Inbound marketing strategies are the all the buzz among businesses and marketers. But that doesn't mean everyone knows what it takes to make this style of marketing work for them. Here are 5 fundamental things you need to achieve success with inbound marketing:
Related Blog: How WISTIA Can Help You With Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Know your buyer persona/s
While you likely have a rough idea about the type of customer who buys from you, you'll need to do some hard research before you get going with inbound marketing. Talk with your sales personnel and get the names of your best repeat customers to create a more specific persona template about them. Consider aspects like their age, business, economic status, goals, etc. These semi-fictional representations of ideal buyers will help you better understand their mindset in order to create the content that will best speak to t
hem.
Create content that people want to read
More specifically, content your buyer personas want to read. Add a blog to your website and make sure that it can be easily accessed via social media. Next, draft an SEO approach to blogging wherein you utilize top industry keywords for your business that'll ensure you both hit your market and drive your site's placing in search engine results.
Offer value to obtain leads
People in the digital era have fairly short attention spans. It isn't enough that you write a snippet of content that applies to them, you need to make that content valuable and useful. Offer detailed how-to information in a downloadable ebook, or make an engaging video that foremost entertains and engages your audience. Offer such valuable information and entertaining media as free with the exchange of an email or contact number.
Follow-up on leads
Once you've obtained the leads through your various value-rich content, it's time to follow-up on those leads. Schedule a series of emails in a 'drip' marketing campaign that nurtures leads with marketing automation. Once a person is sufficiently interested in your product or service, step in and go for the closing.
Constant analysis
Whether you're doing the above marketing automation or nurturing a series of email campaigns via list segmentation (where different buyer personas and people on various parts of the buyer's journey receive targeted information), there will come a time when the campaign ends. Once this happens, enlist the aide of integrated analytic software to analyze how successful each campaign was. Use this information to better tailor future marketing.
