How to Create a Powerful Inbound Marketing Strategy?

So how does one create a solid inbound marketing strategy?

Mass marketing or “push” advertising worked extremely well in the earlier days. But times are changing, and so are consumer preferences.

It’s an undeniable fact that consumers online are doing their homework before buying something, especially when they are faced with multiple options. They’re using Google to research products and social media to seek recommendations from friends/family.

This is why inbound marketing is gaining more importance than regular outbound marketing. So as a business, you need to understand how “aware” consumers are and what you need to do to get on their radar with a real inbound marketing strategy.

The question now is how to create a powerful inbound marketing strategy. Below are some tips for a successful inbound marketing strategy.

 

Creating a Strong Inbound Marketing Strategy

There are three parts to a successful inbound marketing strategy:

Attracting visitors
Turning visitors into leads
Nurturing leads into customers

We’ll be looking into each of these parts in detail below.

 

#1: Attracting Visitors to Your Website

Your inbound marketing strategy will only work if you are consistently attracting the right people to your website. You want your target audience to naturally get pulled towards your content. And that can only happen when you do the following:

Define Your Buyer Personas

When you craft content, you want it to appeal to your prospects. You want them to benefit from it in some way. But in order to develop content that your audience finds value in, you’ll have to be clear on who they are.

Who are you marketing to?
What is their profession?
What are their primary challenges?
What are their goals or objectives?
Where do they look for information?
What are their objections?
By developing buyer personas, you’re no longer doing guesswork. You are not creating content just for the heck of it. You have a better direction and purpose, which improves your inbound marketing strategy.

Conduct a Content Audit

Any business that has been leveraging content for marketing, needs to do a timely content audit. The purpose of conducting a content audit is to analyze plus understand how your content is being used and delivered to your target audience.

For instance, if you’ve focused only on blogging over the year, then maybe you may want to try conducting webinars or deliver case studies to see how these other formats work. You can also audit your content for your buyer personas to see if they go with the buying stages.

Begin Producing New, Useful Content

When you put in the effort to create new content, you want it to strike a chord of your target audience. With outbound marketing, that isn’t the case because you’re not targeting your content to a specific set of audience. But with inbound marketing, you know what content your prospects will find interesting because you’re producing it based on buyer personas.

The purpose of content creation is not just brand building, but also getting traffic back to your site. Not just any traffic, but traffic that will convert into leads/sales. So having a clear idea on who will be consuming your content and what appeals to them will help you attract the right people to your site.

Integrate SEO

SEO or search engine optimization has been out there for a long time now, and is counted as THE way to get free, organic traffic to your website. Since the search engine listings are free, all you need to do is invest some of your time to optimize your site.

The reason we’re mentioning SEO is because it’s an inevitable part of any successful inbound marketing strategy. Search engines like Google and Bing are powerful enough to find your content and show it to the right people, given that you’ve done your SEO well. So integrating SEO into your inbound marketing strategy is something that you should take seriously.

 

#2: Turning Visitors into Leads

Attracting the right kind of visitors to your website is important, but it’s not the only part to focus on. Your inbound marketing strategy should also involve a proper lead capture.

In order to convert a visitor into a lead, you need to have some kind of “exchange of value”. You give something to your visitor and they give you their contact information.

Here are two simple tools that you can implement on your website to turn more visitors into leads.

Exit Intent Popup

One of the most effective lead capture tools out there is the exit intent popup that can help you boost your conversion rate up to 10% when implemented properly.

Live Chat

There’s something about Live chat that makes it so meaningful in people’s eyes. It makes you look more authentic and approachable. It gives your visitors the confidence that you are real. Which makes it a great tool for engaging your visitors and boosting your conversion rate. If you want to capture more leads and do it without looking shady, Live chat is the way to go.

Below are some quick benefits of using Live chat on your site…

• It lets you connect to your visitors on a higher level and remove any objections they may have by answering their questions in real-time.
• It gives visitors an opportunity to talk to you about your site’s content and give direct feedback, which gives you the opportunity to convert them.
• It lets you personalize your messaging based on the location of the visitor or if he/she is a repeat visitor.

Regardless of the size of your business, you can and should use Live chat to boost the conversion rate of your site.

 

#3: Nurturing Leads into Customers

Lead nurturing is a crucial part of the whole inbound marketing strategy, where you engage your acquired leads with relevant/useful information. The type of information you send them depends on what stage of customer journey they are on, and what they need.

Developing relationships with your customers on various stages of the sales funnel becomes more easy and predictable with lead nurturing. The idea is to move each lead further down this funnel, so that you can turn them into a paying customer/client.

When you focus your inbound marketing strategy to get more leads into your sales funnel, you’ll have more clarity on the importance of having a strong lead nurturing process.

Here are the most common lead nurturing tactics you can use…

1. Targeted content
2. Multi-channel lead nurturing
3. Timely follow-ups
4. Personalized emails
5. Lead scoring
6. Sales and marketing alignment

 

Remember, generating traffic with great content and then converting it into leads/prospects is of no use unless and until you nurture your leads effectively. It’s the final piece of your inbound marketing strategy that helps everything fall in place.

 

Source Credit: https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/inbound-marketing-strategy/