4 Steps to Implement Your Inbound Marketing Campaign
Outbound Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing
Traditional or outbound marketing uses paid advertising to promote products and services. It is directed mostly at the general public, even those who may not want or need the services offered. In contrast, inbound marketing is the process of attracting interest from customers without necessarily paying for it. This method includes tactics like content marketing, social media and SEO. It targets individuals who are more apt to use the products or services being promoted. In other words, outbound marketing uses paid ads to push products to people, while inbound marketing strategies relies on earning people’s interest and gaining their trust.
Inbound marketing is creating and sharing useful, compelling and fantastic content with potential and established clients. It’s inviting them into your way of thinking and business culture. Traditional marketing is just “talking AT the customer”, whether they want to listen or not.
Needless to say, inbound marketing strategies require more complexity than the tactics used in the traditional marketing arena. But the outcome can be well worth the effort. Outbound marketing is reaching increasingly diminished audiences, while inbound is more engaging and more accessible to the people wanting and needing what you are offering.
Why try to buy customers with traditional outbound marketing when most consumers aren’t even paying attention? Here are a few statistics that indicate that outbound marketing is highly ineffective:
- 45% of direct mail never gets opened
- 200 million people are on the national Do Not Call Registry
- 85% of people fast forward through commercials
- 84% of 25–35 year-olds are likely to click off a website with excessive advertising
Inbound Marketing Campaign Techniques
So how do you implement inbound marketing for your business? Here are four suggestions to get you started:
- Audit your website. Gather statistics that measure your website’s effectiveness. Use Google Analytics to monitor the number of visitors, which pages get the most views, retention rate per viewer and qualified leads being generated.
- Create customer personas. This requires you to assess the type of customer who would be looking for your service or product. By doing so, you will be more aware of your target market. A buyer persona is a profile that models, summarizes, and communicates observations about a specific type of individual. Details usually include:
- Demographic information; where they live, work and shop
- Employment; company, position held, salary range
- Education background
- Age, gender
- Values goals
- Pain points
- Main sources of news and information
A great resource to help in developing personas is available using the Hubspot persona creator. It’s a step-by-step wizard that will help get you started.
- Write a blog. This is a great way to engage visitors, provide information and solicit, as well as maintain, customers. An interesting and informative blog can provide the following benefits:
- Drive traffic to your website
- Increase your SEO/ SERP
- Position your brand as an industry leader
- Develop better customer relationships
You don’t think you’re qualified to write a blog? If you really think about it, you have a lot of information to relay about your service or product. There are plenty of sources online to help you in creating blogs. They don’t have to be perfect, although it’s always a good idea to have someone proofread them, or even have a professional create the blogs for you. If the blog is engaging and informative, viewers will read it.
- Get on Social Media. This is a great venue to get people interested and engaged in your business and what you have to offer. Facebook and Twitter are the first tools that come to mind, but LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube are great sites as well, depending on what your business offers to the public.
These tools should be set up to monitor conversations related to your brand, your competitors, and your industry. Chances are they will find an ongoing discussion between your prospective customers and your competition and will want to get involved immediately.
And don’t forget to post regularly, or you’ll get lost in the mass. Don’t fall off the radar!
Need an Inbound Marketing Audit?
Changescape Web, the SEO for Growth consultant in St. Louis offers a total online presence audit for just $799. This inbound marketing audit is a great way to understand your current state online, as well as to provide competitive landscape and a set of recommendations to build a more effective total online presence which is essential for inbound marketing.
At St. Louis SEO for Growth, we are inbound marketing certified. We build content-driven websites that get you leads and will help you get found in search engines. We have the expertise to build your online marketing strategy so that you can concentrate on attracting and keeping customers.