Let’s start by defining inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is defined as a collection of marketing strategies that use high-quality, engaging content to appeal to your audience. Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing doesn't require you to use old-school marketing techniques. Traditionally, big brands have applied outbound marketing through the use of hoardings, trade shows, TV and radio ads, and other strategies. Each of these techniques costs a lot.
Inbound marketing is the opposite. If focuses on creating content to bring in website visitors. Hence, they came to be collectively called as Inbound Marketing Strategies. As you can imagine, small companies have to rely heavily on inbound marketing to grow their business online.
In our landing page guide, we wrote about how web audiences can have many distinct characteristics. With inbound marketing, you often create what are known as "buyer personas". These are representations of your potential customers, and they're used to segment your audience based on their needs, location, age, online behaviour and other factors. For instance, your buyer personas might include freelancers, small business owners, and CEOs of large firms. The inbound marketing strategies you would need for each of these audiences will be different.
Your first goal is to catch the attention of your potential customers by using these buyer personas. After that, you must convert them into returning website visitors. Then, you want them to become warm leads who are curious about your product. The ultimate goal is to have your customers buy and enjoy your products/services. They will, then, tell others about their experience with your product or service.
What kind of content should you focus on writing for your Inbound Marketing campaign? Here are some ideas to get you started:
In our landing page guide, strong copy came up again and again as a crucial component to a converting landing page. Indeed, you’ll want to use the skills you learned in that guide to write killer landing page copy now.
Besides landing pages, you should also write informative and educational webpage copy. All copy should be keyword optimized and SEO-friendly. Keep outgoing links to a minimum. If you must have them, make sure they’re redirecting to other pages on your site. A landing page should not have any external links; it should be a self-sufficient piece of content.
Social media is the backbone of inbound marketing. There are no better avenues for making people aware of your company than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks.
Content here doesn’t solely mean written blog posts (although those are important, too), but also videos and viral images. Anything that will inform or entertain your audience is fair game on social media.
Finally, inbound marketing includes useful blog content. You may post daily or weekly, but you’ll need an editorial calendar. This way, you can plan to write about the various topics all your audience segments are interested in. You can then share your blog posts across social media.
Now that you know a bit about inbound marketing vs outbound marketing, you may wonder how you can use inbound marketing tools to attract potential customers. We’re going to cover that in the next chapter of our inbound marketing guide, so keep reading.
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