Inbound marketing can revitalize your strategy and provide a great return on your investment, but doing things the right way is a must. How can you get buyers to contact you when they are ready -- and how can you cultivate a team of dedicated readers and engaged followers? These inbound marketing tips will help.
4 Ways to Jumpstart Your Inbound Marketing Efforts
1.) Build Buyer Personas
One of the fastest and easiest ways to create inbound pieces that actually work and are read by your target customer is to create a vision of your ideal buyer. Where do they work – and what problems do they have? Most businesses will have several buyer personas, each one a made-up character that is a composite of the existing customer base.
Knowing who you are selling to allows you to easily generate content and strategies that will appeal to that individual. Knowing who your target customers are can help you build quick snapshots of them and ensure that the content you are using for your inbound marketing efforts is truly useful.
2.) Enhance Your Social Media
Make it easy for customers to come to you by being accessible and easy to find. If you are actively posting informative, interesting, and educational content on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, make sure that your profiles on these sites are completely filled out and that they build the image you want to portray. Professional photos (not selfies), text that is similar in tone to your site and up to date, as well as easy to use contact information is a must and allows customers to easily get in touch. Make it too difficult and they might just pass you by.
3.) Blog Consistently
If you only post when you have an idea, your blog will be filled with sporadic, spread out posts that make it difficult for readers to stick around. Creating a content calendar and sticking to it can help you post more consistently and help readers make the decision to get in touch. Also, consistently blogging will not only help drive more traffic to your website, but it will also establish your company as an industry thought leader and begin to establish trust with your readers.
4.) Don’t Worry about “Giving Away” your Ideas
Bring your “A” game when you create content for inbound marketing. Putting your best work out there allows potential clients to see what you can do and imagine what you can do for them. It is tempting to keep your best ideas to yourself or to quickly dash off a blog without investing much time, but failing to produce your best work is a big mistake. Think of the pieces you use for inbound purposes as a representation of your business – sometimes the only sample a decision maker will see before they make the decision to get in touch – and act accordingly.
Beefing up your inbound marketing efforts can open up some surprising avenues of business and help keep a steady flow of prospects flowing towards your sales team. For more ways to boost your inbound marketing efforts, give Marketing Essentials a call at 419.629.0080. One of our Digital Strategists will be more than happy to explain how a solid inbound strategy will help you start generating more online leads today.
