Learn how to execute an inbound marketing strategy, plan your content, and engage users.
What is an Inbound Marketing Strategy?
Inbound Marketing is marketing focused on getting bound by customers who find you through blogs, channels, and social media. An inbound marketing strategy is meant to give your potential customers educational guidance, building trust and long-term growth for you and your prospect. Inbound strategy involves tailoring your content to your prospect on the customer’s journey. Content acts as your voice (blogs, chatbots, social media, etc.). You want to create content with actionable inbound marketing strategies that are timely, aligned, and personalized to fit the prospects’ needs or problems.
Inbound Marketing is about creating relationships that have lasting impact.
Attract, Engage, Delight & Repeat
Creating buyer personas helps you develop a trait that’s at the heart of inbound: empathy. Detect the prospects’ potential problems and help them come up with possible solutions. Aid in their decision-making by determining the prospect’s goals personally and professionally. This makes up their buyer persona along with other aspects about themselves like spending habits, demographics, location, and more. Consider how you’re leveraging ads, engagement, and business pages on social media based on these personas.
How do you get people that could potentially become leads to your site? “You attract more of the right customers with relevant content at the right time” (Hubspot 2020). Your goal should be to rank well in the topics that matter most to your prospects. This is executed by publishing content across all channels as well as creating ads to increase awareness of your content and brand. It’s important to identify the specific tool or strategy you should use depending on where your prospect is at in the customer journey.
Attracting Strategies
Inbound Marketing Strategies that attract your target audience and buyer personas involve content creation. To reach your desired audience, start by creating and publishing content that provides value to the users you want to engage with. This could involve content on how your product or service can be of benefit to them, information about your company, customer testimonials, and details about sales or promotions. From a content marketing perspective, blogs are a great way to share educational content.
To attract customers on a deeper level through inbound marketing, optimize all of your content with an SEO strategy. An SEO strategy will require selecting and targeting specific keywords and phrases related to your industry, business, products, or services as well as the solutions you provide for customers. You want to include these keywords and phrases in the titles and descriptions of various types of content. When using an SEO strategy, this will allow your content to organically appear on the search engine results page (SERP) for the people you want to find when they’re searching. In other words, you will get more traffic to your site.
Engaging Strategies
Having helpful and human web design becomes crucial at the “Engage” Step. You want to deliver an experience that caters to your prospects’ preferences from the moment they engage with your content
. The goal is to ensure you’re communicating with leads and customers so that they will want to build long-term relationships with you. Work to identify and remove underlying issues that created the initial roadblock. Improve customer experiences with live chats, offers, chatbots, etc. Craft ads that are targeted to their questions or the data collected about what pages they were on. Once you’ve used one of these strategies to engage, insert information about the value your services or products could provide them.
A specific engagement strategy may coincide with solution selling rather than product selling. This allows for mutually beneficial agreements for your customers and your business.
Delighting Strategies
The goal of the “Delight” phase is to empower people. Potentially ask customers how you can improve your process. Prospects don’t want to be sold to, they want to be educated. One way to nurture relationships with your potential customers with an inbound marketing strategy is by implementing chatbots and surveys to delight people with your customer service. This shows you want to answer their questions and care about their feedback.
Social media listening is another important strategy when it comes to delighting customers under the inbound marketing model. The responsibility under social media listening is to respond to interactions such as questions, reviews, or shared testimonials. You should respond to these interactions with information that educates, supports, and encourages followers that you care about them and what they have
Delighted customers eventually turn into loyal fans and promoters, so handle all conversations with care- no matter how small.
Goal Setting
Some goals that align with the execution of an inbound strategy would be to develop a strong contact database, develop buyer personas, and create relevant, segmented content. A contact is anyone your company markets to, sells to, partners with, engages with, or employs. You want to collect as much information about your contacts as possible so you can identify which ones you can help
To get the right traffic, you should go about making buyer personas. As mentioned previously, buyer personas are similar to target audience buckets that describe a persona’s demographics, behaviors, motivations, and goals. For content that is more targeted, choose one persona to tailor your content to. Setting goals shows how your marketing efforts are helping your company grow as well as hit numbers.
Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
Planning Your Inbound Strategy
Content delivers the message of your inbound marketing strategy. Content marketing is the art of communicating with prospects without selling to them. Inbound and Content Marketing focus on: empowering potential customers, building lasting relationships, and creating valuable content that entertains and educates. Planning provides a roadmap for your content. A long -term content plan helps you stay organized and supports every team in your company. You want to aim to tell a story with your content.
Planning your content for every stage of the buyer’s journey is essential. It’s a waste of time and resources to fail to resonate with the people who need to be connected most to your business.
There are three steps to creating a long-term content plan:
- Setting Marketing Goals
- Assessing your organization’s initiatives and assets
- Identifying buyer’s journey for your buyer personas
Every business’s content plan is going to be different. It’s important to set the right goals given the capabilities of your company and tailor your content to who you want in the conversation. Why may you ask? “A study by Powered Inc. suggests that consumers who receive educational content are 29 times more likely to enlist the provider’s service compared to traditional advertising” (DaBrian Marketing, 2019). Among other reasons, inbound marketing strategies is your best initiative at attracting, engaging, and delighting prospects. When a company cares about providing value to its customers and does so with the strategies mentioned above, you will undoubtedly see more happy customers.
