Unlike outbound marketing which is costly and outdated; inbound marketing strives to get your business found by consumers by leveraging your web content and bringing them direct to your website.
At the same time, inbound marketing aims to benefit your audience and help them to solve their problems – no strings attached – so that they’ll willingly want come to you more and more for your products – and everything else that you have got to offer – and establish long term relationships.
And achieving this is easier than you think.
By optimising your web content and strategically placing it within locations that your target audience is likely to visit; you can boost site traffic and get your business ‘out there’.
Yet this is not all you can do to maximise your inbound marketing. Below are a number of techniques that can help you to get noticed.
- Content – at the core of every successful campaign is compelling content that attracts interest to your business and compels users to visit your site. When paired with search engine friendly keywords; together they can help to convey your brand message and make a positive impact on your audience.
This is further strengthened by revolving your content around specific keyword topics and displaying them on blogs, videos, podcasts, webinars and eBooks.
Similarly, well written content has the power to showcase your knowledge and capabilities and make you an expert in your field, thus increasing your hiring potential.
Your content needs to offer them a solution; a means to solve their problems and move forward. That is why your content should be helpful and solve a variety of problems so everyone walks away with a solution.
Other things to consider:
- Aim to publish informative, SEO optimised blogs
- Make use of your social channels for shorter content marketing i.e. tips
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisations) – the goal behind SEO is to increase site visibility by generating organic results. By first researching trends and your competitors, and isolating topical keywords; you can take this information and incorporate it into your content and achieve the rankings you crave.
Tips for influencing your results:
- Keep Title tags brief but descriptive; unique for every page and make sure that they accurately describe the topic of that page’s content.
- Use descriptive Meta tags that use keywords and which accurately summarise the subject of the page.
- Maintain a simplified site structure that clearly organises your content and makes information easy to find.
- Create 2 site maps – one to be used by visitors and another for search engines.
- Use anchor text, heading tags, and optimise every page using imagery that has had descriptive filenames and alt attributes added to them.
- Produce fresh content on a weekly/bi-weekly basis that is easy to read and written to a high standard.
- Generate a large number of quality inbound links.
- Social Media – this medium is a fantastic way to get your brand message out there and broadcast your knowledge. Within this environment, you can create and exchange user generated content, whilst putting your followers in control.By doing so, this encourages them to become more engaged and connected with your business, as social media allows them to put a face to your business and view you more personally. At the same time, social media allows you to prove to consumers that you are open to listening to their thoughts and concerns.
Top social media channels to consider include: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.
Ultimately the role of inbound marketing is to attract, convert, close and delight prospective customers.
Through blogs, keywords and social publishing, you can harness forms, call-to-actions, email marketing (newsletters), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and targeted landing pages to eventually convert and turn them into credible leads.
So if you’re looking to market your business, make sure inbound marketing is at the core of your strategy. With its help, you can build long term traffic, conversions and client relationships.
