Inbound Marketing is a significant part of the modern marketing strategy. It takes seriously the requests and concerns of their customers and provides them with relevant content.
Do you want to ensure, you have implemented the newest Inbound Marketing Strategy? Eminence, your digital marketing agency has collected for you the ten most efficient and successful tips for 2019.
But before we start with the tips, we would like to explain you in more detail the components of Inbound Marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is a Pull Marketing strategy for generating leads (customer acquisition cost). It’s about drawing the attention of potential clients to your company’s services and products of and to attract them with high quality content. The methodology of the Inbound Marketing is based on four stages. For each stage there are different marketing instruments available:
- Attract strangers to become visitors with the help of Blogs, Content-Strategy and Social Media.
- Convert visitors to leads with the help of registration forms, meetings, messages and live chats, CRM.
- Close leads with customers with the help of Pipeline-Management, Lead-Nurturing, Email-Marketing, automatic Lead-Scoring.
- Delight customers to become promoters with the help of Customer Hub, Smart Content and Conversations.
In all of the four stages, content marketing is playing a very important role. Furthermore, the last station of the inbound stage shows a particularity. With the purchase, the process is not finished, but instead sustainability plays a very important role.
Today’s delighted clients are the promoters of tomorrow. They will recommend the company and assure the constant growth of the inbound marketing ROI.
→ Inbound Marketing enables you to achieve your business objectives
1. Identify your Buyer-Personas
Before you start producing content, you should define your target audience. Create a profile of the buyer, the so-called Buyer Persona, which includes demographic and behaviour characteristics. You need to adapt your content, your tone of voice and your marketing messages custom-fit to your Buyer Persona.
The profile of a Buyer Persona should include:
- Name
- Age
- Profession
- Income
- Origin
- Hobbies
- Problems
- Expectations regarding the product
In the inbound methodology, you should build your Buyer Personas using market researches, surveys or through interviews.
2. Define your objectives with the SMART principle
Define from the beginning on, your long-term goals as concrete as possible. Your objectives should be SMART:
- Specific: What is expected, who is involved, what are the restrictions?
- Measurable: What are the criteria, which can be used to measure the progress?
- Attainable: Is the target setting realistic?
- Realistic: Is the objective realistic for the success of your company?
- Timely: What is the deadline of the respective goals?
3. Create content with added value for your target audience
Don’t forget – the principle in Inbound-Marketing ROI is:
The client is in the focus and NOT your own product!
You should take into account this motto while choosing your content. It’s not about putting your own product in the centre of attention, but it’s all about informing, entertaining and supporting the potential client in his needs and expectations. When establishing content, you should regularly ask yourself if it is generating an added value for your specific Buyer Persona or not.
4. Adapt the content to the Buyer’s Journey
Effective Content Marketing should take the user straightaway to the desired stage of decision-making. As part of the Buyer’s Journey, three stages can be distinguished where different content should be applied:
Awareness stage: The user is getting aware or recognizes symptoms of a problem.
Ideal content: E-books, whitepapers, editorial content.
Consideration stage: The user has identified the problem and is looking for a concrete solution. Ideal content: Podcasts, videos, expert guides.
Decision stage: The user makes a decision for a solution. Ideal content: Product comparisons, case studies, free trials.
5. Define a concrete strategy for the implementation
Instead of producing random content for different Buyer Personas in different stages of your Buyer’s Journey, you should define a clear and feasible strategy:
- What kind of content elements should be included?
- On which channels do you want to distribute your content?
- In which order and frequency do you want to publish your content?
- Who is doing what and when?
Your content should be listed in an editorial plan that shows who has created and published the respective articles and for which Buyer Persona in which stage it was created.
6. Multi Channel Promotion and distribution of your content
To draw the attention of your target audience, the precise distribution of your content via the different channels is crucial. With regular targeted publications on your Blog and earned Media channels you can build a long-term organic reach and visibility in the Google Search Engine (SEO). For short-term reach you can use paid media actions (SEA), which you can apply on search engines, and Social Media paid advertising.
7. Choose channels, which match to your content and your Buyer Personas
Choose the Social Media platform on which you want to distribute your content based on your Buyer Persona. Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat are used by the younger generation. LinkedIn is used in particular for the business. Also take into account the style of your respective content; Instagram is for visual content, Twitter for very short posts and also try to integrate videos.
8. Use your landing page as mainstay
When it comes to Inbound Marketing efforts all roads lead to a landing page.
A landing page is a website where the user gets when he clicks in the Internet on a banner/advertising or an entry in the Google search engine. The landing page’s goal is to convince the targeted user to make a specific action the site operator has already defined (conversion). Such objectives may be the purchase of products, lead generating, distribution of content, etc..
The landing page should be kept simple and answer the following questions:
- What is the offer?
- What are the advantages of the offer?
- Why the offer is relevant for the visitors?
- How the visitor can purchase the offer?
9. Don’t forget to collect and analyse the relevant data
Different marketing tools enable the collecting of data. Relevant data can give you information about the performance of your content:
- Who has seen which content? How many likes and how many comments did I receive?
- What is the total number of clics ? How long was duration time?
- How many times an email was opened?
- Which gender, which age group and which geographic region is interacting the most with my contents?
Always refer to the objectives you have defined in advance and analyse the relevant key figures for your targets. This can provide you with the information on the progress of your measures and actions.
10. Optimise and reuse
After the production, the distribution and the performance analysis, there is an other important step, which needs to be done: The Optimisation.
You should never see your content work as a completed work. Use the information you get from your analysis to optimize and constantly adapt your future content to suit better and better the needs of your target audience. Sometimes your users are also providing you with constructive suggestions for improvement. Benefit from those suggestions and implement them in your future articles.
In a nutshell
Inbound Marketing has become indispensable in Digital Marketing. Companies will be able to build successful client relations only if they create a high relevance content for their target audience.
It is statistically proven that 60% of the users are doing research work after having read the content of a product. For each amount spent, Content Marketing is generating leads three times more, than traditional Marketing.
This confirms the change of the perspective, which is carried out in the Inbound Marketing, namely a shift from the product to the interests of the users.