The 7 Best Strategic Inbound Marketing Practices
Inbound marketing is a critical part of a marketing strategy that generates business growth. Companies deploy inbound marketing programs to make it easy for their prospects to find them on the internet. Instead, most consumers prefer a “soft sell” approach in which they learn information that is pertinent to the problems they are trying to solve before they engage a company to fulfill their needs, especially that many people tune out pure marketing messages due to the large number of them. In addition, inbound marketing results in warm leads that can be more easily converted than other approaches such as cold calling or traditional advertising.
Inbound Marketing Basics
Understanding the human psyche is key to ensure you are not dumping cash on campaigns that don’t actually lead to sales. Inbound marketing is a passive method of building trust with customers, and can help in increasing sales with strategic execution. Inbound marketing strategies are reliant on appealing to people’s psychology effectively to ensure effective investment into campaigns that will help your business grow. With the highest level of strategic execution, your marketing campaigns could go viral which will only amplify your success.
Here’s some considerations that will help you more strategically plan your next inbound marketing campaign:
- Most strategies are relatively inexpensive to execute since engagement will increase the success of your campaign.
- Visitors become warmer and more receptive as they receive more relevant content that appeals to them.
- Send email campaigns out to an organically built email list. Using a purchased list can be a huge waste of money as it may result in your reputation taking a serious nosedive. While sending your first campaign with a purchased email list might be delivered into your recipients’ primary inboxes, subsequent emails that you send are highly likely to be delivered into “spam” or “promotions” folders. This is due to the amount of people who mark your first email as “spam” which will even affect the ability for legitimate contacts to receive your emails. In contrast, an email campaign that is sent to an organically built email list are going to be delivered into your recipients’ inboxes more frequently, which is a key aspect of a strategy in how you can maximize the amount of people who open your email in the long term.
- Genuinely provide high quality content that is relevant and useful to your audience to build credibility with your audience.
- Provide ongoing support to your clients as a part of your inbound marketing strategy to strengthen customer loyalty, which will help provide additional opportunities to upsell complementary products and services.
- Remember that you are gradually building trust with your prospects and clients over time to build or strengthen business relationships.
The 7 Best Practices of How To Grow Your Business With Inbound Marketing
1. Strategically Research Your Targeted Keywords
Find relevant keywords to strategically plan your SEO and PPC campaigns by utilizing Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner. This planner allows you to assess any particular keyword’s search engine volume and competitiveness, which will help you compile a plan of what keywords you should target. It will also show a suggested per click bid which will help you evaluate the cost for each potential search term. Furthermore, you could focus on targeting specific keywords using SEO strategies for keywords with a higher PPC cost to streamline the results of your advertising budget. In addition, you should align your keyword strategy to your overall business goals by properly defining your target customer and what action you want them to take.
2. Create Multiple, Highly Relevant Display Advertisements
Create highly relevant display advertisements that appeals to the specific demographics of your target customers. Incorporate content that addresses how your solutions effectively solves clients’ needs, as well as what differentiates your business from competing solutions. You should create 3-4 alternatives to ensure that you get maximum ROI for your advertising budget as you can continually A/B test different alternatives for the most optimal performance of your campaigns.
3. Optimize Your Landing Page With A Single Call To Action
Optimize your landing page with a single call to action to ensure it achieves maximize conversion. Coordinate your landing page content with the content of the advertisements which are driving traffic to the respective landing page. Ensure that you have a single, bold call to action positioned above the fold, which means that is visible to prospects without the need to scroll. You could provide a free trial, offer a live demo, or host a webinar. We recommend offering a free whitepaper on the first landing page and following up with the prospect to schedule a more detailed presentation.
4. Post Relevant Content On Social Media On Platforms That Have The Highest Alignment To Your Business
Social media is more than just connecting with your targeted audience. Businesses regularly post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest to help them develop relationships with their targeted audience. You could rotate amongst posting promotional, relevant, interesting, funny, educational, and inspiring content to build trust and authority.
Offering free white papers and ebooks provides more value to your prospects than blog articles. You can then ask for an email address and other contact information to access the content. Then, you can use marketing automation to track them as they continue to engage with your website, social media, and email campaigns.
5. Become A Thought Leader & Increase Organic Search Visibility By Publishing Relevant & Appealing Content
Set up a blog to share trending information related to your product and services that build trust and thought leadership with your current and prospective customers. Indeed, it takes time to build an audience through blogging, but once you do, you are good to go. As articles that appear on the first page of Google average 2000 words, keep in mind that more detailed blog posts are more impactful to SEO.
6. Build Trust By Periodically Sending Out Email Newsletters
Similar to blogs, email newsletters are a way of providing information rather than selling that builds trust. Strengthen relationships with your clients by leveraging email to amplify the reach of your blog. You can also include a promotion, or an upcoming event to to maximize its effectiveness.
7. Use A Marketing Automation Platform
Use a marketing automation platform to track how your users engage with your content, which will maximize the ROI of your inbound marketing initiatives. A marketing automation platform will help you more productively turn prospects into paying customers because it can track how your customers interact with your website, email campaigns, and social media accounts. Your company can also send personalized campaigns based on specific website pages your customers visit, and prioritize which are the best contacts to reach out to at any given point in time.
Well, that’s all folks. Remember that an inbound marketing strategy is very synergistic as you will experience more results as you strategically deploy additional initiatives within your inbound marketing campaign.
Reflect upon these considerations to maximize the benefit of your company’s inbound marketing campaign. Consider partnering with a top digital marketing agency, like Prime Marketing Experts that will help your company be more effective in attracting, converting, and retaining customers. For more information on top quality digital marketing services, please visit Prime Marketing Experts or email us at michael@primemarketingexperts.com.