The key to success is getting your customers to come to you - but you may feel that is easier said than done. Organisations often feel frustrated when they initially come to us as they are unable to entice your prospects to give their company a chance. Marketers who get it right reap the rewards of engaging with their customers on their terms, gradually nurturing more people to buy more often.
You no longer need to worry - we’ve seen it and been there with so many of our clients. We can show you how inbound marketing can help you achieve your marketing goals and bring your customers to you instead of chasing them away.
What is an inbound marketing strategy?
An inbound marketing strategy is at the centre of marketing. More specifically, it is the methodology you use to attract customers through content creation and experiences tailored to their needs and wants. Inbound marketing looks at forming the connections your audience is looking for and solving their problems.
This strategy builds meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s centred around value and empowerment - making sure that those around you reach their goals. There are three ways in which inbound marketing can be applied:
Attract
Draw the right people in with content and conversations. This should be tailored to their needs and wants - people are more likely to find you trustworthy if they feel you are listening to them. This makes engagement more likely.
Engage
Present insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals - building a solid foundation with current consumers and prospects.
Delight
Provide the help and support your customers need to find the success they are looking for with their purchase of your products and services.
Customers finding success creates a loyal base of people who will keep coming back to you and help with the acquisition of new customers. This is how your organisation builds momentum and why a strong inbound marketing strategy is necessary for the longevity of your business.
8 Steps to making an inbound marketing strategy
Building buyer personas
Buyer personas are a representation of your ideal customer. This will allow you to understand who you are marketing to. With this information, you can create content that resonates with the potential buyer, inspires trust with your company, and convinces them to open a dialogue with you.
Set your objectives
Once you understand who you are marketing to, you will be able to identify what you want to achieve with your strategy. Without setting these objectives, you won’t be able to measure the success of your strategy.
Start by assessing your website’s current ability to attract traffic, convert leads, and ultimately close business. Key performance indicators of this may include unique visitors, CTA clicks, forms completed, inbound lead gains, and sources of site traffic. When setting your objectives, it is important to make sure that your marketing and sales team can work together effectively to achieve your objectives.
Outline marketing triggers
Now that you have identified who your customers are, you need to understand the pain points in their lives that make them seek out your products and services. This gives way for the possibility of highly targeted and personalised messaging, making your marketing strategy relevant. Understanding these triggers will also allow you to know what content to create to stay relevant.
Create keywords
Buyer personas in place, marketing triggers understood, and you can move on to making sure people can find you when searching for your product. Keyword research is essential to this, as it allows you to understand the terms your customers are searching with. This means that you can tailor your keyword-rich content, making it easier to find and making customer reach easier.
Align content to the buyer journey
Leads typically come in three stages; top-of-the-funnel awareness, middle-of-the-funnel evaluation, and bottom-of-the-funnel buying decision. To avoid losing leads, it is essential to make sure you are not only paying attention to one stage of lead acquisition. Understanding your buyer's questions and concerns at each stage is imperative to successful lead conversion.
Create a lead-nurturing process
Most leads are lost because they aren’t given enough information. This is where automation can help with the process. Automating and nurturing your lead process means that at no stage will your leads feel lost or that they have a lack of information and directly influences your lead conversions.
Conversion-focused blogging
This strategy is specifically designed to attract traffic to your site. Each blog post is centred around specific content tailored to your customers' needs, with a call-to-action encouraging them to find out more about your products and services. Often, the call-to-action will link gated content that the reader can access once they have provided their contact information.
Build a team of experts
Getting your inbound marketing strategy right requires a broad set of skills. Building a team with these skills will make your process easier, quicker, and ready to find leads that convert to loyal customers. Inbound marketing influences the entire marketing strategy for your business and is imperative to invest in.
Work with the experts
There is a lot to consider when building an inbound marketing strategy. Sometimes, you just don’t have the time, resources or budget to fully commit to the long process of trial and error when implementing your strategy for the first time. Luckily, you can avoid this process by finding the right digital marketing agency to guide you.
Finding the right agency partner is the first step towards having an exemplary inbound marketing strategy. It saves you time, money and frustration and lets you find success without the need for in-house skills and know-how. We understand how important an integrated sales and marketing campaign is today, and how limited budgets can hinder this. As a small company ourselves, we’ve gone through this process, but found a way to succeed. That’s why we've spent the last 12 years planning and implementing award-winning integrated campaigns for B2B clients worldwide.
Contact us for a quick 30 minute meeting and we will present you with an integrated marketing campaign plan with the right messages, channels, audience and content to use, to make success an assurance.
