Is Your Business Discoverable Online?
In today’s online world it is vital that your business is discoverable online and should be a pre-requisite for doing business in today’s fast paces online world. However most businesses don’t understand or know how to effectively position their business to appear higher in search results, or to reach more prospects using online marketing.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing, in simple terms, is the process of helping prospects find your business. This frequently happens before the prospect is even ready to make a purchase, but making contact early can turn into brand preference and, ultimately generate leads and revenue.
Inbound marketing is a strategy that utilizes many forms of attraction marketing to create brand awareness and attract new business.
content marketing
blogs
events
search engine optimization (SEO)
social media
and more
These methods make you attractive to customers because they don’t make prospects feel like they’re being sold to., nobody likes being sold to. The content provided by inbound marketing is educational, entertaining, and welcomed by consumers. When done correctly, inbound marketing can return dramatically better results than traditional marketing that disrupts prospects rather than giving them an open invitation to engage with you and your business. When consumers find your company this way, it has a stronger influence on their future marketing decisions, their feelings toward your business in general and can have the effect of shortening the buyers journey.
The best part? Inbound marketing consists of entirely organic leads, so it relies on brains rather than budget.
Inbound marketing has the power to put your prospects and customers in the driver’s seat, connecting you with people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say and do. Aside from lead conversions and customer retention, inbound marketing can do wonders for social media shares, brand awareness, and search engine optimization efforts. Inbound marketing has the powerful ability to put customers in the driver’s seat, connecting you with people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. Aside from lead conversions and customer retention, inbound marketing can do wonders for social media shares, brand awareness, and search engine optimization efforts. A robust inbound marketing program allows customers to engage with your brand at any time. This allows you to generate qualified leads for much less money than traditional marketing.
The empowered buyer has all the information they need to make a buying decision at their fingertips any time, any place. Detail specs, pricing, and product/service reviews are right in their pocket, not to mention social media’s impact on information sharing. In order to be successful in this evolving landscape, visibility through inbound marketing is key.
The Most Common Issues Inbound Marketing Solves!
Problem: I need to increase my brand awareness.
Up to 94% of buying cycles start with an online search. If your company appears at the top of search results, or is active on a searcher’s social network, you can organically increase your brand awareness. To do that, you must make sure you have the right content and messaging in place to show up in these key inbound channels.
Problem: I want to improve my brand preference.
By informing, educating, entertaining, and interacting with prospects before they are even thinking about making a purchase, you build trust and increase the likelihood that they will choose you when they are ready to buy. Never underestimate the impact of becoming a familiar face.
Problem: I need to generate more leads but have less to invest.
Inbound marketing is a long-term strategy and investment that builds on itself over time. Your results will multiply many times over as you become better at creating engaging content that naturally attracts organic leads.
Problem: I’m not sure I have the staff or budget to do inbound marketing.
Like most things in life, the more you put into inbound efforts, the more you’ll get out of it. However the most important thing you’ll need is to have a great strategy.
Learn more about what you need to get your inbound marketing program started with our
Inbound Marketing Cheat Sheet
ROI of a successful inbound marketing program
Inbound marketing is unique in that it generally has less of an up-front cost than other marketing efforts, and it can have a seriously impressive ROI when used correctly.
- Inbound marketing brings leads to you. Inbound marketing generates three times more leads per dollar than traditional methods (Content Marketing Institute).
- Inbound marketing has a proven ROI. 44% of brands that use marketing automation software see ROI within six months, while 75% see ROI after one year.
- Inbound marketing is easy on your budget. Businesses that mainly rely on inbound marketing save more than $14 for every newly acquired customer (Hubspot).
Planning, implementing, and optimizing your inbound marketing program
As with most things in Business and life the more your invest, the bigger the return and inbound marketing is no different. The secret is in creating amazing, engaging and informative content. This takes brains and commitment rather than budget. No amount of money will make content effective it has to be amazing, just good enough just will not cut it with today’s search engines and the shear quantity of content that is being published every day.
5 Steps Of Inbound Marketing
- Step 1: Define your business goals and buyer personas. Identify your target audience and learn all you can about them. You can’t write content to inform your customers until you know your audience.
- Step 2: Provide content at every stage. Preemptively answer the questions that your customers are likely to have at each stage of their buying journey. Determine your unique, compelling story. Why should your audience listen to you? The concept of what we call transformational inbound marketing goes beyond traditional inbound marketing techniques. Unlike traditional inbound, transformational inbound leverages valuable content to attract and retain customers throughout their entire lifecycle, not just before they are a customer, but after as well. Additionally, transformational inbound marketing puts a greater emphasis on personalization and relevance.
- Step 3: Choose your delivery platforms. The more valuable the content you create for you audience, the more likely you are to win them as customers.Determine the best way to reach them, whether it’s through Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, your blog, or elsewhere.
- Step 4: Create and execute your content calendar. It is important to create a schedule that will consistently turn out fresh and relevant content to continue to engage your audience. By keeping a constant stream of content that addresses your customers’ questions, issues, and pain points, you’ll maintain relevance and build your brand as a trusted thought leader.
- Step 5: Analyze results and optimize your inbound marketing program. There’s a variety of metrics to choose from when measuring the success of your inbound marketing efforts. Whether you decide to analyze SEO rankings, inbound links, or the number of articles published, these resources will provide valuable insight into how your campaigns are performing. Set aside time for analysis on a weekly basis. This step will aid you in understanding how effective your inbound marketing efforts have been and how they can improve.