If you are struggling to manage your company’s marketing program, it may be wise to step back and evaluate the most important channels you are utilizing. 
While your marketing firm may be pushing you to invest in traditional outbound marketing techniques, you may wish to de-emphasize them and focus your resources on more cost-effective inbound marketing techniques.
Some of the most effective inbound marketing strategies include:
Buyer Personas—Creating buyer personas for your target market becomes an essential marketing step no matter what marketing efforts you are deploying. A successful buyer persona is a made up personality of your ideal consumer. You should include as many details as possible to get into the shoes of your ideal buyer persona. Include as many details as possible about their job responsibilities, their job title, the publications they read, where they hang out, whom they report to, what they do outside of work, etc. After you create buyer personas, any and all pieces of content you produce should be directed at one of those personas.
Social networking—It is critical to have an experienced and innovative marketing team handling your social media initiatives. It is no longer enough to have a “presence” on Facebook or Twitter where you post once every few days or so. Your marketing team needs to be engaging consumers, generating positive buzz and drawing visitors to your home page through links. In order to successfully accomplish this, you should be encouraging your marketing team to create contests, games, videos and consumer-generated media to help stir enthusiasm about your products and brand. Furthermore, choosing which social media outlets will best engage your target audience will be more constructive to your marketing efforts than just trying to do a little bit on each platform.
Blogging—A blog is a low cost method of generating consumer interest. Not only does a blog help elevate your company’s reputation by demonstrating its knowledge of the industry, but it is also an important SEO tool. The new content that is posted regularly helps maintain or elevate your website’s ranking. This can contribute to 55% more traffic to your website, according to HubSpot. When generating blog content make sure you have a target buyer persona in mind.
Search engine optimized content—SEO should be a high priority for your marketing team. One of the key components of any inbound marketing strategy is to drive traffic to your website and having a highly ranked website is foundational. Your marketing team should be continuously adding new content in the form of articles, videos and photos that alert Google and other search engines that your site is well maintained and is generating fresh content.
Pay per click—PPC techniques like Google AdWords could also be a key component of your marketing strategy. Not only are PPC methods easy to implement, but most are scalable and readily analyzed. This allows you to easily determine which PPC marketing strategies are producing sizable returns, and which should be discarded, so you can plan a budget according to what works best for your brand.
Lead conversion—All of your inbound marketing strategies are funneling visitors to your website. You don’t want to roll out the welcome mat only to shut the door in their faces. Your website should be search engine optimized, but it should also be highly suited to converting leads into sales. It should be welcoming and aesthetically pleasing, as well as easy to navigate and populated with attractive call to actions (CTAs). CTAs are what gets website visitors to the first step of entering the sales funnel, starting with a landing page. Landing pages should be clean, simple and offer something of value to the visitor in exchange for basic contact information. After they have entered their information they can receive the offer on a thank-you page. This thank-you page can then turn them back to your website so you can continue to offer them other content and move them down the sales funnel.
Not all inbound marketing strategies are effective for all businesses, so you should be working with a marketing firm that is dedicated to producing a customized marketing plan.
It is also helpful to have a team that provides reliable analytics so that initiatives can be properly evaluated and enhanced if results are less than expected. With a dependable marketing team you can be sure that your company will experience growth in visitors and sales.
Want to learn more about inbound marketing for your company? Click the link below.
