inbound marketing

How to Get the Most Out of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing can have a very high return on investment if utilized properly. As HubSpot describes, inbound marketing is all about turning your site visitors into customers and eventual advocates of your brand. Let’s chat about a few techniques to get the most out of your inbound marketing efforts.

 

Add Value to Your Customer’s Journey

Nobody likes the person at the party who does nothing but talk about how great they are. To compare this to running a blog, a company consistently publishing nothing but self-promotional articles won’t serve their visitors any good. You’ve got to provide value with your content so that new visitors become returning visitors, and returning visitors eventually become customers. This involves educating them with insights about your industry, and it falls directly in line with understanding your customer’s problems.
 

Understand Your Customer’s Problems

In order to properly educate your site visitors and potential customers, you’ve got to recognize the hurdles they’re jumping over on a regular basis. Develop your inbound marketing content to help dismantle your target’s hurdles so that they can run freely, and understand how they find solutions to their problems from an SEO perspective. Optimize and plan your content from a problem-oriented vantage point rather than a solution-oriented perspective. Most people using search engines are searching for terms based on their issues and not the solutions to their issues; if they already knew the solution, they wouldn’t have to Google it.
 

Re-Use Content Across Various Media

Wrote a blog post? Great, share it on social. Have a white paper? Include it in your monthly email newsletters. Short story even shorter: by creating content you’ve created assets, and you want to leverage these assets as much as possible across all the different platforms you utilize.
 

Keep Track of Leads

The only way to effectively make sure that you don’t lose track of the relationship with a potential lead is to use a tracking system such as a CRM. This is exactly why they’re called Customer Relationship Management systems: software solutions such as Salesforce or HubSpot CRM can make sure that you properly follow up with visitors that have shown interest in your business so they don’t get lost in the funnel.
 

Automate What Can Be Automated

Using tools like Zapier to automate certain aspects of your inbound marketing strategy can be extremely advantageous. But you don’t want to appear robotic and entirely systematic; there needs to be an authenticity to your strategy, and this means engaging with your visitors and audience in genuine ways. Automate things that aren’t customer facing, like using automation to properly keep email lists updated and consolidated, but don’t automate things that are customer facing, like direct messages sent to everyone on Twitter who follows you.
 

Set SMART Goals

Success starts with setting goals, but realistic with the targets you set out to reach. SMART goals are:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Realistic
  • Time-Based

 
So first you want to decide on a determined goal, like increasing brand awareness. Then you’ve got to decide on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with this goal and can represent it numerically: in the case of brand awareness, it would involve increasing impressions and increasing the size of your audience whether it be page likes or followers. You also want to choose a goal that’s achievable and realistic: Rome wasn’t built in a day, so don’t expect to go viral and gain a million followers overnight. Lastly, give yourself a deadline in terms of when you’d like to achieve this goal. A million followers may, in fact, be a realistic goal if you want to build that audience over a long period of time, but find a balancing act between long- and short-term goals. Your short-term goals should be the building blocks of your long-term goals. For example, aim for a 10% increase over the course of a month and if you reach your goal, try to hit 15% next month. As they say, “if you build it, they will come.”
 
Read this blog post to find out more about digital marketing goals, or follow us on Twitter to get consistent, valuable knowledge right to your feed.
 

How to Get the Most Out of Inbound Marketing