Inbound marketing is what you need

Finding clients for your own business is not easy. Addressing prospective customers traditionally – via billboards, newspaper ads or call center often has the opposite effect. Luckily, now more than ever, you have the opportunity to make the customers come to you. It’s called inbound marketing.

WHAT’S INBOUND MARKETING ANYWAY?

You might have heard about inbound marketing by now. Trying to read potential customers’ minds is not just a domain of copywriters anymore. In fact, most of the business owners have already noticed that luring clients to their products is way more effective than talking them into sales. Predicting what the clients want and making your service exactly that, waiting for them to call you? Brilliant.

The ABC of Inbound Marketing

It’s a strategy of online activities that will make the client come to you in search for their perfect service. A customer-friendly approach that offers valuable information without asking for anything in return. In other words, your customer’s dream strategy. And yours too!Inbound marketing is all about building a positive image of a brand, engaging the clients into your marketing activities and thus increasing their loyalty for your services.

There are several components of inbound marketing strategies, you should get to know.

Statistics

You might think that the inbound strategy implemented by your company is great, but do the clients share your enthusiasm? You need to advertise in the right places, learn how to optimize your content for SEO and monitor your activities in all the communication channels. This might seem like a lot of work but thanks to the statistics you can calibrate your website in such a way, it is the most visible for the target group.In order to measure the traffic and user interest correctly, as well as equip yourself with knowledge about the hottest keywords in the business, you might want to try one of these great tools:Positionly (positionly.com)SEO and marketing management tool with seven complex components that will help you exceed your expectations for inbound marketing success:

• search rankings – find out what keywords are best for your content, and much more
• competitor analysis – outsmart your competitors by analyzing their moves
• inbound links – who, when and why links to your website
• website auditor
• automated reports – never lose track of the score
• user invitations
• white label – customize the app

SEOmonitor (seomonitor.com)Also a great SEO & marketing management tool with seven (basic) self-explanatory features:

• Accurate solution – your own keyword workshop
• Brand and non-brand organic traffic segmentation
• Business case builder
• Visibility score
• Content performance
• Search reputation – this one is actually pretty original, it allows you to find opinions about your brand and quickly identify the negative ones
• Dashboard

MOZ (moz.com)A brand offering ‘software for managing inbound marketing and local SEO’. You can choose one of two options ‘Moz Pro’ or ‘Moz Local’ and benefit from the following features:

• Keyword research
• SEO Audit & Crawl
• Backlink Research
• Rank Tracking
• SEO Toolbar
• Business Listings Audit
• Citation Cleanup
• Local Ranking Factors
• Local For Enterprise

Click on the name of each product and decide which of these amazing tools works best for you.

Conversions

A conversion is the act of turning your website visitor into a client. You have to design your website, content, contact possibilities in such a way that the visitor feels the urge to make a connection.How to do it? Through tests! You can’t actually read prospective clients’ minds, but you can track their online behavior, specifically, what they click. Heatmaps  show the place on website that is mostly cliked and looked at by a user. Read the article below to find out how you can increase conversions with heatmaps.Heatmaps increase conversionsAnd if you want to create your own heatmap, you can use one of these two tools, for example:Hotjar (hotjar.com)Crazyegg (crazyegg.com)Clicktale (clicktale.com)Mouseflow (mouseflow.com)

Loyalty for the brand

Selling once to a given customer is better than not selling anything at all. Still, wouldn’t it be better if you had a group of loyal, regular customers? Show your customers you care by sending them great, free of charge content in exchange for their e-mail address. Offer special prices and discounts only for the customers. Building a base of regular customers is one of the core ideas of inbound marketing.

WHY SHOULD I KNOW THIS?

You should know this, because inbound marketing actually works.

This is how people want to buy nowadays.

Think about your own shopping routine. Are you going to be convinced into buying shoes you don’t like just because they were advertised on a huge banner when you were stuck in a traffic jam on your way to work? Probably not. However, when your old jogging shoes are not comfortable anymore, you’ll open a browser and look for a new pair online. Instead of waiting for the perfect shoes to come to you, you’ll find them.

It advertises your services, not your name.

Even people who don’t drink Coca-Cola know that it’s a sweet fuzzy drink. It doesn’t mean they are going to buy it, they just know it exists. Small brands won’t even get that much from outbound marketing. Randomly advertising a product with hopes of attracting the right audience might result in people saying ‘Rings a bell… I guess?!’. You want the target audience to appreciate the quality of your product, and if the rest does not know about your existence, that’s okay. Leads are what matters. Your goal is not branding, your goal is to get leads.

You can optimize it daily.

Thanks to statistics, inbound marketing is something you can monitor and alter. Sure, at the very beginning you need a strategy, but even best strategies don’t always work. If you were to begin a huge outbound campaign it would mean losing a significant amount of money, and the worst part is, you could only judge its success after the end of it. Inbound marketing gives you the opportunity to see whether the campaign works well. Many communication tools for inbound marketing give you the option of tracking the actions of your website’s visitors. You can read about this and other functions facilitating your inbound marketing strategy that LiveCall offers here.

It’s about the customer

What you should always keep in mind while planning inbound marketing strategy for your business is the idea of your customer’s wishes. It’s very easy to fall in the trap of talking only about your products without actually analyzing the audience’s needs. Still, once you have a well-thought through marketing campaign based on what your target group wants to find out, this should not become a problem.

SO, SHOULD I GIVE UP ON ALL THE OUTBOUND MARKETING STRATEGIES NOW?

source: Weidert GroupOf course not! However, outbound marketing should not be used often and needs to be written into a bigger marketing plan. For instance, mails with coupons and discount codes is a part of an outbound marketing strategy that works very well with your inbound marketing plan. Sending great opportunities available only for your clients actually builds the loyalty among your audience. Make sure that your outbound strategies are not annoying to the audience.

 Have you already tried inbound marketing? Tell us in the comments how it works for you.