Creating an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy
As an online business, inbound marketing should be on your radar. You might already be doing it without actually knowing the technical term – and that’s great.
The right inbound marketing strategy will get eyes on your brand and generate consumer interest. It should also result in consistent traffic that’ll help boost ROI. So here’s how to pull customers in and keep them engaged through effective inbound marketing.
Inbound Marketing Vs Outbound Marketing
Firstly, it’s important to know the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is much more interruptive and invasive as it’s the process of pushing brand messages or services through emails, cold calls, direct mail and such like. In contrast, inbound marketing is all about creating amazing content that people deliberately search for when they need it. In other words, consumers come to you and not the other way around.
Attract, Engage, Delight
Inbound marketing might sound simple on paper but for it to be effective, there are three main things you need to do – Attract, Engage, Delight. Let’s find out more.
#1 Attract
People can’t take an interest in your brand if they don’t know you exist. You might have the best product or services in the world, but if you’re not actively putting your brand out there in a competitive online space, you won’t get the credit you deserve. So, to attract an audience it’s important to focus on content marketing. Here’s what’s required:
- A Creative Strategy
Your content needs to be unique, engaging and relevant to your brand. It should be as creative as possible and go beyond the written word. Think videos, animation, podcasts and other content forms that can be optimised for maximum engagement. To help with this, look at how people are already getting to your site and use this to expand your creativity.
- An SEO-Driven Strategy
Your content must be SEO optimised in order for it to be found via a Google search. An SEO-driven content marketing strategy means targeting the right keywords by conducting thorough keyword analysis. It also means creating content with search traffic potential. You can get ideas by entering a topic into a free keyword research tool. This will tell you what sort of content is popular.
For example, if you type in ‘vegan diet’, you might discover topics such as ‘vegan recipe ideas’ ‘vegan cakes’ ‘top vegan snacks’ which will help fuel your content strategy.
- On-Page Optimisation
Once you know the keywords and topics you wish to target, you then need to optimise your web pages. This means placing keywords in titles and subtitles as well as throughout the body of the content. On-page optimisation also means perfecting your internal linking structure to pass link juice to pages of authority. This will help Google deliver content you want people to see.
#2 Engage
Just because people are looking at your content, doesn’t mean they’re going to buy from you. This is why you need to be as engaging as possible. The aim is to answer user questions and address specific pain points. You can do this by offering question and answer content or having an FAQ section on your site.
Other engagement tactics include an email signup box on your landing page with an incentive to do so. This could be a free e-book, webinar or worksheet. If they do signup, make sure you send a welcome email to follow up the process. This should include a strong call-to-action. How about also offering product/service samples to hook people in?
#3 Delight
Ultimately, you want your consumers to be delighted by what you have to offer and tell others how amazing you are. So don’t stop trying to please once they’ve completed a purchase. Delighting tactics include offering a live chat service for troubleshooting and general customer care. You can also provide ongoing tutorials as part of your inbound content marketing strategy. Another idea could be to create a customer-only community packed with exclusive content to make customers feel special.
If you need help with your inbound marketing strategy, contact Whitefish Marketing today.
