How do you bring in new customers? Your inbound marketing strategy should answer that question. But, if you’re like a lot of businesses, your inbound digital marketing isn’t doing everything you want it to do. The goal is to get your name and your content in front of people who’ve never heard of you before. Convince them that they want what you’ve got, when they didn’t even know they needed it.
Your inbound digital marketing strategy needs to have measurable goals in place. If you don’t have a way to rank your leads and determine what’s working best, these strategies will only get you so far.
Create more video content
Short videos are shareable and interesting, but many companies don’t make any videos at all. Sometimes video production is too expensive or involved, other times companies don’t know what to make videos about. But if you have the resources available, video is a necessary component of your inbound marketing strategy.
Surprise new people with great video content, and you’ll entice them to learn more about you and possibly buy your products. Some great ideas for video content include: funny how-to videos, each centered around one of your products, engaging brief informational videos offering your audience tips or tricks they didn’t know they needed, or heart-warming videos that bring smiles in otherwise depressing social news feeds.
You can avoid live video most of the time. Unless you’re trying to do something niche with webinars, live video is a complicated endeavor that needs a good tech infrastructure to pull off. Focus on making your current videos short and shareable. Think about what companies like Buzzfeed offer in a video, and spin that idea for your specific niche, audience, and company.
Use email more effectively
People sign up for email lists because they hope to get something they want to read or interact with. Maybe they wanted a coupon, or were hoping for insider tips, or desired to know when your next sale will be. Whatever the reason, it’s usually a combination of irrelevant emails or far too many emails that lead people to unsubscribe from mailing lists.
When you have someone’s email, don’t throw it away on annoying newsletters and huge email blasts. Instead, make your communication more personal. When you email, offer valuable information people can’t get anywhere else. Maybe you’ve got some information that you want to give to everyone a day or two before it goes up on the blog. Perhaps you’re letting them in on a sale before anyone else gets there. You might be offering an exclusive coupon code. Give your list a reason to click your email instead of immediately trashing it, then unsubscribing from your list.
Get active on social media
Advice on how to use social media for all kinds of marketing work is very broad. When you turn to social media for inbound marketing, you need a specific strategy which includes ways to measure its effectiveness. Some of the most popular ways to use social media are actually not doing you any favors; simply posting links to your blog or writing about sales you’re having isn’t enough.
The key word here? Social. This is your format to interact with people. Ask questions, offer insights, and take polls. Spend time replying to the people who choose to interact with you. Treat your customers as individuals and show them how much you value their input. You can still post links to your latest blog posts, of course, but that should not be the primary function of your social media accounts. Some companies have taken social media so far as to be a customer service avenue, and they use Facebook and Twitter to resolve customer issues.
Ultimately, your customers and leads like to remember that there are people behind the company username. Interacting on a human-to-human basis makes customers feel valued, and it gives them an emotional connection to your brand. Plus, when new people see you creating those human connections, they’ll be enticed to see what you’re all about.
Get noticed in searches with long tail keywords
Ensuring your content shows up in people’s searches can be difficult. SEO is a complicated process, involving using the right keywords and building quality links.
On your website and in your blog, use long tail keywords to attract more people to your site. Long tail keywords are the long phrases people have entered into search engines to find your website. By seeing how people are finding you, you can focus on using those keywords in your content to help boost your search engine rankings for those phrases people are searching.
Focus each post on one long tail keyword, so you don’t create ideas or content that’s too confusing or disjointed. Each long tail keyword needs to end up in several blog posts, so create lists of blog post ideas in which you can include each of your long tail keywords. Choose the best one, and start creating content.
Use link building to boost your search rankings
When other quality websites link to your site, you get a boost in search engine algorithms. The number of sites that link to you gives search engines clues about how worthwhile your website is, and where to place it in searches. You can give yourself a boost by making sure your links show up on other websites.
Start by finding industry blogs and sites where you can post expert content. Offer to write blogs about industry news, how-to articles, or things people wish they knew more about. Bury a link to your page in these posts, and voilà! You have a link from a reputable site leading back to your page. You can also offer bloggers and influencers samples of your products in exchange for reviews. Have those people link to your site when they write the reviews.
These link building tactics offer another bonus: people who read that industry blog or follow those influencers now are aware you exist. Some of them might click on your links, even inadvertently, and end up at your site.
Connect with new influencers
On the subject of bloggers and influencers, those reviews and guest posts help your inbound digital marketing in a whole different way. Many people rely on personal reviews when deciding what products to buy. Even if people don’t know the reviewer, reading an honest take on a product or service helps people make buying decisions that are otherwise frustrating or difficult.
Choose bloggers and influencers who fit your audience. That way, the people who follow them are probably interested in what your company has to offer. Plus, you already know they’re interested in what that blogger or influencer has to say, so your product is in good hands. When you do this, always give a shout-out to the person doing the review over social media. That way, they get some promotion, too, and may want to work with you in future.
Work on conversion rates on landing pages
Your landing page is probably full of missed opportunities for inbound marketing. A simple landing page is the way to go, without navigation or complicated headlines. You need a few key components and nothing else on your landing page to generate leads.
First, your landing page should be simple, with only a few form boxes to fill out. Don’t ask people to input a bunch of information before they can sign up for what you’re offering. An email often suffices, maybe a name. That’s it. Go light on the information you ask for; even if you need more about the people you’re hoping to convert, you can gather that information through incentivized surveys once you have a way to contact them.
Your landing page needs an image to be visually stimulating. Make sure your headline is the most interesting part about the landing page, too. If the subheading is more compelling than the headline, then switch them, or use the subheading only. Finally, don’t give people a navigation menu while on your landing page. Just make an easy way to get back to the home page of your website, like clicking on the logo. If you offer navigation to other pages, people might get distracted before they finish filling out your landing page’s form.
Combine these tips to revamp your inbound marketing strategy. Create more brand awareness and attract new customers who will love what you’ve got to offer.
