There are many ways to approach your prospective customers, and using inbound marketing is one of them. Inbound marketing is an approach that takes a buyer-driven or customer-centric perspective. This implies that companies that use inbound marketing focus on attracting customers through engagement and content. Inbound marketing revolves around organic search engine optimization, as it is very cost-effective and outperforms traditional outbound marketing strategizing like paid advertising.
In this article, we will cover inbound marketing tips that you can follow to boost your brand’s performance. With effective digital marketing strategies and quality content marketing, inbound marketing helps build authority in your business industry over time. This way, you provide your potential customers with valuable solutions and information, solve their problems and address their pain points. You can build trust with your prospects and organically convert them into loyal customers.
Numerous companies widely implement inbound marketing, so you might need more than just an optimized blog to outperform your competitors. Inbound marketing yields more lead generation opportunities than any outbound marketing activity if approached right. For professionals new to implementing inbound marketing, these are the tips to follow:
Strategize your marketing workflow
The first step is to strategize your workflow before you start creating content for your inbound marketing campaign. You need to outline your goals and prepare your marketing strategies according to what you plan to accomplish.
This is a 3-step process that will help you get an idea of a strategic marketing workflow:
- Attract: Write relevant content that draws your audience to the website or social media through blog posts, videos, and more.
- Engage: Create a lasting connection with your audience by collecting data about them. For example, you can collect their email addresses through landing pages and sign-up forms.
- Delight: Provide reliable information and valuable content to the right people, converting them into loyal customers and, ultimately, promoters. This can be achieved through continuous communication via email or social media.
To implement these three stages, you need to understand each phase and come up with a strategy for it.
Define detailed buyer personas
The first step in the inbound marketing workflow is writing compelling content that resonates with your prospective customers. In order to create relevant content for your audience, you need to understand your audience better. It involves in-depth research and analysis to identify prospects who are interested in buying your product or service.
To create a detailed buyer persona, you need to answer these questions:
- Who are they? Their age, gender, marital status, occupation, etc.
- Where do they live? Do they reside in metropolitan areas, small cities, or mostly travel?
- What kind of problems do they have that you can address?
- What platforms do they use?
These effective ways will help you find answers to these questions and identify your ideal buyer persona.
Use social media insights
You can leverage your existing social media channels to get a clear idea of creating a buyer persona. Go over platform insights and learn more about the audience who engages with your content. The process is quite straightforward with such platforms as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Create a survey
If you have an email list or a customer base, try conducting surveys to get more information about your audience. Ask them about their expectations, problems, needs, etc. This will give you a detailed picture of your ideal customer in addition to specific pain points. The acquired information can be used to create content around these problem areas.
Develop a content marketing strategy
When you have defined the buyer persona, you need to deliver valuable content to your prospects to power engagement with a solid content marketing strategy. Even though inbound marketing is not limited to creating content, but this aspect is nonetheless important. You need to come up with comprehensive, relevant, and helpful content for your audience to show them that you are the one who can address their problems with useful solutions. It requires dedication, patience, and persistence to build trust with your audience so they become returning customers.
To achieve that, you need to create a working content marketing strategy by planning the types of content you will create for your audience. What your audience prefers defines it all.
Here are some important aspects to consider for your content marketing strategy:
- How does your audience prefer to consume content? These can be blog posts, podcasts, videos, etc.
- What are your audience’s pain points, and how can your business solve them? Optimize your content to address these vulnerabilities.
- Outline the customer journey and create content for each phase. For instance, you can create content that focuses on existing, new, and repeat customers.
With all this said, inbound marketing is an effective customer-centric approach that facilitates lead generation for your business. It is all about understanding your prospects, creating content that speaks to them, and using this process to convert them into long-standing customers.
