Inbound Marketing: 7 Steps to Success

Inbound marketing is an effective means of online marketing to increase leads for your business. When you use inbound marketing, you can anticipate a conversion rate of up to 12 per cent, which is double the conversion rate seen with outbound marketing. Inbound marketing occurs when the customer comes to you – they are pulled to you, compared with traditional marketing that reaches out to the customer with push marketing. As inbound marketing only attracts customers who have already shown commercial intent or interest in your product, they are the top source of new business as they are very likely to convert. If you are able to engender their trust and their interest, then they will be simple to pull in.

How then do you establish that trust? The key is providing the customer with what they are looking for and setting yourself up as an industry expert. This is able to be achieved via your website. However it cannot be just any old website.

It is crucial to include all the following facets in order to master inbound marketing and achieve the best result.

1. Social Media

Social marketing is a an excellent means by which to to get people to visit your website. People can notice you first through social media, and then steadily establish a relationship with your business. A social media presence engenders trust and makes you appear more authentic. It has been reported that over 80 per cent of consumers trust a company more if that company has a solid presence in social media.

Social media can also assist your business with a strategy known as closed loop marketing. Closed loop marketing is about using insights to close the gaps, in order to gain an understanding of what marketing activities are working well, and which ones are not working well. As social media is probably the initial location a customer will find your business, it is known as the top of the funnel. By combining this with the useful analytics available to Facebook advertisers, you can get a thorough understanding of what does and does not interest your target market. By doing things as simple as altering the content or the image on your social posts, you can witness a dramatic alteration in the number of users who click though to your business website. This information is all of critical importance when forming the trust and authenticity that you need in order to become skilled at inbound marketing.

2. Appealing Landing Pages

Landing pages that are keyword-targeted, appealing, and load rapidly are key factors in getting people to your website and keeping them there. Attractive landing pages are the face of your digital shop. Akin to how a bricks-and-mortar store must make their shopfront appealing, you must ensure you have an appealing online presence.

There is a delicate balance between having landing pages that are keyword-rich, and making them beautiful and appealing. Your landing pages do need to target a keyword, but they also need to be written in a way that is natural and organic. With landing page keywords, quality is more important than quantity. If your content is obviously keyword- stuffed, visitors will depart. Similarly, if your pages load slowly or your pages are unappealing, visitors will leave,

Attracting visitors to your business website is only the first step. You want visitors to stay on your website and you wish to convert them into customers. On average, a visitor spends only 15 seconds on a website, so effectively that is all of the time that you have to make an impression on them. You need to make those precious seconds count.

3. A Good CRM

CRM is the abbreviation for customer relationship management. CRM is a software system that assists you to understand your customers and to provide them with a personalised experience. A good CRM automates sales and marketing by integrating with the technical part of your website (known as the back end). CRMs also give excellent data on the customers’ purchasing journey, with information such as where the customer comes from, what their interests are, and their demographics. By utilising this valuable information, you can target the correct customers and convert them into buyers.

4. Automated Marketing

The essence of good automated marketing is making appear as though it is not automated. Messages that begin with a generic Dear Madam or Hello there simply do not work. Rather, get the customer’s attention by using an automated program that tracks what the customer does on your site, and then sends personalised messages to them based on their personal data. As an example, if a customer adds a product to their shopping cart, but then does not check out, your automated system would send a cart abandonment message reminding them that the item is in their shopping cart. When automated marketing is personalised to the individual customer, you witness greater conversion rates. If utilised in the right manner, automated marketing is able to more than double rates of conversion

5. Strong Calls-to-Action

A call-to-action is a statement that encourages a customer to take a particular action, and that statement links to a landing page where the customer is able to buy or download something, or find further information.

The key to effective calls-to-action is ensuring that they are sensical and are relevant in the context. A lot of websites use a phrase like click here as the call-to-action, which is obviously too generic. It does not inform the customer where they will be directed to when they click and it does not give them a reason to click. Customers are smart enough to realise that when they see a hyperlink, it will redirect them. More effective calls-to- action would be something like Start your free trial now! or Contact us for more information, with each link directing the customer to a landing page on which they can undertake that particular action.

6. Simple Forms

Website forms let your customers get in contact with you or find out further information from your business. The customer can fill out the form and provide their contact information, then send the information to to you, effectively delivering you another lead.

An important point to to remember about forms is that they must be as convenient for the customer as possible. Do not ask for too much mandatory information from the customer. Most importantly, keep things simple. In a recent study, a business was able to move from a 5 per cent form conversion rate, to a 12 per cent form conversion rate, just by decreasing the amount of mandatory fields. Another important point is that the majority of people prefer not to provide their phone number – mandating the provision of a phone number can decrease form conversion by 5 per cent.

7. Great Content

Effective content is not just keyword-rich. It is useful information that tells your customer something that they did not previously know. Regularly publishing good content will not just attract customers to your page through keywords, it will make you an expert in the industry who customers trust. Customers are more likely to purchase from someone they feel that they know and they trust. Regular, well-drafted, helpful content is an excellent means by which to build up trust.

By publishing great content, it will also be more likely that you will be accepted by content-aggregating sites. Respectable content-aggregating sites will make your content available to a broader and bigger audience and they will let you link back to your website, which assists with your site ranking.

8. Ebooks

It is anticipated that the ebook market will account for almost a third of all books purchased by 2019. With greater and greater numbers of people reading ebooks rather than paperback or hardcover, businesses need to offer their own ebooks. Ebook design and creation is fairly simple, and there are many programs available for users to download ebooks. Just by making a downloadable PDF file that provides important information and promotes your business, you can show yourself to be a trusted resource to customers, which will only increase your sales.

The secret to a great website is not just attracting visitors. The crux is getting those visitors to trust you and to purchase from your website. By putting in place inbound marketing best practices and ensuring that you are a respected and useful resource to your customers, you will be able to build and genuine and strong relationship with them, and an increase in your sales will follow.