As a business that understands inbound marketing, you are probably looking for a way to attract, engage and delight your customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. By being in touch with prospects throughout the buyer’s journey, you can easily turn them into customers and, even better, brand ambassadors who will spread the good word about your business. However, many businesses do not understand how to build on different inbound marketing tactics to help them achieve their goals. Below, we help you create a successful inbound marketing campaign and program by outlining some of the best inbound marketing strategies you can use in your business.
The Inbound Methodology
To fully understand inbound marketing strategies and have a successful inbound marketing campaign, you need to understand the inbound methodology. You can then use different tools and techniques to ensure that your prospects move further into the sales funnel.
The first stage of the inbound marketing methodology is to attract visitors to your business and brand. You begin this phase by evaluating the status of the business marketing efforts. Next, you have to define a buyer persona and create content around them at this stage. Then, you will have to position your content in a way that reaches them.
The second stage of this strategy involves engaging your target audience by presenting them with content and insight that identify and address their goals and pain points so that they go down the funnel and are more likely to buy from you.
The third stage involves delighting the customer by helping and supporting them even after becoming your customers. By doing so, you can maintain your relationship after the sale.
Inbound Marketing Strategies for Your Businesses
The strategies we outline below will help you effectively market your products or services to your target audience’s prospective clients. To help you understand even between, we highlight the strategies you can use when attracting, engaging, and delighting prospective clients.
Strategies to Attract
Strategies that attract the right buyer persona and target audience revolve around creating content and developing it. Therefore, a good inbound marketing campaign would incorporate different unique tactics. Below, we explain the various tactics you can use.
Blogging
It is well known that blogging helps businesses experience a significant return on investment. Therefore, it is not a surprise that up to 100 of the top Fortune 100 companies had blogs as of 2018. Furthermore, according to Demand Metric, businesses and companies that have invested in blogging get an average of 67% more leads than companies that do not have blogs.
The secret to getting a great return on investment with blogs is publishing engaging, relevant content and staying consistent. Staying consistent with valuable content helps businesses generate 3.5 times more web traffic and even more leads than companies that do not blog consistently. In addition, you can use your blog as a platform to answer the questions your users have in detail. You can also use the platform to educate prospective clients on your products and services and even establish yourself as an expert in your field.
You need to regularly update your website with content so that your target audience can consider you a trusted brand. By being trustworthy, you naturally encourage your prospects to move to the bottom of the funnel.
Use Infographics
If you are blogging to attract clients, you are probably investing in long-form content for more detailed coverage of topics. While this is a useful and good strategy, not everyone has time to sit down and sift through this content.
Such people may need a simpler method of digesting the same information. For example, it would be better to use infographics to capture insightful data and present it to them pleasingly.
Content Creation
Content creation offers your business a chance to help your existing contacts get further into your sales funnel and bag new connections. It would help if you had an advanced content plan that incorporates ebooks, how-to guides, whitepapers, tip sheets, and so much more. The types of content you choose should be those that fit your target audience and business. They should also offer a deeper dive into the topics in your blog articles and possibly provide information on the next step a prospect should take when the buyer’s journey. You can also include a call to action at the end of blog articles.
Ideally, it would help to produce at least a piece of content each month for content marketing purposes, especially when starting with inbound marketing. This strategy can help you capture leads and show your expertise in different fields.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO involves optimizing your website and other business-related content to rank higher on the Google search results. Therefore, it can be a good inbound marketing strategy for businesses to achieve organic traffic.
A good SEO strategy involves keyword research and a well-defined keyword strategy that incorporates keywords that your target buyer persona and prospects will be searching for online. In addition, you should ensure that you offer value and address pain points with this strategy.
Apart from working on your content, you need to consider other aspects, such as having a mobile-first design and web security, if you want this strategy to work well.
Video Content
As of 2021, video traffic accounted for up to 80% of internet traffic. With video content quickly becoming a popular way for people to consume information, this is the best time for businesses to invest in them as part of their inbound marketing program.
You can include customer testimonials, product demos, case studies, and video blogs, among other content types.
Market Automation and Lead Nurturing
Companies that have embraced marketing automation enjoy targeted customer communications compared to those that do not. Furthermore, up to 67% of marketers have embraced automation, and the number is expected to grow.
With automation, your business can easily scale lead nurturing workflows that help promote content to customers depending on where they are on their buyer’s journey and their characteristics.
When used properly, you will have a more happy and successful sales team as they are better placed to connect with warm leads than cold leads as traditional outbound marketing methods would have them do.
As more businesses continue to embrace automation, you can become part of the bandwagon and make it a win-win for your team and the prospects who are ready to engage.
Engaging Strategies
Engaging strategies are aimed at helping you grow closer to your customers. At this point, you should be striving to build long-term relationships with your clients. Therefore, strategies that help give more information about the value of your business to the client should be emphasized. Some of the strategies you can use include:
Inbound sales calls
It would be best to focus on how your customer care representatives handle calls from prospects or even those showing interest in your business. It would help if you sold your clients a solution rather than selling them your product or service, as this will ensure a win-win situation for both parties. This strategy goes hand in hand with another strategy-email, marketing- as we explain below.
Email Marketing
Email marketing can be a great inbound strategy for businesses to pass content to their audience at specific times. You can do many things, including promoting new blog content, recommending advanced content, and developing a workflow strategy with email marketing. In addition, you can easily help your prospects through the sales funnel with a good email marketing strategy.
Delighting strategies
Delighting strategies will ensure that your clients are satisfied and have the right support after you have engaged them and they have bought your products. Some of the strategies that you can use at this stage include:
Chatbots
Chatbots are a great way to initiate conversations with customers and solve their problems. The aim is usually t0 detract the customer from needing human customer support agents. An example of how you can use chatbots when you want current customers to help set up new tactics the business is offering.
Surveys
Surveys can also be used at specific times in the customer’s journey. For example, you can send out a satisfaction survey approximately half a year after purchasing a service or product to gauge customer satisfaction. You can get their feedback and ask them to review your product or service to gain insight into their needs and satisfaction levels.
Social Media Listening
You can use one social media platform as an inbound marketing strategy to interact with your customers. They can ask questions, provide feedback and even share their experience with your product on these platforms. You can encourage them, help, and support them as a business. This shows them that you care about them and helps solidify your reputation.
Conclusion
A good inbound marketing campaign should help your business attract, engage, and delight customers. In most cases, it does not matter whether your business is getting value or not from your interactions on the spot as inbound marketing focuses on building strong relationships and creating brand awareness in the long run. Your inbound marketing efforts are more likely to pay off as these prospects turn into customers and customers turn into brand advocates.
