Most conventional marketing techniques will either be too expensive or unviable for start-ups and SMBs who wish to make it big in the business world. Inbound marketing for a long time remained as just one of the portions of the core marketing strategy of an organization.
But as digital content consumption marked an unexpected rise, inbound marketing has now become a focal point. Not only it’s cheaper than traditional advertising and marketing techniques, but it also has the incredible power to attract more massive crowds to a brand and turn it into a magnet.
If you are new to this digital marketing environment, you might be figuring out what inbound marketing is. If you do figure out, you will realize that it is one of the most viable tactics to help you create the required impetus around your brand so that customers can discover you in several ways.
A Gartner Research report says that “25 percent of customer service operations are predicted to use virtual customer assistants by 2020.” If this comes true, inbound marketing will have a significant role to play in giving your brand a perfect voice that speaks to the masses.
Listed below are some of the most appropriate inbound marketing strategies that do not fail to deliver if planned as well as executed meticulously.
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Content Marketing
Content marketing is a necessary pull factor when it comes to inbound marketing. Relevant and useful content that helps users find what they are looking for can significantly boost your visibility on the internet. The content thus posted must be optimized so that it ranks better in various search engine pages.
In case, if promoted on both the onsite and offsite platforms, it can generate quality leads that may later become buying customers. You may post articles, whitepapers, blogs, audio-visual content, and a lot more to give your brand a voice.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The remarkable thing about inbound marketing is that it aids you in getting found by customers rather than spending time to find them. If you did not know, getting organic placements on any search engine result pages (SERPS) is one of the best methods for inbound marketing.
So, keep optimizing your website and content. It makes Google’s web crawling technology determine and index your site’s content to appear in web searches. It can be a highly economical way to get significant traffic to your site.
SEO revolves around keywords, link-building, website structure, and a lot more. Once you identify the most relevant keywords, try optimizing the heck out of them. Gaining the top position in search pages, improving your rank in searches, and then moving up the order in a range of various other keywords could help you get excellent outcomes.
However, do not try to win in all those keywords at once.
Social Media
Giving your brand a needed personal identity and a social existence is an essential step towards making your content reach a broader audience. Creating content would be futile if you do not share it over several online social media platforms.
As per a new survey report by Pew Research Center, created in alliance with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a significant portion of the U.S. adults, that is, 62% of them get news on social media, and 18% do so often.
While trying to enhance outreach on social media, one must not limit themselves to a few sites instead focus proactively on multiple other platforms. A lot of firms in the B2B world make LinkedIn their focal point in social media outreach. They likely believe that other platforms are not good enough to reach the audiences they wish to connect with.
Although LinkedIn continues to be the most utilized B2B social media platform, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, amongst others too, are used by organizations to create the right amount of buzz around their brands.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer Marketing is considered as a hybrid of old and new marketing tools, where businesses take the idea of celebrity endorsement and put it into a modern-day content-driven campaign. Although this method is somewhat intricate to implement practically, it has a huge potential when it comes to influencing a specific audience.
Quite a few B2B companies have discovered the benefits of this tactic and are currently using them to lure customers into their business. Consider this example from American Express. It advertises extensively across a wide range of media with the branded hashtag #AmexAmbassadors.
In this example, the company used Influencer Marketing to promote its Platinum card. It targets this product at high-spending people, such as managers and executives, and it emphasizes its luxury and exclusiveness on Instagram.
The challenging part of influencer marketing is to convince opinion leaders to contribute to your cause as they expect to gain something from this method. However, if you promise mutual benefits, there is a higher possibility that they may agree to work with you. So, fret not!
PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
We know that marketing scholars and enthusiasts are divided over the classification of PPC campaigns as an inbound or outbound marketing technique. No matter where it belongs, PPC certainly helps a business score a prominent position in web searches as well as gain considerable traffic to your website.
And, the truth is, pay-per-click marketing works for almost any kind of business, whether you’re planning to generate leads for a software business, sell products through an e-commerce website, or drive visitors to your local store.
But, the difficulty is in the execution. To get the most out of the PPC campaign, you need to follow some best practices. Failing to optimize your PPC campaigns may lead to a wastage of financial resources without bringing you proportionate returns.
Conclusion
Inbound marketing, like every other marketing strategy, may get extremely complicated. It needs immense patience as you have to simultaneously work on multiple things and unify your efforts towards a common goal. Though marketers cannot always be confident of the result of their inbound marketing strategies, they can figure the best way out through trial and error.
An inbound marketing strategy may not assist you in growing unbeaten overnight, but it is one of the most constructive ways to build your way to fame.
