How to Use Inbound Marketing Solutions to Attract Clients
Implementing inbound marketing solutions for your business is a big step. Whether you’re hiring your first inbound marketing agency or replacing your current agency, we understand that it can be stressful.
We’ve put together this article to help you get the most from your inbound marketing solutions.
What is Inbound Marketing?
The inbound marketing methodology is based on three principles –
- Attract: creating high-quality content that people find valuable and make them want to engage with your business.
- Engage: catering to customer pain points by offering insights and solutions.
- Delight: Empower your customers by providing them stellar support with their purchases.
These three principles feed into each other and form the inbound marketing flywheel. The goal of this flywheel is to attract new customers and turn them into long-term relationships.
You can use various strategies for each principle. Such as –
- Ads and social media for attracting customers.
- Email marketing and marketing automation for engaging customers.
- Smart content and attribution reporting to delight customers.
Successful inbound marketing strategies deploy a strategic mix of techniques to make their flywheel as self-sustaining as possible.
How an Inbound Marketing Expert Can Help You
At a basic level, this means creating high-quality content that is mapped to buyer personas. And using data analytics to learn more about your marketing campaigns and how you can optimize them.
Inbound marketing also works well for your Sales team. It emphasizes the use of solution selling rather than product selling, which means that the content you create empowers sales to offer holistic solutions rather than discrete products.
Why Choose Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a long-term strategy. There are many elements to inbound marketing, such as content marketing, marketing automation, lead generation, etc. All of these work towards getting you, new customers.
There are a few advantages to using the inbound approach –
- Inbound marketing usually generates 54% more leads than outbound marketing (source).
- Leads via inbound marketing also cost 61% less than outbound marketing (source).
- The very nature of inbound marketing ensures a long-term value creation strategy. May it be your content or your approach to lead generation.
- It is meant for fostering long-term relationships with your customers, making a captive audience.
Still not convinced about using inbound marketing for your products and services?
Inbound marketing is about delighting your customers and making them do your marketing for you. No marketing strategy works better than a good word of mouth. Inbound marketing helps you enable just that.
Engage Professional Inbound Marketing Solutions
A professional inbound marketing agency will have a team of experts working together. They are well versed in copywriting, marketing, social media, and automation tools. It’s more cost-effective for your business to hire a team than to hire individual specialists.
Before signing the agreement, ask the agency about the methods that they plan to use to generate results for you. Then check to make sure their team has proven results for the proposed method.
Get Your Subject Matter Experts & Sales Team Involved
Although the agency is the marketing expert, you are the expert in your business and industry. It’s a good idea to have your subject matter experts and sales team involved in the content creation process.
They have valuable insights that will help the agency produce good content. By engaging in a conversation, your agency can better understand the topics.
Moreover, your sales team has direct conversations with your customers. They understand the buyer’s journey, pains, needs, objections, and buying signals.
High-quality content will give you a boost of authority, making the sales process smoother. But poor quality content might cost you a potential customer.
Review The Content Before Posting
Your prospects will be reading the content and using that to decide if they want to do business with you. Before being posted, make sure that every piece of content is high quality.
It needs to be customer-focused and provides valuable and accurate information. An excellent way to test is to ask yourself if you would share the article.
You’ll want to check:
- website content
- blog posts
- social media posts
- videos
- emails
- landing pages
- eBooks
- infographics
Leverage Inbound Marketing Automation Tools
A good inbound marketing solution will utilize automation tools. This helps to move prospects down the buyer’s journey automatically.
Choosing the right tools and software can be overwhelming. So get your agency to help you with the process. A good inbound marketing agency will educate you on the tools that fit your business needs.
For example, CRM will store all your contacts’ information in one place. Your sales team can go in and see data on the buyer accurately, including all the pages a contact has viewed. They can use this data to make a meaningful follow-up with prospects and close more deals.
Use Data And Be Open To Improvements
Your inbound marketing agency should be using data to drive decisions. These range from website traffic, social media interactions, conversion rates, etc.
They need to be able to read the data and make suggestions to improve them. To get the best results, you want to be open to their suggestions. They might test out different approaches. For instance, testing the content lengths, posting frequency, time of day for posting on social media, layout changes on the website, etc.
Ultimately, your customers will tell you which content they want more of. By taking data-driven actions, you will get a better return on your marketing spend.
Make the Most Use of Inbound SEO
Inbound marketing and Search Engine Optimization might seem like very different disciplines from afar but make for a perfect match in reality.
Inbound SEO works best when you are targeting keywords that people are already searching for. Do keyword research to find them and then optimize your content with those keywords.
Finding high-quality customers that are interested in purchasing your product and spreading the good word about it are the kind of customers you ideally want. Inbound SEO is a way to attract just these kinds of customers.
Start from the basics and do thorough SEO research into your own website and your competitors. Doing this might seem overwhelming for those new to SEO, and is where a good inbound marketing agency might be of help.
Use that research to optimize the meta tags, descriptions, and titles of your web pages. Think from a customer-first approach and emulate what and how they are searching for solutions to their problems.
Get More From Inbound Marketing Solutions
A good inbound marketing strategy can bring you leads, sales, and revenue. Carefully consider the services before hiring. Don’t settle for anything less than excellent. And once you’ve decided on one, use the best practices to get the most out of it.
If you’re looking for the right inbound marketing solution for your business, we’d love to help. Get in touch with our advisor today.
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