Marketing has been the backbone of every store be it the traditional retail stores or the online stores. Technology has paved such a broad way that the seller is eager to find new marketing means. We have indeed witnessed varied techniques but inbound marketing is something that stands out, want to know why? Well, unlike other techniques the possibility of an occurrence of purchase is massive. The consumers here are drawn to the product instead of forcing them to make a buying decision.
To get to know what inbound marketing is you have to understand a buyer’s journey. It’s simple, the journey a buyer passes through before making a purchase decision, where he identifies a problem, finds a solution, and makes a purchase decision. As HubSpot mentions a buyers journey has three stages:
- Awareness Stage: The buyer identifies a problem.
- Consideration Stage: Buyer defines their problem and finds a solution.
- Decision Stage: The buyer makes a decision.
Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting target audiences and building trust in them by providing valuable content. We can’t market the same content to each customer that approaches us, for this, we have to understand our target audience or buyer persona. So what is a buyer persona?
Identifying Your Buyer Persona:
A crucial step before we market is to understand the buyer persona. A clear idea of who we are targeting or our target audience is. Certain factors are considered like Demographics, Lifestyle, Personality profile, Pain points, Information sources, Goals, etc. to understand the buyer persona.
An appropriate alternative would be to incorporate approaches along the way of the buyer’s journey. One thing to keep in mind is the strategies you focus on may be different but the content produced for the same should be valuable and informative which helps in building authority.
The 4 stages of Inbound Marketing Methodology: Attract, Convert, Close, and Delight.
ATTRACT: The first and foremost stage of Inbound Marketing is to attract the target audience or the buyer persona. At this initial marketing point, through search engine optimization and social media marketing, the prospect is provided with the right content, at the right place, and at the appropriate time.
BRANDING AND WEBSITE DESIGN
Not only visually appealing but also containing valuable content, a website aims to promote the discovery of its content. Inbound marketing is providing visitors with featured content, information relevant to them and CTAs. This exploration of material is what drives visitors to consider which ultimately is churned to conversion. It’s a must to focus on the logo and visual identity of your company to ensure it works on your website and on all channels.
A sensitive website reduces bounce rates as this platform makes visitors happy. They are able to navigate quickly to the information they are searching for. Google also prefers websites that are open and can help improve your search results.
Additionally, content that is not focused should be optimized for inbound by using targeted keywords important to the users.
CONTENT MARKETING
Create highly appropriate content for the audience you want to attract. Let customers come to you because you have the best content available in which they have an interest. Marketing content is not about selling your product, but rather about providing valuable information that helps create trust and confidence in your company.
Always try to provide fresh and valuable content. There’s no chance to hold your leads and convert them. The content may come in various forms to help your audience answer a question or solve a problem.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the method of optimizing the content and search layout of your website to earn organic placements on the results pages of the search engine. Creating an SEO-optimized quality website and content means that Google’s web-crawling algorithm is capable of finding and indexing the content of your website to make it accessible to people looking for free. This is the method of ensuring the website ranks on Google’s page 1 and is focused on things like consistency and amount of links, readability, uniqueness, keywords, etc.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
SEO satisfies searches and social media brings the company on sites in front of people where they actually hang out. While businesses can be welcomed on the social front, engaging with potential customers in a sincere and honest way is crucial. It’s also important to be consistent, to show up and be there, and trust will grow over time.
Like blogging, social media lets you keep your brand in touch with your followers on a regular basis, plus it helps you extend the scope of your ever-improving brand identity considerably. Social media also improves the identity of your brand by giving your audience a voice and a chance to connect with your brand, as well as being a place where you can give your audience news, blogs, and other useful material.
Spend time designing a social media marketing strategy to deliver your content to the right people, evaluate your top-performing content, and pay for the content that resonates with your audience to encourage and attract even more traffic.
PPC (Pay Per Click)
Pay-Per-Click or PPC alongside the above-mentioned ways has a great impact on the website visitors that you can generate. With the help of paid search, you can pay for the top place where your ads are and offer to draw interested visitors on similar keywords. Here you have the power to change budget, pause ads, calculate ROI and the list goes.
CONVERT: Here the people have identified you and visited the website, the aim here is to turn them into leads by collecting their contact details on a landing page. To obtain this valuable information, they are being provided the valuable content that they need at that very moment. It helps them to get the details they are searching for while giving their contact information to you for marketing to them.
CONTENT OFFER OR LEAD MAGNET
The basic idea here is to generate your leads’ contact information. You might have got traffic to your website but to get the person to provide their details you have to provide them valuable content, it can be in the form of a webinar, ebook, video or anything else. Lead magnet is where the customer is offered valuable content by the marketer in exchange for the leads contact information.
CALL-TO-ACTION
A CTA is a lead magnet feature where you can grab the attention of the customer and direct them where to go next. A call-to-action will direct traffic to your content thereby increasing sales. CTA is normally used across marketing channels to drive conversions. Here the one thing to keep in mind is that the CTA should be structured in a way with respect to your content that the lead is persuaded to take an action.
LANDING PAGES
Your lead magnets are located on the landing pages. After clicking the CTA the landing pages are where the leads come. The landing page should be in relevance with the CTA. An example is, when your visitor from a paid search for an ad advertising Men’s shoes, you will not send them to the landing page containing Women’s shoes. Focus on a single point, make sure you restrict navigation to other pages moving away from the landing page. The design of the landing page should be such that it should keep the visitor engaged. Videos, images, testimonials are some of the elements that can help improve the conversion rate.
Close: Here the leads are nurtured and turned into customers. There are certain marketing techniques that determine to ensure the leads are close at the right time, email marketing and marketing automation are some of them.
EMAIL MARKETING
Excellent communication is the secret to an effective marketing campaign, and you are making inbound email marketing the perfect approach for all sizes of companies. Whether you’re a start-up or a small-to-midsize company, email marketing can help you a lot. You may need to send personalized brand messages and educate consumers about your goods and services. In these instances, plugins like WooCommerce email customizer lets you quickly create and customize transactional email using a simple visual template editor.
Lately, Ecommerce stores use automated emails to share updates on purchases, cart abandonments, offers, and much more. They are helping to reach people better and make a purchase decision.
MARKETING AUTOMATION
Sending target content to the leads based on their actions is done over time. It’s important that you consider your own customers. You need to consider what their sources of discomfort are and what they can find the most engaging. This will help you build emails that have a better chance of communicating with them effectively. They need to feel like you’re the answer to their issues.
Inbound marketing is about delivering excellent content for consumers and leads alike. Even after they are our clients, we can not avoid giving interest to the leads, they have to be engaged in interactive content and social media. The ultimate goal is to please customers in making them your company advertiser.
