Do you want your potential customers to find YOU instead of you approaching THEM?
Inbound Marketing can do that for you.
Inbound Marketing is an extremely effective marketing strategy that uses customized and eye-catching content to attract potential clients to your business. The content can be in several forms – blogs, ebooks, videos, infographics, landing pages, etc. It just has to be as per your ideal customer’s interests, goals, or concerns so that they are drawn toward your content.
Rather than promoting yourself to customers, inbound marketing focuses on giving customers reasons to come to you.
It has a total of 3 stages:
Source: LaunchPad
Attract: Get customer’s attention with the use of valuable content and conversations
Engage: Engage your potential customers by providing insights and solutions
Delight: Make sure that the customers are pleased and feel supported even after they make a purchase.
There are various strategies that you can use for effective Inbound marketing, but before that let’s go through some of the benefits of Inbound Marketing:
Benefits Of Inbound Marketing To Small Businesses
a. It’s Economical
When your budget for marketing is limited and you want to spend each and every penny efficiently, Inbound marketing is the best option for you. As per Invesp, Businesses that mainly rely on Inbound Marketing save more than $14 for every newly acquired customer.
Also, Inbound Marketing can generate leads in a much cheaper manner than Outbound Marketing.
b. Establishes a Long-Lasting Trust
The purpose of marketing is to build good connections and something that lasts. Customer retention is a major part of your business success. Through inbound marketing, you can use tools like blogging and SEO and be consistent. If your content seems to be helpful to the customers, you will automatically gain their trust and consistency.
c. Reach Out to New Clients and Businesses
By strategically using popular and useful keywords in your content you can attract new customers and introduce your business to them. This allows you to reach out to potential customers who are unaware of your brand.
d. It Directly Targets the Customer Looking for Your Products\Service
With the use of inbound marketing tools, like keyword optimization, you can directly attract the targeted audience to your business and if your content provides all the information that they are looking for they would trust your store as being reliable and safe, and chances of them buying the product from you, increases.
e. Increase Your Authority and Brand Exposure
Inbound marketing is a good medium to create brand awareness and build your brand name. You may utilize social media, high-quality blog articles, infographics, PPC, SEO, etc to get your brand in front of thousands of potential customers and educate them about your firm. This helps your business generate more leads and sales in the future.
Inbound Marketing Strategies
1. Analyze Your Target Audience And Your Market
Before you plan your inbound marketing strategies, it is important to study the current market condition. This research can help you identify your audience, know more about your rivals, what are the current trends in the market, what your customers are expecting from you, what problems are they facing, etc.
Following is an example of a survey carried out by Fractl and Moz, to know how customers learn about a company or a product.
Source: Moz
It was observed that 88% of them do it by an online search.
2. Develop a Content Plan
After you have a basic knowledge of the target audience and their preferences, you need to plan a Content Marketing Strategy for your small business. It plays an important role in Inbound Marketing. If you write common and self-serving blogs or articles, you are less likely to succeed.
First of all, you will have to decide on a blogging platform. WordPress, blogger, and Hubspot are a few examples of such platforms. Another option is to add blogs on your website itself, this way you can make it more active and improve search engine optimization (SEO).
3. Create High-Quality Content To Engage The Audience
The content that you are creating by blogging has to be of the highest quality.
It should capture the reader’s attention and keep them engaged with your content. For instance, if you want to launch a podcast, make sure to come up with unique ideas for a podcast to trigger the interest of your target audience. After going through your blog they should feel satisfied, leaving them with no questions.
You can use various creative content writing techniques like breaking up the content into bullet points, using visuals for better understanding, using appropriate keywords, etc., and making it attractive and user-friendly.
4. Use Attractive Headlines To Draw Attention
Your blog’s title is the first thing that a visitor will see. The heading is what gets the most clicks and draws the most traffic. Therefore, it is very important to create a concise title, that clearly states what your blog is all about, and is equally appealing to the targeted customers. It should also include all the required keywords for a better SEO.
Source: dlvrit
The image shows 64 power words that can be used in headings to make it attractive and draw the target audience.
You can use various tactics to make the headings eye-catching, like:
- Using numbers and data in the headlines
- Using hyphens and colons
- Include unique subheadings.
- Using interesting adjectives for eg. “engaging, essential, important, captivating, incredible, effortless”, etc.
- Using questions in headings
- Test Negative headings – which have words like “never”, “stop”, “Don’t”, etc.
- Include unique subheadings.
5. Use Visuals In Your Blog
There’s no denying that combining text with a visually attractive picture or video is a very impactful combination that helps people remember what you’re saying. You can use images, videos, memes, GIFs, charts, graphs, screenshots, etc to keep your readers engaged in your content.
As per Orbit media studio, 47% of bloggers include at least 2-3 images in their blogs, it is also proven that bloggers who add more visuals get better results. Therefore, make sure your content is more than simply massive blocks of text if you want it to appeal to your prospective audience.
Source: FreelancingGig
The above image is an example of a meme that can be used for any blog relating to content writing.
Read More: Small Business Memes Ideas
6. Your Articles Should Be Thorough And Data-Driven
Before writing a blog you should always do some thorough research on the topic and then phrase the content from the knowledge you gained. Instead of keeping the content brief, you should research and create in-depth data driven content that can be of maximum use to the customers and able to provide every information that they are looking for on that topic.
It should also be supported by all the required data and analytics. This would not only help your clients but will also improve your SEO rankings.
7. Use Call to Action
A call to action is a piece of material that allows the visitor to follow a link that will send them to a landing page where they can get more knowledge about the company, product, or service. This would help them to make a buying decision. It can be in the form of a banner, pop-up window, or call-to-action button.
Source: Hubspot
Every blog should have a relevant CTA at the end. You can use imperative words like, “shop”, “click”, “join”, “like” etc. and make it pop off the page.
CTA is advantageous for your small business since it allows you to collect visitor information such as name, email address, and other information that you may need for lead nurturing.
8. Get Backlinks For Your Content
Backlinks are hyperlinks on someone else’s website that link to your website. This is a way to drive reliable customers to your site. You can use your personal contacts to get backlinks or reach out to publishers and industry websites and request backlinks.
If your content is relevant enough and helpful for their audience, they will definitely look into your request.
The screenshot shows a backlink example. When clicked, it takes the reader to the website of Backlinko.
9. Create A Strong Social Media Presence
Social media is a very crucial inbound marketing strategy for any small business. Inbound marketing is all about attracting and building relationships. Social media is the best option for this. It allows you to stay connected with your target audience and helps you know more about your potential clients.
When you have a strong social media presence, it boosts your online visitors and draws traffic to your content. You can directly interact with your customers on social media platforms and easily know about their likes, dislikes, expectations, problems, etc., and can help you improve accordingly. You can use a number of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tik Tok, etc.
Read More: 11 ways to improve Instagram marketing for small business
10 Indulge Yourself In Guest Post Writing
Guest posting is all about writing an article and publishing it on someone else’s websites that accept guest posts. It’s a type of collaboration wherein they get a suitable blog from you, which their audience would like, and you get a link in the blog that directs the audience towards your website.
According to a survey, 82% of marketers actively use content marketing.
Through guest posting, you can drive traffic and increase sales by writing creative and relevant blogs that can impress the audience.
11. SEO And Keyword Optimization
Your content has to be easily visible to the targeted audience in order for inbound marketing to work.
You can improve your SEO rankings by finding the right keyword for your content and placing it suitably throughout the content. This way you can be among the top rankings on Google and attract the targeted customers.
For example, consider this keyword: trampoline park orlando
There must be a lot of companies providing trampoline park services in Orlando, and every company wants to rank in top 3 for google local map and organic positions. SEO is the best way to outrank competitors and rank in top 3 packs.
For small businesses it is hard to fight for the topmost keywords and get results, however, long-tail keywords can be used for targeting your content and getting the desired goal.
The image shows examples of Broad Keyword and Long Tail Keywords. Long-tail keyword searches have a click-through rate of 3% to 5% higher than generic searches.
Therefore, it is advisable to use unique key phrases to draw maximum traffic.
12. Develop An Attractive Website For Your Business
A business website is a necessary part of the digital success of your small business. It represents your business online.
After drawing customers towards your business website, it is important that these potential customers are converted, otherwise what’s the point of it all?
And to make that happen your website should be appealing, user-friendly, and include reliable content that the customer may be looking for.
Source: GuildCreative
You also need to make sure that your website is accessible on desktop as well as mobile phones or else you would be losing out on many potential customers. It is said that, by 2025, nearly 73% of internet users will access the internet solely via mobile devices.
13. Promote Your Business On A Larger Platform Through Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is another effective form of Inbound marketing wherein businesses use influencers to advertise themselves.
They have a large social following which can be effectively used by SMEs to promote their business on a larger platform.
According to a survey, 80% of consumers have purchased something via an influencer recommendation. They are regarded as trustworthy information sources.
You can find the right influencer for your brand and target your niche through effective influencer marketing techniques.
14. Increase Conversations Through Content Upgrades
A content upgrade is a technique where you offer a piece of content to the clients in exchange for their Email Ids. This way, they hand over their contact details and you get a lead.
Instead of sharing the entire blog on your website you can include an opt-in form and urge people to enter their email addresses in order to reveal the rest of the blog or get some bonus content.
Source: Themeisle
The image shows an example of a content upgrade where the readers have to enter their name and Email ID in order to download the free PDF version of the guide.
15. Market Your Business Through Emails
Email Marketing is a kind of direct marketing technique wherein you can promote your brand by sending commercial emails to potential customers or other businesses and spreading awareness about your business.
Source: Aweber
As per Hubspot, 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers. You can opt to write engaging Emails for campaigns. It is the most effective as well as an affordable inbound marketing idea.
16. Do Not Forget About After-Sale Services!
Your job is not done after the lead is converted into a customer. Getting a new customer is more expensive than retaining the old one.
You need to maintain a strong customer relationship while also focusing on your sales. After the customer is converted it’s your duty to make them feel satisfied with your services and provide them with everything that you promised.
Therefore, even after conversion, keep sending them necessary and suitable content, offers and discounts, follow-up emails, etc., through various channels, and motivate them to be your loyal customers. Don’t forget to add a DMARC record to your email domain to make your emails look credible and increase the deliverability rate.
You can even conduct surveys for the existing customers and get their feedback on your service. This will let you know where you are lacking and allow you to improve your services helping you retain your customers.
Conclusion
Inbound marketing is the best way to draw customers and leads effectively.
In order to attract potential customers to your website you need to analyze their requirements and accordingly create useful, high-quality, and data-driven content using visuals, perfect keywords, Call to action buttons, backlinks, etc.
Use Strategies like Social Media presence, attractive website development, SEO Management, Influencer marketing, Email marketing, etc., and draw traffic to your business.
Use the above tips to skyrocket the sales of your small business!
