You have heard about inbound marketing, but the thing is:
You don’t know how to implement it in your business.
In 2006, HubSpot coined the term inbound marketing. Unlike marketing channels like PPC, this focuses on creating reasons and solutions for customers so that they come to you without forced advertisement persuasion.
It’s all about identifying what a market needs and giving it to them when people want it.
According to HubSpot, it consists of 3 stages:
- Attract
- Engage
- Delight
The first stage is to let the customer come to you: you don’t go to them. Let them find you by creating useful content and attraction channels like ads and videos.
The second stage is to increase engagement, to connect with them, so they trust you.
The final stage is to delight the customer with smart content.
In Inbound marketing, customers come to you when they need you. That’s why it makes more profit than PPC and other marketing channels.
The main aim is to create a pull for your product through strategic content.
In this guide, you’ll discover 7 different ideas to get started with inbound marketing. I’ll give you several examples, so you know the exact way to implement these ideas to grow your business.
Let’s begin.
1. Focus On Content Marketing
Content marketing is at the core of inbound marketing.
Not only does it work all the time, but it also works extremely well.
In fact, startups like Kinsta have scaled their business to 7 figures using the same strategy. They published in-depth content consistently, and in 12 months, their traffic skyrocketed by 1,187%!.
Create a blog for your product. Start blogging so you can attract people who need your product and are willing to invest in your tools and services.
Consistently create helpful content for free. That’s how you master the first stage of inbound marketing, attraction.
Here’s a guide to creating long-form content that drives traffic.
What kind of content copy can you write about? Some ready-to-use ideas are:
- How-to posts
- Case studies
- Survey reports
- Step by step guides
- Common mistakes
2. Start Search Engine Optimization
Once you’ve started publishing content on your blog, start leveraging search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is all about optimizing your website and blog content for search engines. You make it easy for search engines to find your content and then you make/add necessary changes that may help your content rank on page 1 of Google for your target keyword.
It is an integral part of inbound marketing. As it’s the best way to generate free, organic traffic.
By implementing SEO, you get free traffic to your content from search engines. The traffic coming from Google is highly targeted, making it easier for you to convert the traffic into leads and customers.
SEO isn’t complicated and gives amazing ROI when done right. You can find out all about getting started with SEO here and here. Check out our WordPress SEO guide.
You’ll NEED to implement SEO to help customers find you through search engines. Else, you’ll be leaving behind a giant channel of potential customers.
3. Interact & Get Active On Social Media
Social media is has helped inbound marketing grow exponentially. Having this level of reach with the audience gives an advantage to businesses in building a connection with their audience.
Create your personal and business social profile and get active on every channel. Facebook pages are a great way to build an audience.
Managing multiple social accounts is a challenging task. So, automate it as well.
In fact, social media automation tools make it super easy to manage multiple accounts from one dashboard. The tools will also help you gain insights into your market and audience.
Some popular social media tools for businesses are:
- Brand24 – to monitor your brand across different social networks.
- Iconosquare – for Instagram analytics.
- Missinglettr – Automated social media post-draft and campaigns for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and managed all social media accounts from one dashboard.
4. Use Ethical Bribes & Content Upgrades
Ethical Bribes and content upgrades are different, are lead magnets: a resource that attracts more leads and helps in conversion rate optimization.
Conversion is a key element of inbound marketing. Every converted visitor is a potential customer, so you need to implement strategies like this, so your visitors eagerly subscribe to your mailing list.
Conventional lead sources like optin forms on your blog’s sidebar don’t convert visitors into leads, so lead magnets are essential.
An ethical bribe is an incentive you offer your visitors and blog readers in exchange for their email addresses. This could be an eBook, checklist, PDFs, discounts, or free membership. And a content upgrade is a content-specific lead magnet.
Both of these lead strategies are insanely powerful.
You can create a segment in your email list if you are using ConvertKit. I’ve put together a guide on how you can deliver multiple lead magnets, add them into one mailing list and segment them.
Since segmentation gives you the ability to personalize emails, it can boost your sales significantly.
5. Call to Action
A call to action (CTA) is the action you want people to take once they see your message. It can be anything from signing up to a mailing list to purchasing a product.
A CTA is often a button that reminds or compels a visitor to take action.
The action of the CTA Button depends on your business goals. But the Call to Actions’ effectiveness depends on 3 important factors, which are:
- Relevance to target persona: who are you targeting?
- Compelling Color & Word – What will compel the visitor to click on your CTA.
- Placement – Placing your CTA above the fold and below the fold will maximize its visibility.
Your call to action should be clear. The CTA should make it obvious to take action.
6. Landing Page Optimization
I can’t emphasize more how much you need to pay attention to your landing pages. I recently had a chance to talk to the Unbounce’s marketing team, and according to them, the biggest reason for losses in any campaign is poor landing pages.
Your landing pages are the next thing your leads will see once they click on your call to action.
Below is a 7-step formula for building landing pages that convert at their best:
- Headline
- Offer
- Credentials
- Guarantee
- Social proof/Testimonials
- Scarcity/urgency
- Call to Action
Headlines are essential – they determine if a visitor gets hooked or not. Next, add your credentials to your landing page: why would anyone listen to you, who are you?
Add testimonials from your previous customers. If you’re new to the business, add social proof using tools like WPfomify, so when someone purchases a product from your website, it shows up to your visitors in an instant.
Create urgency by doing scarcity marketing of your product. Why should not your visitor wait? Why should people but now?
Make your call to action clear. The decision should be obvious.
7. Video Marketing
People want more videos from brands and marketers!
Videos convert better than text content. Whether you’re trying to sell a product or enroll more students into your program, you have to add more videos to your marketing.
In fact, if you look at the research closely, you’ll notice how millennials respond to videos more than emails. Media is changing the inbound marketing scenario.
Getting into video marketing is easy. You can start a Youtube channel and use tools like Tubebuddy to analyze how your competitors are doing on Youtube.
Recording a video is easier than writing a copy. And it converts pretty well.
Implement these inbound marketing strategies to grow your business without relying on paid media.
Download free 50 ways to convert your visitors into customers here.
Awesome ideas for inbound marketing. That’s interesting that 87 percent of online marketers are now using video content. I imagine that video appeals a lot to target audiences since so much of social media is video. If I needed a digital marketing strategy for a business, I would want to make sure I employed a marketing agency that was going to help with my social media and content strategies.
That’s great and Indeed video marketing is highly effective ????
Thank you bforbloggers for giving me practical information. I’m currently doing inbound marketing for my business.