Inbound marketing is the subtle art of attracting visitors and converting them into loyal customers. It’s the process of adding value to your brand in a way in which prospects can’t help but want to know more about your services.
In Inbound marketing, your marketers won’t have to spend hours rounding up customers through traditional marketing strategies. They won’t have the leverage of high ad spending on advertising or depending on cold calling.
The inbound methodology is driven by remarkable content marketing in which highly valuable content is placed on your website and shared through different social media channels.
In this article, we are going to discuss how you can build your very own inbound marketing strategy. We will also share a few successful examples along the way to help you understand inbound marketing better.
You can also follow these best digital marketing tips for hosting websites.
Interested? Read on.
How to Formulate Your Inbound Marketing Strategy?
In order to formulate an inbound marketing strategy, you will need to take in consideration different aspects including the company’s goals and objectives and also customer feedback. To pull information on your customers, you can always ask your sales team to provide you the information through CRMs and other communication channels.
By doing this, it is possible for a business to recognize its target audience as well as knowing what content they want or need in order to achieve their marketing goals.
The following inbound marketing strategy development tips can help in developing a successful inbound marketing campaign.
– Target an audience that is relevant to your company’s business offerings
– Develop content which solves problems for your target market; provide value in every piece of content and be consistent in publishing it
– Make sure you have the right resources in place, including inbound marketing team members, designers and content writers
– Prioritize inbound activities in your company’s budget
– Measure the success of inbound activity by tracking conversion rates from social media channels to make sure you are not only getting visitors but also converting them into customers.
So now you have a brief idea what you need to do to put together your inbound marketing plan. Let’s take a deeper dive in each of these areas to better understand them.
1) Study Your Target Audience
In inbound marketing, you have to understand your target audience in order for your inbound activities to be successful.
You will need to know what they care about, how they think and the challenges that are faced in their day-to-day lives. By understanding who these people are as a person first then targeting them with products or services in your industry, you will have a higher chance of converting them into loyal customers.
A good example, in inbound marketing, is Zappos.com who has a very popular in-house blog with content that revolves around customer experience and satisfaction in the company’s offerings of shoes for all occasions.
This type of inbound activity was so successful that it resulted in over $80 million in sales in 2010! Another great example is Nike Running. The inbound marketing team at Nike has written in-depth articles that are highly informative and focus on running.
These inbound activities have helped the company to increase its conversion rates from social media channels by almost 300%.
2) Developing Content Which Solves Customer Problems
Next up will be to create content which addresses your customer’s pain points.
A good inbound marketing strategy will have content which solves customer problems. Of course, in order to do this successfully you need to know who your target audience is and what their pain points are in the first place.
This can be done in a variety of different ways,
For instance, Betfair betting company’s inbound marketing team recognized their customer pain point in the form of being able to bet all over the world with one account. To solve this problem they developed an in-depth blog post on how people in different countries could bet in order to take full advantage of the inbound marketing strategy.
The inbound content published by Betfair has helped them increase their conversion rates on social media channels from 0% to about 70%.
3) Prioritize Inbound Activities As Per Company’s Budget
It’s important to prioritize inbound activities in order for you and your inbound marketing team to be successful. I recommend starting with the budget allocation because it will dictate what type of inbound strategies can be executed, as well as how many people need to work on those initiatives.
For example, if there is a small budget in place in a company, then inbound marketing activities should focus on content creation and conversion rate optimization. This is because out of all inbound strategies, this one has the highest return on investment.
If there’s more budget in place to allocate for inbound marketing strategy development, that means you can invest in social media campaigns as well as inbound activities in the form of competitions and promotions. Making some investments in animated video production is not a bad choice either. It can be highly rewarding and number crunching for your businesses.
4) Measure the Success of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Finally in this inbound marketing strategy guide, we will discuss what kind of metrics to measure the success of your inbound marketing.
You need to know which inbound activities are driving the most traffic and conversions for you so that you can see which ones should be prioritized in order to make them successful for your company. Measuring inbound marketing success in terms of traffic and conversions should be simple.
If you want to measure inbound marketing strategy success in other ways, such as customer satisfaction rates or retention rates then those measurements will take a little more effort on your company’s part. For this type of measurement there is usually an industry standard for the average benchmark which can help in the inbound marketing strategy development process.
So there you go, that’s just about everything you need to know about inbound marketing and how to make the most out of its relevant practices. Are you interested in making investments in an inbound marketing strategy for your business?
Now might be the right time to jump in!
