By Taniya Santani
What is Inbound Marketing?
A fundamental shift in the way you do business and is a philosophy based on helping people. The inbound approach to doing business is more human and customer-centered.
In today’s world, buyers have all the power. There’s been a massive shift in the relationship between businesses and buyers.
Now, a buyer has more information about your product, industry, and completion. Inbound is a better way to market, a better way to sell, and a better way to help your customers.
“If your customers are able to grow, your business will too.
Growth is the result of a well executed inbound strategy”—Barin Hallign
So, instead of interruption-based messaging where businesses have all the control, inbound is about empowering your buyers. You can align the way buyers think, research, and purchase. It’s about being helpful and being a business that’s helpful during each experience they have with you and your business. Rise to the challenge to meet consumers where they are.
To practice Inbound, you need to be Inbound;
Being an inbound marketer means you’re building relationship and having conversation with your audiences by giving then value. Being a part of that conversation means sharing helpful, relevant content and at the right time, it’s about drawing people in—that’s why it’s called Inbound Marketing.
Consumers buying behaviours are going to change and evolve. Your inbound tactics and tools will also change and evolve, but the inbound philosophy will still remain true. It’s a philosophy about polling people to be helpful. By actually caring about what the problems are of your potential buyers and how you can help solve them. That’s why inbound should extend to every aspect of your business.
Inbound marketing is a dynamic buyer-critic solution that’s focused on the consumer’s needs, desires and buying journey. What it’s not is an expensive solution that serves the seller.
The methodology identifies s fitting buyer persona’s pain points and aims to provide a solution through enticing engagement. Its various steps account for the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Through these steps, tailored content is served to targeted buyers in order to attract, convert, nature and delight them throughout their buying lifecycle.
Why Inbound Marketing?
Inbound is focused on attracting the correct customers, nurturing them to a conversion and then continuously delighting them. This is a very similar process practiced in Hobo.Video .
Traditional marketing is outdated and doesn’t attract the modern buyers anymore. This is where and why inbound marketing has stepped up and filled the gap. And to provide custom ores real and exact products is very important, in this case to build trust between buyer and seller Hobo.Video has come up with video marketing, where you receive the exact product you watch.
The idea of sales without selling is based on promoting your knowledge of your services, products and industry. But how do you grow your sales without selling them? By growing your brand, establishing yourself as a tough-leader and thereby creating those accurate leads.
Here Are Some Inbound Marketing Strategies That Will Help You to Grow Your Business.
1. Spend time in building your local search engine optimization (SEO) strategy
Local SEO is one of the most essential 2021 inbound marketing strategies for companies looking to drive leads with Inbound Marketing. This strategy involves building your local presence to attract more traffic and clients to your business.
Let’s look at a few ways you can optimize for local SEO.
I. Calm your Google by business listing
The first step to optimizing your local SEO presence is calming your Google My Business Listing. When users search for local business, it generates a box at the top of the search results.
You can claim your local listing by going on Google’s site.
Once you claim your listing, you’ll fill out all the information. You’ll have to provide your:
- Business name
- Address
- Phone number
- Hour of operation
- Summary about what you offer
Aside from this information, you also have to add photos to give people a preview of your business.
By claiming your local listing, you’ll help more people find you when they search for local companies near them.
II. Integrate local keywords
Local keywords are critical for ranking in local searches. If you want people to find your business in the local search results, you need to optimize for local keywords—which is why they must follow inbound marketing ideas for 2021.
Typically, you need to focus on long-tail keywords. These keywords contain three or more words, these local keywords help people find your business when looking for a company that fits their needs in a specific area.
By integrating local keywords into your website and content, you’ll help your site appear in more local searches so you can drive more credible traffic for your business.
III. Verify your name, address, and phone number on all platforms
As a local business, you want to ensure that your information is accurate on all platforms. Whether it’s online directories or your website, you need to verify that your information is correct.
Verify your name, address, and phone number (NAP) information. Your NAP should be the same format across all platforms.
You also have to check that your hours of operation are correct. Even though it’s not a part of NAP, it’s still essential to ensure that you’re giving customers accurate information about your business hours.
2. Create high-quality information content
Content plays critical roles in helping your business grow online, and in 2021, it’s no different. This tactic is one of the most essential 2021 inbound marketing strategies for companies looking to improve their online presence and expand their reach.
It’s not just about creating any content, either.
“You must think like a publisher, not a marketer.”—David Meerman
It’s not about what your audience needs. Create the content that they want or need, become the “go to” person for answers and be viewed as the expert in your field.
- Read blogs from others in your industry: Understand what others are writing about and use this knowledge to create a plan that includes topics and types (i.e. blog post, podcast, video, presentation, whitepaper, etc.). Share great content with your audience by posting the links on your Facebook page or Twitter. You can also take ideas for such blogs from Hobo.Video .
- Create an editorial calendar: An editorial calendar is one of the most important documents to create. It will help you to stay on track with your publishing schedule.
Using this information you’ve gathered, take that list of topics and break them down into multiple posts. This will enable you to write posts that focus on one keyword phrase that your market uses to search for the answer to their problems.
- Write a natural voice: Write as You are not writing to impress people with your large vocabulary. Use simpler words, lists and shorter sentences to help people scan your content quickly.
- Add a blog to your website: your blog is the creator of your inbound marketing strategy and is the first activity you should add. Start populating the blog of your WordPress website. If your website isn’t in WordPress, recreate it in WordPress to give you a well integrated platform that is easy to update regularly.
Remember, quality is far more important than quantity. Publishing a lot of low-quality content is not going to gain you a higher search engine ranking, publishing high quality, useful content that is properly optimized will.
3. PPC Advertising
PPC ads allow you to segment your audience by criteria like demographics, location and previous conversions. They give you control over which times of day your ads are served and the kinds of websites you want them on. This allows you to target your buyer persona more effectively, driving conversions and boosting ROI.
And as any good inbound marketer knows, optimizing for conversions and ROI requires continuous analytics to understand what is and isn’t working. PPC ads come with UTM parameters, which allow you to track their attributed traffic and conversions. In fact, most digital advertising platforms are already equipped with A/B testing capabilities. This gives you the ability to continuously optimize your advertising approach.
Here is how you incorporate PPC into your Inbound Marketing Strategy,
- Maintain your Inbound mindset: PPC advertising is traditionally an outbound marketing approach, it’s important that you keep inbound best practices in mind while implementing it. Rather than purchasing ad space and interrupting someone’s day, make sure you’re offering highly relevant content to a targeted audience.
Don’t forget the core tenant of the inbound methodology; helpful, non-invasive and contextually relevant. Structure your ad campaign so that they’re educational and served to specific. Segmented audiences based on your buyer persona.
- Be conscious of targeting and timing: Make sure to keep fennel stages and buying cycles in mind as well. You wouldn’t want to serve bottom general awareness ads on people who are ready to become customers. Target users in the decision stage and segmenting your audience by past conversion.
By serving ads with the right content to the right time, you can ensure these ads will be as effective as possible.
- Don’t rely on Google defaults: Google provides default settings for certain features of PPC advertising.
Keep up to date with your ads. Check in on your ads periodically, manually adjust the bids based on how they’re performing and make sure none of them have been flagged due to recent changes in SEO criteria. This will give you insight into how and why your ads are performing. If you let Google adjust your settings without your input and conversions decrease, you won’t know what to change to bring those conversions back up again.
- Test and optimize continuously: As with any inbound marketing practice, you should never put your PPC campaign aside for successful iteration. Use UTM parameters and analysis to gain insight into whether or not your ads are generating site visits, who’s clicking on the ads and how many of those visitors ultimately become customers.
Br tracking the performance of your ads and using A/B testing to examine different approaches, you can continuously optimize for conversions and drive growth. Your marketing decisions should never be left to guesswork; maintain a data-driven mindset and you’ll be able to make smarter, more effective choices for your business.
4. Use Social Media to reach target audience; important part of Inbound marketing strategy
Here, now why is social media an important part of Inbound Marketing strategy?
Facebook alone has over 60 million active business pages, and it’s predicted that there will be over 4.4 billion users of social media overall by 2025. Social media is an important part of Inbound Marketing Strategy because it’s your audience go-to for C2B engagement and feedback.
Therefore, it’s essential that you know what they’re saying about your brand- even when they are not engaging directly- by using the best social media listening tools, and that you create great content that is influenced by current trends.
In this section, we’ll look at four types of Inbound Marketing Strategies using social media. You don’t have to use all these at once. Just choose the platforms where your target audience is most likely to be, and focus on those.
I. Leverage Instagram Stories
As Instagram stories are great for virtual storytelling, and since they last for just 24 hours- unless you add them to your highlights- they encourage constant interaction so that the audience doesn’t miss out.
And Instagram stories are useful for Inbound Marketing for many reasons, including:
- These Instagram stories are designed to inhabit the entire screen of a user’s device, which cuts down on distraction from other sources in the feed. The goal is to create a sense of closeness between the user and your brand, without the distraction of other content.
- It encourages engagement. Tools such as pools, sliders, and question boxes are ways to stand out on Instagram as they invite your customers and followers to interact directly.
Brands can get as creative as they want with Instagram stories to get quality leads. If you have 10,000 followers or more, you can also use the swipe up function to send users directly to a webpage.
Tip: Did you know you can schedule Instagram stories? That will save your time and make your marketing more efficient.
II. Create videos
Viral videos are a great way to grab attention. Videos that spread like wildfire won’t only generate all the quality leads that you need. They will also increase your sales, brand awareness, and engagement dramatically.
There is no fixed formula for getting a video to go viral on social media. Content that has the following characteristics is more likely to perform well:
- Resonates with target audience
- Uses a compelling visual strategy that is compatible with the brand and the target audience.
- Exudes creativity
- Appeals to the emotions of the target audience
- It is shareable
- It is published at a time people are on social media.
III. Start an influencer marketing campaign
Influencers can help grab the attention of your target audience and send them your way. When you work with influencers, it’s easier to grab your audience’s attention and engage with them because the influencer already has an established relationship with them.
In fact, the average content engagement rate of influencers is 5.7%, which is almost double the amount seen by content published by brands themselves. But you must partner with the right influencer for the campaign. The person you should choose caters to your target audience. Pay attention to:
- Number of online followers
- Niche
- The activity level on social media
The influencer’s reputation is also essential. You want an influencer who is known for professionalism. That person’s value should also fit your company’s mission and vision.
The best platform where you can get tips for influencer marketing is Hobo.Video .
IV. Use paid advertising
You can generate qualified leads on social media by using paid advertising strategically. With paid ads, your content can get in front of the right people faster. Although organic social media posts are useful tools for reaching your target audience, paid social media ads are even better. You can zero in on specific members of your target audience when you pay.
You can decide to run a paid advertising campaign, make sure you choose the platform where your target consumers are. Your ads should also be relevant, timely, and provide value. You want people to click the ad? Then give them a reason to do that.
5. Landing Pages
Your landing pages are where your leads land after clicking on your call-to-action. Whether it is a product page, a form filled out to download a whitepaper, or a subscription service page, you need to ensure your landing page is top notch unless you’d like to jeopardize potential conversions from coming in.
Some important elements to keep in mind:
- Relevancy: You need to make sure that the landing page is relevant to the call-to-action.
- Focus: What is the goal of the landing page? Is it to “sign up for this E-Newsletter” or “Download guide today”? Make your landing page’s purpose singular. Ensure the CTA is big, prevalent, and above the fold. Also make sure to restrict the navigation to other pages and keep forms short.
- Design: This is a major component of keeping visitors engaged. Using videos or images, testimonials, and trust signals are all design elements that can help improve the conversion rates of your landing pages. Run A/B tests to decide on the best designs for your landing pages.
By now, you’ve seen the value of each of these inbound marketing strategies and how each component of your inbound program interconnects and depends upon the rest for success. Your inbound program is going to evolve and change over time, so it’s essential to commit to not only your inbound marketing strategy, but also to measuring and evaluating your program’s effectiveness to adapt strategies when needed.
