Over the years there has been a change in marketing the business. Earlier, the marketing predominantly was through Newspaper and Magazine advertisements, Radio and Television advertisements, Pamphlet distribution, Billboard hoardings.
These Outbound Marketing strategies are utilised in the present day as well, however, maximum TRAFFIC or maximum leads can be generated by using Inbound Marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing and How does it work? Inbound Marketing is creating content to market products for a specific audience and ensuring that the targeted clients reach your company. Through Inbound marketing, businesses can generate leads by optimizing the content to attract customers and move them through the sales funnels.
Inbound marketing is more worthwhile and profitable because you are aware of the target audience and hence accordingly can plan your strategy to reap the rewards.
There are many Inbound Marketing Agencies and Inbound Marketers offering excellent services to their clients resulting in overall business growth and creating a reputed brand value.
I have been working in this field of digital marketing for the last 13 years and based on the immense experience I gained from working with various large and small organizations, I have been offering Inbound Marketing services that has been instrumental in boosting the revenue of client’s business as well as enhancing the brand value. I would love to share some of my ideas, tips and techniques in this blog.
Businesses develop their brands through various modes such as Creating websites, Blog Posts, Social Media Content, and videos. Then using optimization techniques such as SEO, PPC to optimize these modes invite the attention of the prospective clients to gain excellent ROI.
Once the prospective client is aware of the brand, you can further build trust by offering demos, trials, case studies. This will help the client to proceed with an affirmative mindset and consolidate the decision to make the purchase. Furthermore, after-sales follow-up through the client’s preferential mode of communication can build trust. The relationship developed with the client also opens a window to pitch new products or upgrades to the existing clients through email, call or social media.
Let us explore more into the various modes of inbound marketing –
Website – The website is representing your business, even when you are not online or even if your shop is not open. The website visitor who can be a potential customer has to get engaged and hence it is necessary to have absolutely spot-on layout of the website along with proper aesthetics.
Important aspects that should be properly ticked while developing the websites includes engagement and seamless navigation. If there is engagement then there will be more traffic and the metrics will definitely improve the two significant R’s –Ranking as well as Revenue. Seamless navigation helps to retain the visitor on the website thus reducing the bounce rate and thus boosting the metrics for higher Ranking and more traffic.
Content – While creating a website one should always remember the target audience and then proceed to develop the content of the website. It is necessary to have a holistic approach to develop content that is comprehensive, relevant and unique. The focus while developing the content should be on the client and not the search engines.
The content of the website should be original and relevant. It should be lucid reading for the targeted audience. The content should have appropriate headers to help the visitor to trace the topic. It should address issues that can be a concern to the prospective customers.
Quality Content is the prime requisite for any website to succeed online. The content, if peppered with related videos, the image will be very helpful for the client to make decisions. Selection of font and the size of font and formatting of the content is also vital to enhance the overall layout of the website.
Keywords – Relevant keywords to be interspersed in the content. If relevant keywords, both generic and long-tail should be included judiciously in the content. Stuffing of keywords is not advisable as it will be considered as Black Hat SEO and can also lead to a ban on the website.
Meta Tags – Writing Meta tags that include title and description should contain keywords. This will help attract the search engine and display your website on SERP when the searcher has typed keywords to search on the internet.
Developing websites with fresh and relevant content is one of the primary steps to get the required target audience. Optimizing the website for Search Engines will be a perfect move as optimization of the website content will help the content to be found on SEARCH ENGINES such as GOOGLE, BING, YAHOO and others.
It is evident from the following graph from Statcounter.com that Google is the top search engine for over a decade with a market share of 91.26% as of January 2022. Bing at 3.1%, YAHOO at 2.89% and Baidu at 0.83% Yandex RU at 0.36% and others at 1.57% clearly indicate the lead Google search has over the rest of the search engines. Thus, it is clear that to be top-ranked on Google using SEO will boost the leads of prospective clients.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – is the best organic way to optimize the content. Create a website and publish the content and optimize it. The success of Inbound marketing will get the appropriate push through SEO. If SEO is properly executed, inbound marketing gives desired results. Ranking higher in the search engines does offer a boost in traffic. Hence it is necessary to get a higher ranking consistently.
Periodically evaluation of the website using Google tools such as Google Page Insights will be helpful to know the performance of the website. This evaluation is also referred to as Core Web Vitals. The user experience is the primary requisite for ranking in Google. If the user experience is good your core web vitals are excellent and the webpages of your website will rank higher. Hence, it is very necessary to improve user experience to improve core web vitals.
Call to Action – A call to action for every section of content on the website is significant. It is instrumental in guiding the prospective lead to your sales funnel. Every product or service description – distinguishing features -should have a call to action.
Pay Per Click or PPC – is also another Inbound Marketing method to generated relevant leads as it targets those audiences that are searching for their requirements and your website is catering to those needs. In PPC advertising you pay to search engines like Google for every click. If feasible using SEO and PPC in combination will yield more leads.
Blogs – Quality content attracts Search Engines and subsequently provides good leads. That also leads to publishing quality content on the website by writing Blogs. Writing and publishing blogs with adequate material consisting of relevant textual information along with images and videos will be helpful to get found on prominent search engines like Google. Blogs topics should be related to the website products and services. It can also deal with issues and concerns raised by the clients and help to eradicate the doubts pertaining to the product in a very easy and subtle manner. Blogs thus can be catalysts for the prospective customer to move towards the sales funnel.
Blog Posts helps in building brands and creating awareness. The blog offers in-depth information and insights on subjects, resolves queries and issues pertaining to the products and services. Hence, Blog posts should conclude with a call to action with a request for comment or suggestions to build relations with the clients.
Social Media – is beneficial to both B2B and B2C marketers. The success of social media channels in business can be attributed to the global preference of these social channels to connect with friends, source information, build communities, and more importantly to reach the target audience.
Apart from posting information for free to creating paid ads one can definitely receive potential leads from social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter by writing relevant yet brief posts, creating attractive images for posts, posting videos, live videos, audio chats, etc. for people to know about your business, products, services.
Using social media also benefits SEO thus giving the required boost to organic promotion of the website. Periodically posting on social media enhances brand awareness, establishes strong credentials amongst prospective as well as existing clients.
Videos and Inbound Marketing – Video for marketing is a big plus. Creating videos of products by highlighting the features, or showing the importance of services through videos. It helps in making a collection of videos of various products and services. Tag and segregate and pitch it to the related clients, the video will act as a sales agent to explain the features and functions of your product.
Creating a YouTube channel and posting videos on the channel will be a big boost. You can create videos of product demos, videos showing clients’ testimonials, explainer videos, etc.
Optimizing YouTube with relevant keywords and writing titles and descriptions – one can write about 5000 characters in the description – writing all the salient features, specifications of your products or services with relevant keywords will optimize the video.
YouTube is very popular as is evident from the graph from Statista.com showing the followers from various countries.
To increase inbound leads, you can upload videos and embed the links in your websites or even email the YouTube links to your subscribers, existing clients, prospective clients or even post the links on various social bookmarking websites or social networking sites to promote the video.
Conclusion – Above tips of Inbound marketing will help you to get found by prospective clients.
Write relevant and fresh content to ensure that the first-time visitor becomes a regular customer and is aware of your products and services to call you for his future requirement.
We will be glad to know your views on the techniques mentioned in this blog. Apart from the techniques mentioned above, you can also share your inbound marketing ideas, tips you implemented to generated leads, in the comments section below.