Inbound marketing is rapidly becoming a must for companies that want to find customers through their websites. The concept of interruptive advertisements are quickly losing favor and being set aside to make way for a more in depth inbound marketing strategy.
Creating an inbound marketing strategy that is a reliable business generator requires a process, attention, time, and ongoing care.
Check Out The Ultimate Guide to B2B Lead Generation
Let's look at several inbound marketing activities, what they mean, and what their contribution is to an overall inbound marketing strategy.
Persona Development
What It Means
All great inbound marketing strategies should start with personas. This is the development of fictional characters, or personas, that represent people in your target sales market.
Its Inbound Marketing Contribution
Understanding your target market helps you know what they care about, how they make decisions, where they are, and how you should speak to them as a company. This helps your digital inbound marketing to be more targeted and effective in generating more quality leads.
Competitive Assessment
What It Means
A report that compares your digital presence to that of your competitors.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
Comparing your digital presence (website, social media, mobile experience) to your competitors not only informs you about what they are doing, but helps you identify gaps and understand how aggressive your digital marketing needs to be to generate more awareness, quality sales leads, and revenue through your website.
Blogging
What It Means
Writing 300-800 word posts or "essays" on a single topic that's relevant to your ideal target audience while demonstrating company thought leadership.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
Writing relevant blog content attracts qualified website traffic, raises your company's reputation as an expert in your industry, and increases visibility in organic search.
Content Marketing
What It Means
Writing and producing "premium content" such e-books, detailed digital guides, how-tos, templates, white papers, infographics, or video.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
Similar to blogging, producing varying types of content in your digital marketing tactics attracts qualified website traffic, raise your company's reputation as an expert in your industry, and also helps to generate new business leads. This content generally contains answers that your potential customers are seeking in a pain point they are experiencing.
SEO
What It Means
Search engine optimization (SEO) is making sure your company's website is found for a wide variety of keyword phrases for web searches on your products, services, and industry.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
By ensuring your website is built friendly for search engines, optimized for a positive digital user experience, and by writing your website content in language your ideal customer is using, you'll maximize your digital marketing efforts to drive relevant visitors to your website that are interested in solving a problem they have.
Paid Search (PPC)
What It Means
Paid search (PPC) is a marketing tactic where businesses pay for placement, on platforms like Google, and can advertise within sponsored, paid listings on a search engine or a partner site where the business pays each time their ad is clicked.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
Unlike other aspects of an inbound marketing strategy, businesses can often see measurable and quality results from paid search fairly quickly. The targeted nature of PPC ads and high search intent of users who interact with paid ads often removes users that would need a lot more persuading to purchase.
What It Means
Can be automated, personalized, or sent as a general newsletter to subscribers or contacts.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
Provides more information and related information to contacts that first sought information by filling out a lead form on your website. Examples of various types of email communication in inbound marketing could include blog subscriber notifications, a regular company newsletter, event notifications, or automated lead nurturing sequences. The purpose of email marketing as a tactic in an inbound marketing strategy is to help make a potential customer sales ready.
Social Media
What It Means
Posting links, photos, videos, or other content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat etc.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
To maximize social media for inbound marketing, social media should be used almost exclusively to drive traffic to your website or to raise awareness of your product or service. Video through YouTube can also be used to generate leads when properly optimized for search or when embedded on your website.
Call to Actions
What It Means
Buttons or links on your web pages that drive a website user to take action.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
Help convert visitors to leads by encouraging them to download a piece of content, take the next step by making contact with your company, or set their expectations for what they will see when they arrive for a positive in-person experience.
Landing Pages
What It Means
Pages on your website that fulfill the call-to-action and offer something of value to visitors. These pages almost always focus on one topic and contain a lead form.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
Help convert visitors to leads by offering something of value to a visitor. For example, you may offer a detailed guide or white paper, and would require the visitor to submit contact information to download it.
Lead Scoring
What It Means
A score for each inbound contact based on a carefully-crafted digital algorithm.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
Tells your sales team how far along a potential customer is in the inbound sales process and how ready they are for sales contact. Can also help the sales team prioritize their contacts for outreach.
Digital Marketing Analytics and Reporting
What It Means
Tracking progress on your campaign by identifying what digital marketing activities and channels are producing business value.
Its Contribution to Inbound Marketing
By identifying which digital marketing activities are bringing the most value to your company, you can shift focus to those activities or deploy tests for better effectiveness of underperforming tactics. Get the full picture of your digital ROI. Don't just measure input metrics like website traffic and leads, measure throughput metrics such as revenue impact by investing in a digital CRM.
If you're not sure which of these inbound marketing activities might benefit your company, we will walk you through the options and figure out what's right for your business.
If you are interested in developing an inbound marketing strategy for your company, we can help. We specialize in creating strategies that will work for your company.
Contact us for more information on how we can help make inbound marketing work for you.
