In today’s dynamic marketplace, selling products and services is becoming harder and harder by the day and this because of keen competition amongst industry players. Even if you’ve superior product or service on the shelf to sell, you still must step up your game to create brand awareness for it to fly. And as a budding online entrepreneur, this may be a Herculean task to accomplish.
However, there is a way to get around this and consistently generate leads for your business. Firstly, you’ve
to come up with unique value proposition that is superior to your competitors.
Secondly, you’ve to back up your unique value proposition with consistent but high-quality
content that will wow your niche audience to your website or brand. This way
you’ll be able to survive and thrive in your business or industry by having an
opportunity to constantly interact with your target audience.
This is where having superior digital inbound marketing
strategy in place is critical to your success if you’ve an online business of
any type. But you don’t want to look too salesy to your potential leads or
prospects in your marketing campaigns while expecting to record measurable
results. And at the same time, you want to consistently generate more leads, sales
and revenue to be able to sustain your internet business profitability in the
foreseeable future.
So, the best way to achieve this goal is through constant content
and inbound marketing strategy which I’ll be discussing in this blog article.
As you may already know, not many entrepreneurs have the deep pockets to invest
in outbound marketing especially when
they are just starting out.
To this end, if you’re searching for low-cost ways to drive
free targeted traffic to your blog, creating top-quality content and distributing
it on and off your website is the way to go.
What is
Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing can best be described as the creation of
content and distribution of same on various platforms to attract and convert
leads to customers. For you to create brand awareness and generate leads for your
business on a regular basis, you need to build trust and credibility with your
target audience. You can successfully achieve this goal by demonstrating your
expertise around your business topics before thinking of selling any product or
service to your niche market.
In other words, your content marketing efforts is not
intrusive or interruptive in any way, but you want your prospects to find your online
business through useful and unique content that you regularly publish on your
web property or third-party websites which will be of interest to them. From
there, they can decide to learn more about you and what you are selling through
CTA (call to action) or web links which you provide.
You can start your digital inbound marketing with a
combination of strategies including blogging, SEO (search engine optimization),
email marketing, content marketing and social media marketing. These are the
major ways to pull in potential customers to your blog website without being
pushful.
As an inbound marketer, you’ve to wear many hats at the same
time except you’ve the big budget to outsource or hire freelancers especially
in the areas of content creation and SEO. But if you’re working on a shoestring
budget, you can still kickstart your inbound marketing successfully with
smattering of SEO and content marketing.
Show Your
Audience How Much You Care for Them
By consistently publishing content that solve the pain
points and needs of your target market, the more you’re showing them how much
you care. Selling is not about being pushy with your product or service but by
conveying the benefits of using it through stellar content and handling any objections
truthfully whenever they come up.
For you to maximize the benefits of inbound marketing,
you’ve to understand the customer’s journey and create relevant articles or
blog posts to satisfy each topic or subject matter at every stage of the
customer’s journey.
Stages in
the Inbound Marketing Strategy
Before anything else as a content creator, you’ve to
research and understand your target audience needs as well as every stage they
are currently at on the buyer’s journey. You may want to draw up buyer personas
to have a visual understanding of what exactly to expect and what content to write
about.
Meanwhile, buyer personas is a fictional representation of
your ideal customers. Drawing it up will facilitate your efforts to create
content that will address the problems and pain points of your intended
audience.
For example, writing a blog post on digital marketing for beginners will have a
beginner’s tone and style which will be quite different from if you were
writing for veteran internet marketers on the same topic. In other words, your
niche lingos and lexicon must be toned down for a beginner to grasp your
message.
The stages in the inbound marketing methodology are attract,
convert, close and delight. You must create content tailored to each of the
above phases differently to guarantee best results.
Attract
Your first task in the inbound marketing cycle is to attract
with remarkable content as many targeted visitors or strangers who will
ultimately represent your leads and potential customers on your blog website.
You should not forget that first impression matters and last long in any
relationship.
To put it succinctly, your job is to put your best foot
forward before your target audience by demonstrating your expertise and then using
the medium to create awareness and build credibility for your brand. Creating
content that is useful and helpful will do the magic.
Conducting keyword research to discover users search intent
and targeting these search queries when creating blog content and complementing
it with social media marketing will make the difference in your inbound
marketing strategy.
Convert
When visitors come to your website to read up your blog
posts or articles, you’ve only few seconds to wow or lose them. What this means
is that creating top-quality content to answer the pain points and problems of
your target readers is a given for you to turn them to leads or customers sooner
or later.
However, you’ve to make sure that conversion tools such as
subscription form, landing pages, compelling CTA (call to action) text, etc,
are properly put in place. To add to this, you must create the right incentives
or freebies to cajole your visitors to further do business with you by giving
you their names or email addresses in exchange for the free give away.
Close
For you to seamlessly close a website visitor or stranger to
become a lead or buyer in the customer journey, you’ve to do several things
right from the get-go. Understanding TOFU, MOFU and BOFU at this level is very
vital to your success.
The inbound marketing sales funnel requires specific content
to attract, convert, close and delight prospects and customers or clients at
every stage.
Delight
Turning a lead or prospect to a customer is just the
beginning of a business relationship. There is more work you’ve to do to keep
customers loyalty to your brand. This is why focusing on customer-centric
information and communicating same on a timely basis is paramount to your
profitability.
Statistics have it that it costs less to keep an existing
customer than to acquire new one. This should compel you to create a desk for
after-sales support. An active customer support will endear your clients to
become brand promoters and advocates.
If you ask me any day, the best and easiest way to acquire a
customer is by word of mouth or referral because it doesn’t involve hard
selling but by recommendation. Customers experience with your business brand
will convince them whether to blow your trumpet in the marketplace or not.
Inbound
Versus Outbound Marketing
As a matter of fact, inbound and outbound marketing are
complementary in the digital marketing space. However, inbound marketing
essentially uses high quality and constant content to attract the right website
visitors who want to learn and know more about your business. You can see it as
earned or organic marketing.
On the other hand, outbound marketing involves buying
attention in sundry places with paid advertising such as PPC (pay per click),
sponsored posts, direct mail, trade shows, etc. Most outbound marketing methods
are obstructive although results can be automatic or instant.
Steps for
a Successful Digital Inbound Marketing Campaigns
The following steps have been outlined to help you start a
successful digital inbound marketing strategy in any niche or industry.
- Identify your target audience.
- Research keywords which your target audience use to search for information of their interest.
- Itemize their pain points from the questions your target audience are asking and search intent.
- Create and publish researched and remarkable content addressing problems and pain points on your blog or third-party websites.
- Promote your blog and articles.
- Use landing pages and opt-in boxes to get contact details of your leads so that you can continue to feed and nurture them. You cannot do this without quality freebie such as ebook, video, e-course, and so on.
- Analyze and optimize for best results and upscaling.
In Conclusion
Setting smart and specific goals and creating quality content consistently for your blog publications and/or promotions are pivotal to your digital inbound marketing strategy success. You can achieve this by creating a plan and following through to a T. This involves a lot of groundwork and it’s doable.
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