Inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, convert, close, and delight customers online. Inbound marketing falls under the umbrella of digital marketing. It focuses on creating and optimizing content that will attract your target audience (personas), engage them early on in their buying journey, convert them when they're ready to become leads and customers, and delight them at every stage.
Sounds easy right?
Inbound marketing has been proven to be very effective for almost every industry regardless of whether your business sells to consumers (B2C) or other businesses (B2B). But for it to be successful, you need to start with a strategy and be persistent and consistent.
Strategy Development - Start
You need to start with a great strategy that includes understanding how your website performs today (benchmarks), how you want it to perform (goals), how you're going to get there (plan), and what the expected ROI should be.
But that's not all, you can't develop content for your unique personas if you don't know who they are. A deep dive through your data,
Once you know who they are you can develop content to solve their specific problems and help them through their unique buyer's journey.
Blogging - Attract
Blogging is one of the single most effective tools to attract qualified website visitors. In fact:
- B2B marketers who blog get 67% more leads than those who do not. (Source: LinkedIn)
- Websites with a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages. (Source: TechClient)
To be successful, you need to be persistent and consistent with your blogging. But a blog doesn't always have to be text. You can create a podcast or vlog. The more variety there is (as long as you're using formats your personas like) the better.
Bring It All Together
Okay so you have the plan, you know who your personas are and what kind of content you need to develop.
Now you need to bring it all together, what keywords are important to your personas, when are you going to develop the content (editorial calendar), who is going to do the writing (in-house, outsource, or combination), and how are you going to promote the content (campaigns).
