15 Ways to Boost Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

10 Ways to Boost Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing relies on attracting customers to you instead of seeking them out. Here are 10 ways to attract more customers to your business.

1. Work Your Blog and Content Strategy

Keep in mind that your blog is one of the most important channels to reach your audience so make sure that you put time and effort into it! A blog is essential to any inbound content strategy as it is a key attractor of traffic and leads. Make sure that your content is high quality, that you post regularly, and that you are addressing topics of interest to your audience. Keep in mind that your blog is one of the most important channels to reach your audience so make sure that you put time and effort into it!

2. Personalize, Personalize, Personalize

The conversion funnel can help you plan your inbound marketing strategy. You can customize your content for every stage of the funnel to make it more relevant to the user. This will make them appreciate and feel more connected to the brand. Here are some ideas for customization based on each stage of the funnel.

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): In the first phase of the funnel, the user has determined that he have a need so they are searching for relevant information. Use your social ads, blog content, and video content to respond directly to this information searching phase using proper keyword research.
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): In this second phase, the user is evaluating the different options on the market. You can use downloadable content that will allow you to get more information about the lead. With this information you can launch personalized email campaigns and remarketing tactics to move the lead down the funnel.
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): The final stage of the funnel is when the user is ready to make a purchase. Use tactics like free demos, discounts, or trials to get them to commit to you. And after the purchase don’t forget to maintain their loyalty, using personalized emails, coupons, or discounts.

3. Use Your Lead Magnets

Are you using all of the tools available to help you attract users organically? These tools, known as lead magnets or Inbound Marketing tools, are based on the Buyer Persona and the customer journey. They provide value and help move your lead down the conversion funnel. Make sure you are using them all correctly for the best results.

The most important lead magnets are:

• High quality content
• CTAs
• Landing pages
• Forms
• Chatbots

There are many types of lead magnets, which can be used in different ways. For example, a CTA within a blog post (such as the two in this blog post).

4. Include CTAs

If you want your users to take a specific action, you need to have a strong call to action strategy. Scattering your call to actions throughout your website or app is not enough. You need to have a plan that will guide users through the conversion funnel so that you can get better results.

Use these techniques when developing your CTAs:

• Remember that a CTA is in fact content! Instead of treating it like a navigation button, start seeing and treating your CTA as a content piece. This will help you strategize them better.
• A good design will be crucial to its effectiveness. Try A/B testing to see which CTAs get more clicks.
• Defining its function and its phase within the conversion funnel is critical. Consider that you will have different CTAs for each phase of the funnel.

5. Revise Your Landing Pages and Forms

Landing pages and forms turn anonymous visitors into leads.

Look at your current landing pages and consider how well they align with what users need and whether the design encourages users to stay on the page. These factors will have a big impact on conversion rates.

Here are two tips for creating a good landing page:

• Have the product, content piece, or main element take up a majority of the landing page. It sounds obvious, but this ensures that your user doesn’t get distracted by your landing page, or feel like they have been tricked into clicking on your website.
• Have the form appear on the user’s screen without the user having to scroll. This encourages users to fill out the form easier and with less steps.

Remember to consider the forms you use to collect information from leads! Ask yourself if the form is too long or if it is asking for too much information. Too many questions can make it harder to convert leads into customers. Only include the questions that are relevant and necessary in order to determine if the person is a marketing qualified lead.

I recommend using progressive forms, which means that new questions appear on the form each time leads return to your website. This allows you to get more information about the prospect without annoying them with the same questions.

There is a time and place for using longer forms, but only when the value content you offer is equivalent to what you’re asking for. In other words, make your content worthy of filling out a longer form.

6. Workflows, Email Marketing, and Lead Nurturing

Email marketing is an important part of inbound marketing. It is still a useful tool for developing potential customers.

evaluating your workflow and determining how you can use it to its full potential will allow you to better take care of your leads and help them through the different stages of converting into a customer. For example, if a user downloads an ebook or whitepaper, set up a workflow that continues to send them more relevant content. If they respond well to these emails (opens the emails, clicks the links, etc.) you can consider reaching out personally after determining if they are a SQL.

7. Don’t Forget About SEO

The main goal of both SEO and inbound marketing is to attract visitors to your website. However, SEO is a tool used specifically for this purpose as part of your inbound marketing strategy. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can increase the number of visitors coming to your site which, in turn, will lead to more leads and customers.

8. Link Building

Link building is the strategy of placing incoming links from your website onto other relevant, high-quality websites. To be effective, the following parameters must be taken into account:

• Diversity: If all of your links are coming from the same domain, your link building strategy will not be effective. Ensure you are diversifying your link building, so that many different websites are linking back to you.
• Quality: It is not enough to have many backlinks – they must be high quality. Try to aim for links from websites that are related to your industry and have a strong domain authority. For example, an online sports store, will get more value from links from a sports blog than a marketing blog.
• Quantity: Having many links pointing to your site from different domains tells Google you are relevant and a trustworthy source in the industry. But if quantity is an issue just remember that Google values quality more than quantity.

9. Utilize Social Media

Aside from content distribution, social media can also assist with lead generation, branding, and brand recognition. Google SEO factors in social media links, even though they are dofollow. Therefore, regularly posting engaging content is essential to maintaining an active social media presence.

10. Don’t Ignore Paid Advertising

An effective inbound marketing strategy uses both paid and organic tactics in a coordinated way. For example, the keyword research you do for your SEO blog articles can also help inform your SEM campaign. Paid ads, like Google Ads or social ads, can also support your inbound strategy by providing additional visibility and traffic.

PPC ads and SEO inbound marketing are both effective strategies, but PPC is better for quick results while SEO is better for long-term results. If your inbound marketing plan is off to a slow start, consider using SEM to strengthen it.

5 Mistakes that Can Derail Your Inbound Marketing Campaign

#1: Not having a clear inbound marketing plan

Benjamin Franklin once said that if you don’t plan ahead, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

You can’t just do digital marketing without a strategy. 49% of businesses are doing it without a concrete strategy, but you need a clear inbound marketing strategy for it to work. Only 32% of B2B marketers have a well-documented content marketing plan.

This is not the case. One reason why businesses fail at inbound marketing is that they don’t fully understand the strategy and what it entails. Many companies believe that all they need to do is publish a few blog posts and share them on social media, but this is not enough.

How to fix this:

It is probable that you have guessed correctly that the best way to solve this is by creating an inbound marketing plan for your business, with goals that are clear and measurable.

Getting specific about what you want to achieve online, understanding how you will measure success and ensure that the goals are achievable and realistic are important steps to take in order to create successful lead generation strategies.

Your next step is to create a buyer persona for your business. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, including their demographics, values, behaviors, challenges, and goals. All of your inbound marketing activities should be designed to attract your buyer persona, so it’s important to be as detailed as possible when creating one.

You can write up your inbound marketing plan using my inbound marketing checklist as a guide.

#2: Always going for the shortcuts

Business owners want to see quick results for the promotion of their products or services. Therefore, they may be tempted to use a few “inbound marketing shortcuts,” such as buying reviews, social media followers and likes, and email lists. This is especially true if the business is new. More customers would be attracted to a business with these improvements. However, this is not the case.

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How to fix this:

If you’re willing to spend money on your marketing campaign, it might be a good idea to invest in inbound marketing strategies instead of relying solely on outbound methods.

You don’t need to get rid of outbound marketing methods entirely just because inbound is more efficient. In fact, using a mix of both inbound and outbound strategies, like sponsored ads, PPC, and display advertising, can help you achieve your goals more quickly as you grow your business. These methods will make your website more visible and easier for your target market to find. Then you can use inbound marketing to nurture leads once they’re on your site.

#3: Your website doesn’t have a blog

There are many business owners who use another platform, such as Medium, for blogging, or who don’t blog at all.

Your site’s blog is only one of many marketing channels you can use for your inbound marketing campaign, but not having a blog on your website can limit your inbound marketing success.

If you blog on a site like Medium or social media site like LinkedIn, your content is subject to their terms and conditions. You may generate website traffic from these platforms, but if the site owners remove your content or close your account, you lose that traffic source.

How to fix this:

All your blogging activity should be moved to your own website. This will give you more control over your content and help improve your site’s ranking in search engine results. More pages on your site will be indexed and ranked, making it easier for people to find.

Content management systems that are popular, such as WordPress and Hubspot, make it simple to add a blog to your site without knowing any HTML code.

Although you can continue publishing content on other platforms, I would recommend using these platforms to post repurposed content to help your website rank higher on search engines.

#4: Choosing quantity over quality

Frequent and consistent publishing of content is crucial for the success of inbound marketing campaigns. In a study conducted by Hubspot, it was found that companies which published four blog posts per week got 3.5 times more traffic than those which post up to four blog posts per month.

How to fix this:

It is better to have fewer pieces of high-quality content than many pieces of low-quality content. This is also true for consistency. If writing four blog posts a week is too much for you, then write three or two instead. The key is to make sure each piece of content you publish is high quality and that you are posting regularly. You can do this by using an editorial calendar.

Pulizzi says that an editorial calendar is more than just a list of content ideas and posting dates. It’s a document that shows what type of content each buyer persona needs, where they are in the buyer’s journey, and what other channels (besides your blog) you’ll use to reach them.

An editorial calendar template can help you come up with ideas for content that will funnel readers through your marketing strategy towards becoming leads and customers.

 #5: Not optimizing campaigns for mobile

With 62% of people in the US browsing the internet on their smartphones, and the number of mobile users projected to reach 9.038 billion by 2020, it is clear that not including mobile in your inbound marketing strategy would be a very costly mistake for your business.

How to fix this:

Use Google’s free mobile-friendly test tool to see if your website is easy to use on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

The text is saying that the tool will also tell you if there are any issues on your website when it is viewed using a mobile device. It will also tell you what the problems are so that you can resolve them. This way, your target audience will not encounter any issues when they check your site on their mobile devices.