Nobody likes to be forcefully pitched for sales with unwanted emails, forceful ads, and pop-ups. This is when inbound strategies do fit in and appear more natural than aggressively following or approaching your leads through desperate in-your-face strategies like that of outbound ones.

By inbound marketing, we refer to a marketing methodology that aims to draw potential customers and visitors towards a brand. Instead of pushing products or services towards a customer, inbound marketing strategies are directed towards attracting, engaging and delivering a delightful experience to ideal customers so that they visit the website and take further interest in the brand willingly.  Once this mission is accomplished, the rest of the task of convincing the visitor to buy is done by the sales team who uses various conversational channels like emails, chats, etc.

If you think that inbound marketing is what you would be interested in, then have a look at the following effective inbound methods of growing your business faster:

How Inbound Marketing Engages Potential Customers?

To engage potential customers in unique and creative ways, inbound marketing makes use of owned and earned media. Channels such as blog, website, product landing page, and brand’s social media profiles over which business has control come under the category of owned media. On the other hand, earned media includes offline channels like magazines, newspapers, etc. For attracting earned media attention, brands need to work hard to earn a reputation worthy of recognition on these channels. Over earned media, businesses have no control and are solely dependent on your brand achievement and value.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Here are some of the benefits of inbound marketing:

Ability to Attract the Right Traffic

With a well-planned inbound marketing strategy, businesses can better attract and engage with their targeted audience once they reach the right customer at the right place. Inbound efforts like content marketing, social media promotions, etc. enable to understand customers better and segment the audience based on who is most likely to convert and accordingly plan ways to attract the traffic of interested customers.

Way to Win Customer Trust

Inbound marketing isn’t about unwanted sales push. It focuses and aims for delivering value to customers in an engaging and creative way. Marketers using inbound tactics can represent their brand as a reliable source of useful information that people can trust. Before the customer purchases, they should have trust in the product and for that inbound marketing is just the perfect choice.

Opportunity to Explore Multiple Channels

Inbound marketing opens up multiple channels for brand promotion, customer engagement, and building relationships. Businesses no longer require to rely only on one channel and instead can promote content on multiple sources like other website referrals, social media, and organic search draw traffic from each of these sources.

Best Strategies to Deploy for Effective Inbound Marketing

Employ Email Marketing

Content is the very essence of an inbound strategy. It is through content that businesses try to attract qualified leads and win their trust. Hence, to ensure that the content build around customer’s needs and concerns reaches the right prospect at the appropriate time, businesses need to have a well-crafted email marketing strategy. It enables companies to send time to time content to blog subscribers who have opted to receive email communication from a brand. With a targeted list of email contacts, marketers can make most of their email campaigns by sending personalized content to specific contacts and helping them to move through the sales funnel faster.

Focus On Blogging

Blogging plays a significant role in attracting quality leads for your business and increased traffic to your website. Posting consistent blogs at least once in every week will reward your business with exponential traffic growth. Therefore, at any cost, you should include blogging in your inbound marketing plan. If required, hire a professional content writer who can supply timely and high-quality content to impress the search engine so that organic traffic for your website shoots up. Brands should keep creating helpful and unique blog articles that address the targeted customer’s pain points to draw their interest.

However, one thing marketers should understand that overnight, there is not going to be a drastic growth in traffic through blogging. It takes at least 12-18 weeks to notice growth, considering that your company posts a minimum of one article per week. Hence, instead of losing hope, if you don’t see immediate results, keep blogging more.

Optimize Content for Search Engine

We already know that content is a crucial and a must part of an inbound marketing strategy. However, with optimizing the content for search engine rankings, no matter how advanced and useful your content is, your efforts are useless. Without a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, your content will not rank organically and get lost in the crowd. That is why a robust SEO strategy is essential to attract traffic towards your content.

Search engine optimization begins with the search for the right keywords or phrases using which your targeted prospects are likely to search for the products you sell. For instance, if you are a medical device manufacturer, then to draw customers toward your brand, writing content around relevant issues and concerns of your audience with the use of the right keywords will help. Other than content, factors like website user experience, website security, etc. also influence SEO and so needs to be taken care of to rank high on Google’s search results page.

Use Social Media to Promote Content

Your good quality content is of no use if it doesn’t appear on the top of the search engine. Drawing web traffic towards your content is not alone the responsibility of your SEO strategy. In today’s social media-driven world, companies need to promote their blogs and articles on social media as well to reach more followers and draw social media traffic to the site. You can share website content such as blogs, videos, articles, and so on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Not only share content on a brand’s social media page but also ask your employees to share company posts on their personal social media handles as well.

Social media brand reputation is essential to spread awareness and establish an online presence. Keep sharing the company’s old and new articles, promotional content, and even third-party content to keep customers engaged with the brand.

Pay Attention to Video Content

It is estimated that by 2021, video content would consume 80% of Internet traffic, which is huge. Hence, marketers need to take video content creation and marketing seriously and must include it as an integral part of their content strategy. More than lengthy textual content, users are keen to go through an interesting and creative video that is engaging and can be viewed on the go. So, businesses must start using videos as part of their inbound marketing program without any further delay.

Create More Advanced Content 

Advanced content like whitepapers, tips, eBooks, and how-to-guides help in generating new contacts as well as nurture existing contacts. These kinds of content pieces offer more insight on given topics that are relevant and informative for the audience. With the creation and promotion of advanced content, brands can promote their brand to a broader audience who may be interested in accessing educational and detailed content. Also, it keeps the audience engaged and elaborately addresses their concerns and needs.

Improve Website Design with GDD Approach

GDD stands for Growth-Driven Design, which is a productive and more efficient way of designing and maintaining a growth-oriented website. Here, user data is leveraged to build a user-centric website design based on the analysis of visitor’s behavior. With the adoption of the GDD approach towards brand website design, businesses can drive more users to the site content in which they are interested the most. It supports your inbound strategy as it keeps you informed of the areas of improvement and updates required to engage the site visitors.

Nurture Leads through Marketing Automation

Many marketers agree that marketing automation does help in generating an increased number of quality leads for their business. That is why it is recommended that automating your lead nurturing workflow should be included in your inbound program. By leveraging marketing automation, your marketing team can better promote advanced content and blog articles via emails. This will make the job easier for the sales team as they get to connect with nurtured leads who have been already showered with relevant content. Already engaged customers are easy to convince and pitch, creating a win-win situation for your sales team and your business as a whole.

8 Inbound Marketing Techniques Every Business Should Use

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