Welcome to Kiran Gutha‘s Inbound Marketing guide. In this blog post we discuss how to use inbound marketing to help increase your online visibility and how properly done, inbound marketing can produce more leads than traditional outbound methods.
Digital World & Inbound Marketing
Today’s digital world has given rise to a new philosophy in marketing. Instead of simply going for the hard sell, inbound marketers use techniques to organically attract prequalified customers to brands while working to develop long-term relationships that can prove mutually beneficial.
The Idea Behind Inbound Marketing
The main idea behind inbound marketing is to turn strangers into not only customers but also promoters of business. This is accomplished through a diversity of online techniques including the use of content such as blogs, the right selection of keywords, and social media. Inbound marketers seek to attract customers, convert them, close sales, and then entice those customers to promote a brand on their own.
Inbound Marketing Methodology
The methodology behind inbound marketing has become increasingly important as more people spend more of their time online and sharing information via social media channels.
Inbound marketers market where their customers are and they seek to tailor their messages in a fashion that prequalifies traffic for higher conversion rates.
The result is a greater generation of high-quality leads as opposed to traditional digital marketing tactics.
Companies actively engaged in inbound marketing report an estimated 60% of their leads come from inbound channels (e.g. SEO, referrals, social media, content/blog, hyper-targeted display/social ads).
18% from traditional outbound methods (e.g. Cold Calling, TV/Outdoor Ads, Trade Shows, Purchased lists).
22% from Self-sourced leads from the sales teams according to HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report.
Tracking Inbound Marketing Success
Since inbound marketers work in the online world where tracking success through metrics is relatively simple, these professionals use a variety of measures to gauge the progress of their efforts.
Some of the metrics watched as campaigns are launched and evolve include:
- Overall traffic to a company website and/or blog
- Referral traffic that gauges the traffic coming from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook
- Email collection or the number of email addresses you can accumulate from visitors to your site
- Online sales
- Increases in a brand mention on social media channels
- Social media community growth rates or number of followers
- Bounce rates
- Conversion rates
- Leads
- Revenue
Best Practices For Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketers follow a number of best practices to help achieve traffic, conversion, and revenue goals. They include:
- Developing strategies for search engine marketing that include priorities, analysis of website traffic, and main keywords that can help drive organic traffic to a site.
- Using website optimization to enhance organic search rankings, including the use of HTML page title tags, H1 tags, and keyword use in URLs.
- Generating content that’s high in value and useful for those who search for specific keywords and phrases. Blogs, articles, white papers, FAQs, and videos can all provide valuable content.
- Selectively using pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic.
- Using thank you pages that pop up following the completion of a web form. This can be accomplished using Google’s conversion tracking capabilities and is helpful for tracking PPC advertising conversion rate success.
- Formulating reports that use data captured from all landing pages, forms, and keywords into a database to enable the analysis of data and the tracking of campaign efforts.
- Using email to nurture prospects and leads by creating a newsletter and tracking open rates through an SFA (sales force automation) or CRM system.
- Using a point-based scoring system to track leads and inquires based on certain criteria such as quality of the lead, wherein the buying cycle visitors are and engagement on site.
As more people spend their time online, marketers are finding new tactics with a softer approach better serve their purposes.
Inbound Marketing Attracts Qualified Leads
Inbound marketing efforts that are well planned and deliver quality content can attract qualified leads and help close sales while establishing relationships with customers that entice promotion and further sales.
Inbound marketing is one method of increasing brand loyalty and generating high-quality leads.
If you want to learn more, contact me I will teach you the advanced digital marketing techniques for individuals and business professionals at any level of internet marketing experience.
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