The Inbound Economy:
Inbound marketing requires that you become known as an authoritative, go-to internet location. That means you have to develop a strong blogging and social media campaign. It takes planning.
Today's consumers are less impressed with outbound appeals than ever. A majority (some say as many as 87 percent) of consumers go online when looking for something to meet a need.
- The main point is, you have to be there for them when they need products or services.
- You have to know who your customers are.
- They have to be customers whose needs your products and services can precisely meet.
- You have to develop search engine prominence so they will find you easily.
Your inbound marketing strategy should advance your search engine ranking using an organic approach. This involves several tactics, including links that direct traffic to your landing pages and expanding your reach via guest blogging and active participation in industry sites. Email campaigns and social media profiles are also important aspects of most inbound campaigns.
There are six basic steps to follow when planning an inbound campaign:
1. Identify your customers. Knowing what products and services you offer, you can sketch out the ideal customer you are hoping to attract. These profiles- known as buyer personas- should include:
- Customer demographics (age, gender, socio-economic factors, etc.).
- Values and general attitudes that would affect buying choices.
- Needs and pain points.
- What you can offer to meet those needs and pain points.
- How they now perceive your company and products.
- Objections they may have to buying your product or service.
2. Analyze your methods of attracting new business. Here's where you work on your internet presence.
- Work on building your search engine rank. Employ important keywords in your contents and headlines. Write interesting and useful blogs and try to get other respectable sites to link to you when possible.
- Take stock of current traffic to your website.
- Look at the leads and customers generated by similar campaigns in the past and use those benchmarks to set goals for this campaign.
- Set SMART goals and create a plan for reaching them.
3. Create a dynamic lead conversion and tracking landing page. The landing page or website visitors are steered to and linked to has to have the capacity to actively convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. It also has to have built-in mechanisms that count and measure.
- Add tracking tokens to addresses in your website complex. These allow you to measure the success of different aspects of your campaign and different components of your landing page.
- Build a landing page that educates and automatically nurtures leads. Build content that educates visitors about how to select among your products and services to solve their problems.
- Create content offers and catalogs on the landing page.
- Build your landing page in the form of a selling funnel organized around staged calls to action to final close.
- One of the calls to action should be solicitation of an e-mail address or contact information from leads.
4. Build an inbound marketing campaign that brings traffic to your landing page. Use multiple marketing elements.
- Improve your search engine ranking organically by writing fresh blogs on a weekly basis. Regularly contribute to public discussions in your industry. Make sure your writing includes links to your landing page. Informative blogs and other engaging content helps to establish your business as a "go-to" location.
- Develop an e-mail marketing campaign. Regularly (but not too often) send informative reminders to leads on your mailing list.
- Create social media profiles for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.
- Consider paid traffic options to increase search engine prominence. These include sponsored listings, Pay per Click (PPC), or Cost per Acquisition (CPA).
5. Delight your customers to ensure repeat business. Put emphasis on customer lifetime value (CLV). Make purchases as easy as possible.
- Provide free shipping.
- Speed shipping time.
- Improve response time on customer telephone lines.
- Maintain a current catalog.
6. Scale for growth. Build a repeatable system that can be scaled upward as you grow.
- Make your pattern of blog and content writing consistent.
- Encourage guest blogs and customer response.
- Sometimes publication of business magazine, newspaper articles, or public appearances on relevant media can really boost your profile and the attractiveness of your business.
ClientBridge, LLC is an inbound marketing agency and marketing automation firm. We help our clients located in Houston and elsewhere, with proven systems that attract new prospects and customers, capture leads, convert leads to customers, and maximize the lifetime value of those customers. Please contact us to learn more.
