It’s no longer 1985. Newspaper ads don’t work. People ignore TV commercials. And audiences skip magazine ads. Actually, audiences skip magazines. These traditional marketing methods are no longer the most effective way to reach your target audience.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing attracts individuals in your target audience by creating content that solves the problems of or appeals to these individuals.
Inbound marketing involves creating valuable content on your website, publishing engaging posts on your blog, reaching out with engaging content via social media, and boosting your search engine rankings by optimizing your online content.
10 Ways to Excel with Inbound Marketing
Know your target audience. The key to successful inbound marketing focuses on providing valuable content for your target audience. In order to provide valuable content for your target audience, you need to know your target audience. This means understanding their problems, their pains, and providing content that solves those problems and relieves that pain.
Speak your audience’s language. In the world of inbound marketing, 5 seconds is an eternity. It doesn’t take long for potential customers to click away from your site, stop watching your video, or scroll past your social media post. Attract and retain the attention of your target audience, by using the language and terms they use.
Optimize your website. The higher your site ranks in search engines, especially Google, the more visitors you will attract. Optimizing your website for your target audience is an extension of knowing your audience and speaking their language.
Blog well. A well-written, optimized blog that speaks to your target audience brings visitors to your site. A well-written blog engages your target audience. It solves the problems of your target audience. It uses the language of your target audience. And it does so consistently. A consistently, well-written blog makes you a likeable expert in your industry.
Guest blog. You’re not limited to writing blogs on your own site. Offer to write guest blogs on other sites to publicize yourself and get cross-over visitors. Partnering with individuals who offer similar, but not the same, services to similar target audiences helps both grow their reach.
Use the right social networks. A thorough study of your target audience reveals the social networks where you’re more likely to find them. Pinterest demographics, for example, are different than LinkedIn demographics, which are different than Twitter demographics.
Engage with your users. People want to feel important. Engaging with them through social media, blog comments, or email makes them feel important. And after all, they are important. They are the people you serve.
Use a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM). You want to learn as much as you can about your customers and potential customers. And you need a way to keep track of this information. A good CRM automatically documents customer behavior. It organizes personal information that they’ve shared, tells you what pages they’ve visited, what videos they’ve watched, what they’ve bought in the past, and where they find themselves in the sales process.
Segment and customize email communication. Using the CRM, you can tailor your message to specific segments of your audience. You wouldn’t for example send the same newsletter or offer to an individual who’s spent hundreds of dollars at your online store as you would to someone who’s visited your site once and downloaded a free e-book.
Give away great stuff. This seems counter-intuitive, but businesses have been giving away free stuff to attract customers long before inbound marketing existed. Free trials, free limited subscriptions, free content offer your target audience a chance to see how great your products and services are. In fact, that’s all inbound marketing is, offering free value in the hopes that this value is so good, individuals will want more.
Need a little help putting these 10 concepts to work for your business? Link Encounter can help. Contact us and find out how inbound marketing can grow your business the right way.