The first question you should ask is: 'to achieve what'?
Inbound marketing - otherwise known as content marketing - is an excellent, cost-effective way of driving more business to websites. But, in addition to that, it is also good at nurturing known contacts into becoming full blown leads and customers.
Therefore the first thing that you must do when considering inbound marketing is getting your marketing objective right:
- Do you want to drive more website visits?
- Do you want to convert more of these visits into leads?
- Do you want to convert more of these leads into customers?
There are different tactics for each of these.
What can inbound marketing strategies actually achieve?
If you have established your objectives for your business, then you will be able to design and deliver an inbound marketing programme to match these objectives. But what can they actually achieve in reality? That depends on a number of factors and we will try to outline some of the more important ones here:
- Keywords: this will be an integral part of your blogging strategy. There will be keywords which are extremely important to your business and industry. However, you have no control over how many searches there are or how competitive these searches are. You have to be canny about how you choose long tail keywords which are relatively frequently searched but also are not impossibly competitive
- Blogging frequency: You do need to set a tempo of blogging so that you make an impact. If your blogging is so infrequent that you don't develop a readership or are able to link newly published blogs to previous ones then your inbound marketing is going to be less effective. We would recommend blogging a minimum of once per week for most businesses but it is much better to increase that to two blogs per week
- Email: Whilst many think that email is a bit old-fashioned, it is still effective. This is especially true for nurturing campaigns for contacts that have specifically self-identified for more of this material for you. The trick is to make the email valuable - that is provide receivers with offers and material which helps them
- Landing pages: Landing pages are critical to capturing prospect details. Typically, you will have a page which carries some kind of offer for your prospects (something they will value) and, to get access to that offer, they have to complete a short form. The landing page is the vehicle for completing this action and it is how you convert visitors into contacts
- Smart Lists: Smart lists are great and allow you to build a dynamic list of factors which segment your contacts in various ways. As you build more information on what your contact likes, on who they are, on where they are in the business cycle, then you can build smart lists to capture and email them with relevant material
What strategies can you adopt?
Here are some ideas about what you can do for each of these business objectives.- Looking to increase visits:
- Want to convert visits to leads:
- Convert leads into customers:
How long until it takes effect?
I will be very honest here. This is not a fast programme and, if you need a fast programme to help your business over the next month or quarter, you might be better looking at something like PPC or telemarketing campaigns.
Being realistic, you will start to see improvements within three months (if your strategy is correct and achievable) and you should start to see much more improvement over the three to nine month period. This will be especially true in site visits. For example, we have recently seen a 30% improvement in web traffic after three months on running an inbound campaign.
Which element is the most important to get right?
Here is the most difficult answer to give. There is no part which is more important than the rest. They are all important and require close and careful attention.
I suppose if there is one answer here then it is in your choice of marketing software. We are a HubSpot e-commerce partner and we think that HubSpot is the best marketing automation software to act as the platform for these sort of programmes.
How focusing on inbound marketing can give your SME an advantage
The most simple way inbound marketing gives an advantage is that - over time - it will seriously improve your search results. The effect of this is to replace the need for paying for pay per click advertising so saving money whilst not reducing contact-generating effectiveness.
If you liked this blog story then you might also like this previous blog too? http://inbound.itqsolutions.net/blog/content-marketing-agency