point to note is that the landing page should be related to the call to action. Otherwise, your visitors will abandon your website right away. Concentrate on the purpose of your landing page. If it is for newsletter subscriptions or to download information, make sure the CTA is prominent enough to attract attention.

Marketers can use social media to communicate their company’s messages, but it is critical to choose the ideal platform (or platforms). With your buyer persona, you should be able to find the most suitable social media platforms that match their particular needs and interests.

Different methods are available for driving new customers to your website via social media. An instance would be to share content and use promotions to get the content to the right audience. You can track the content’s performance and determine the ones that are getting the most attention. Facebook ads, for instance, have clear CTAs. This is important to an inbound marketing strategy because only those who are interested will follow and click on your links.

Email

Lead nurturing emails help you stay connected with prospects after they have converted. It also helps to improve customer relationships. Your customers will be happy to receive such emails as they reach the end of their inbound content marketing journey.

You should take advantage of automation when sending emails and keeping in touch with prospects to turn them into a sales-qualified lead at the right time. It will also increase the productivity of your sales force, as data shows that marketers only commit 44 percent of their time on their key responsibilities. Email, meetings, administrative work, and interruptions take up the remaining 56 percent of their time. As a result, you should think about automating various internal activities, not your marketing emails only.

The emails you send should have a clear objective and direct consumers back to your website. Therefore, make sure you are delivering relevant material and a clear call to action for the users. For example, your goal could be making them read your most recent blog post, respond to a question, or look at your most recent product. Emails can also help boost customer loyalty, like sending them a note on their birthday.

In Conclusion

Your company’s ability to identify its ideal audience and then build an experience that is both helpful and enjoyable for potential consumers is at the heart of an inbound marketing strategy. There are several routes to take, and as you learn more about inbound marketing, you will see that the strategies are interloped. Hopefully, the main takeaway from this piece is that inbound marketing is critical to the success of your business.