How to start doing inbound marketing?
Posted by Emma Rudeck on Thu, Nov 15, 2012
Instead of spending huge budgets on outbound, interruption marketing, you get to do marketing that people actually find useful, interesting and compelling: Inbound Marketing. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But, there are so many different parts to the inbound mix: social media, blogging, Calls-to-action, landing pages, SEO, lead gen, lead nurturing, email marketing, marketing automation (okay, I think you get the picture). So, how do we make it happen? Instead of just thinking about inbound marketing how can we go about doing inbound marketing?
Before doing inbound marketing, know who it’s for
Let’s start by taking a step back and thinking about who we are creating all this inbound marketing for. Who do we want to start conversations with? These are our buyer personas. Establishing who they are and, more importantly, what their frustrations, problems and questions are will help you tailor your marketing to their needs. It gives your inbound marketing efforts a purpose. Now you’re not just doing stuff, but doing inbound marketing for your buyer personas, the people you actually want to reach with your marketing efforts.
But how do you actually start doing Inbound Marketing?
The first thing you need to do is drive traffic to your website, which will then convert into contacts and leads. It’s simple, right? Well, if you start to breakdown how you go about this, then it’s not as complex as it might seem. In fact, it all comes down to content. You need to be creating different types of content, which is tailored to your buyer personas.
Blogging is one of the biggest parts of this. Companies that blog get 55% more traffic than companies who don’t blog. In fact, the more regularly you blog, the bigger the impact it will have on growing your traffic and increasing your contacts. But, as you no doubt realise, blogging isn’t the only part to content. You also need key content, such as eBooks and white papers. These will normally sit behind a form, so that you can gain contacts from your key content. Prospects are encouraged to fill out forms and become contacts as part of a value exchange. They give you their contact details for content that they believe will be useful.
Now you’ve got the content, how does it get found?
It’s one thing to have lots of great content. But, it’s quite another making sure that this gets found by your buyer personas. There are two key tactics to make this happen: Search and Social Media.
Search engine optimisation has undergone a lot of changes over the last 9 months, with big algorithm updates from Google. But there’s still a place for on-page optimisation, just so long as your web page is still written for people and not just search engine crawlers! Just getting the basics right can make a huge difference to your results in search. Did you know that 60% of search engine clicks go to the top 3 organic search results? If you rank well for the keywords you want to get found for, then prospects are more likely to find your site. And, by extension, the great content you produced for them.
When it comes to social media, there is a balance that has to be achieved when sharing your content. Too much and you’ll only irritate people. Too little and it won’t have enough of an impact. The best way to work around this is to share a mixture of your own content and content from other, relevant sources, while also engaging with prospects. Social Media is not about blasting out product information, but starting real conversations.
In short, getting started with Inbound Marketing is all about knowing who you are targeting, through your buyer personas, creating content that meets their needs and then increasing the reach of this content through SEO and social media.
Want to find out more about how you can improve your Inbound Marketing efforts? Take a look at our Four-Step Strategy to Enhance Your Content Marketing.
