Your Inbound Marketing Strategy – Using the Right Elements

For several years now, inbound marketing has been around and many business people are using it, either alongside traditional marketing or by itself. Just in case you are not familiar with what inbound marketing is, it is a type of marketing in which you get people to come to you as opposed to your having to go after other people.

Let’s define inbound marketing before anything else

As was mentioned in the teaser paragraph of this blog article, in traditional marketing, you post advertisements for your business in print, television, radio, etc. Outbound marketing, on the other hand, is marketing in which you get your prospective clients to come to you. In that situation, those people are prequalified and very happy to connect with you and to build a relationship with you.

With inbound marketing, you do everything possible to make sure that the other person is able to find you and, subsequently, to start to interact with you. Of course, the way that you market using traditional marketing and the way that you market using inbound marketing are also totally different.

Inbound and traditional marketing should be used together for optimal results.

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One important point to make here is that inbound marketing works most effectively if it is used in conjunction with traditional (outbound) marketing. One should never be thought of as a substitute for the other. Anyway, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on inbound marketing. There are very specific ways to use inbound marketing to acquire new clients (eventually).

• Make sure that others can find you: This is easier than you may think. Some tools that work really well to accomplish that are blog articles and search engine optimization (SEO). If you do either (or both) of those consistently, people will start to notice you. Consistency is key because if you post well-written articles on a consistent basis (same day and time each week), people will not only start to read what you are posting but they will also look forward to reading what you are posting, week after week.

• Increasing your conversion rates: Once you have built up a following and you  have managed to build a target audience of people who are loyal to your brand, it will be time to convert some of those loyal target audience members to clients (hopefully, clients who will be with you for a very long time). Some of the tools that you can use to make this happen are your landing page(s) and paying individual attention to those people.

• Examine and analyze what you have done and the results that you have achieved: Once you have done everything possible to let other people find you and to convert at least some of your loyalists, the only thing left to do is to look at what you have done and how you have done it and figure out what you can do better the next time around. There may be several areas in which you can improve or possibly only a few areas. The main thing is that you should always try to improve upon what you have done in the past.

Building your inbound marketing strategy

Before you build anything, you will want to map out your strategy. Having that blueprint will make it so much easier for you than just making it up as you go along. Putting that effort in upfront is well worth it in the long run. The truth is that your blueprint will be unique, which is expected. After all, you and your brand/business are also unique. However, with that said, there are also certain concepts that are in common with all businesses that use inbound marketing as their primary strategy of choice.

• The personas of your target audience: This is very important. Your target audience will need a persona (or more than one). The personas will be for your idea of the perfect client. Once you have established that, you can build profiles around those personas until they are complete and effective. Those profiles will include responsibilities, issues, inspiration, etc. You can also include education, career choices, and hobbies. One thing that you will definitely want to include is a photo of a person (not just any photo). Of course, you will also have to give the persona a person’s name.

• Choose keywords carefully: Your choice of keywords is really important because that is how the search engines rank your business and that is how other people are able to find you. You should choose keywords that are relevant to your brand, are used often in searches and are as unique as possible. If you do a little research, you will probably find exactly what other people are searching for.

• Writing effective blogs and planning them over time: Blogs can be extremely effective tools to get other people to pay attention to your brand. Blogs (considering that they are well written, of course) can do wonders for your business. Undoubtedly, you have a lot of wonderful knowledge to share with other people. However, you also need to know how to express what you know in an effective way that other people react positively to. It is a really great idea to start building a repository (or queue) of blogs so that you are not always so pressured to come up with exciting topics every time you sit down to write. What happens if you experience writer’s block?

Conclusion

The inbound marketing strategy is effective and, if you use it in conjunction with traditional marketing, you will start to see tremendous results before too long. If you include the important aspects of inbound marketing, you will have a winning formula. Your content should be effective and you will want to let others know about it so that they can reap the benefits of what you know. It is important to remember to use both types of marketing and not to substitute one for the other. It will definitely pay off for you.

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