If your website isn’t converting like it could, you are probably wondering what you’re doing wrong. The right content will attract the right customers organically and help your website rank higher in search engines. If you aren’t seeing this, there is room for improvement. But don’t worry, using the 5 tips we’ve compiled below, you can succeed at inbound marketing.
Do you want to create a successful inbound marketing strategy but don’t know where to start? How do you succeed in bringing the right customers into your website? We’ll go through all of these steps in the following article. Hang tight!
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing, simply put, is a digital marketing strategy where a business or entity organically attracts the attention of their ideal customers at different stages of their buying journey. These stages are awareness, consideration, and decision. This is the opposite of traditional advertising, such as running ads or putting up billboards.
Graphic courtesy of Aria.
In a perfect scenario you attract potential customers to your site through offering highly valuable and useful content. Once the customers are there, they learn all about the company and what you offer. Through this content, they become customers. Instead of forcing your business on them through magazines or radio ads, more than likely, your customer is actively looking for a service like yours.
Thus, if you can offer the content they are looking for, they will stay on your site and convert.
Content marketing is a great way to bring customers into your site. By crafting blogs and articles that are perfect for what the customer is looking for, you can easily bring them in.
Inbound Vs Outbound Marketing
If inbound marketing refers to strategies that bring people to you, outbound refers to going straight up to them. Outbound marketing is a traditional method of marketing that looks to put messages out to in front of potential customers.
Outbound marketing includes activities like trade shows, seminars, cold calling, radio and print ads, magazines, television advertisements, billboards and more. In fact, the average human today is bombarded with over 2000 outbound marketing interruptions per day. That is a lot of interaction with outbound marketing tactics.
Comparatively, outbound marketing is remarkably more expensive than inbound marketing, and often, quite less effective. You are speaking to the masses and more than likely, the masses aren’t your target market. The marketer’s and any business owner’s dream is to speak to potential customers who are within their target audience, because they are actually looking to buy, not trying to ignore the sponsored messages because they are forced to watch it before their favorite tv show comes on.
So, how do you go about connecting with the right audience? Let’s discuss 5 tips that will help you succeed at inbound marketing.
5 Steps To Succeed At Inbound Marketing
1. Build Your Target Audience
How do customers find you? Well, this process begins by knowing exactly what these customers are looking for. This step can be accomplished by doing some keyword research. Keyword research helps you find out more about your industry, what people are searching for, and how competitive the landscape is.
Knowing how your industry ranks and what keywords are being searched can help you write the right type of content to attract buyers.
There are several tools you can use both free and paid. At Elevare, we do a combination of things to help you do the necessary keyword research. We use a program called SEMRUSH, but if you are looking to do this research for free, you can use Google Search Console.
While increasing your website traffic, in general, is great, it can be a vanity metric. You want to rank for the right keywords, not just any keywords.
2. Define SMART Goals
Once you understand what your potential buyers are looking for (determining their pain points), you can start to develop your goals for your specific campaign. Using the SMART framework is a great way to do this. What does SMART stand for? SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.
Each part of the SMART framework works together to help you create goals (and further a campaign), that is carefully planned, clear and easily trackable. If you are working towards the wrong goals, this will not yield the results you want.
3. Build Your Team
Now that your goals are set and the audience defined, it’s time to hire the right people. You’ll need content writers to bolster your content marketing initiatives. You have a few options here you can build an internal team, hire an agency or hire freelancers and split up the work.
If you decide to hire an internal content team, this will be a time-consuming process but often worth it in the long-run. These people will have full-time access which means they will be more accessible and can create content more often.
If you decide to hire an agency there are a couple things to look out for. Agencies are often great for starting your project quickly. You can find an agency that provides SEO services, website development and content marketing.
However, because the agency doesn’t know your team as well, often the content can be fluffy and not have your voice as a brand. It may not bring in the right type of qualified content.
If you decide to hire a freelancer, you could save a lot of money, but expertise varies. It can be a very mixed bag in terms of quality! Some freelancers work harder than salaried employees, while for others, your job for them is a side hustle. It highly depends on the situation.
At the end of the day, finding the right mix of employees for your team is up to you and your specific goals and budget.
4. Develop A Quality Content Strategy
Once your goals have been set, you’ve done your research, and you’ve hired your team, now it’s time to write relevant content. Content writing involves much more than simply writing. It involves a lot of processes such as keyword research, brainstorming topics for blogs, building reports and evaluating, updating and optimizing old content.
If you want your inbound marketing to be successful, you will need to plan out how all of this will get done and fit together. You will have to build processes that ensure your blog posts are written and campaigns executed.
If you aren’t sure where to start with a creating a content calendar, click here.
Pro tip: It’s important to set up the right processes for organization and workflow from the beginning. Tracking every piece of content from inception through publication is important for ensuring quality and producing valuable content. You can use calendar and tracking apps like Slack, Asana or Notion to name a few, to help people stay on track of their work and ensure clear communication and expectations.
Things like social media management and email marketing can be full-time jobs by themselves. Be aware you don’t ask too much of your marketers and split jobs into their necessary areas to avoid burnout and lower workloads.
5. Analyze And Adjust
The last and most important step is to constantly be analyzing and adjusting your initiatives. We recommend tracking and evaluating your inbound marketing efforts periodically. This will help you see what’s working and what needs to be adjusted or optimized.
Eventually once you see what works for your business, you can branch out and try new marketing strategies such as newsletters, building out your social media strategy or expanding to using more video content.
Pro Tip: It can be easy to get fixated and hung up on small issues, instead of focusing on the bigger picture. Sometimes it takes months for a specific campaign to take off. You’ll need to give campaigns time to see if they are successful or not.
Craft Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Developing and implementing a comprehensive inbound marketing plan can seem daunting. There are a lot of moving parts. However, with the right team and the right goals set, you’ll be able to improve the traffic to your website organically and attract the right customers without spending too much.
We hope these 5 tips to help you succeed in your inbound marketing endeavors. However, if developing an inbound marketing strategy seems difficult or if you’re still not sure where to start, feel free to contact us today!
