The new year is coming and like most business owners you’re probably already thinking about how you can boost your business to the next level in 2015. It starts by making sure that you’re providing value and putting out the right information for your prospective customers. This includes making sure that you’re giving them the information they want in the right format, at the right time and in the right place.
That’s where a strong inbound marketing strategy comes into the picture. Here are 9 tips that you can use to get your started before the ball drops!
Research
When it comes to inbound marketing, research doesn’t mean you need to head to the local library or even hop on wikipedia for that matter. It’s much more simple. The three things you need to ask yourself are three things you should already be quite familiar with!
You need to know your business, your industry and your customer.
1. Define Your Business
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What is your main revenue goal?
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What KPI’s are you hoping to measure?
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What does success mean to you? (leads coming in, new customers/sales)
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What is the length of your sales cycle?
2. Study Up on Your Industry
Sure, you may think that you know your industry inside and out, but if your industry is anything like the marketing industry you’d better double check and make sure that you’re ahead of the curve. New technologies and innovations are just around the corner making industry research imperative.
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What kinds of content are your competitors offering on their website?
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What is the latest news story out of your industry?
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Are their B2B marketplaces available to you?
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Do you know all key industry benchmarks?
3. Understand Your Customer
One of the best ways to understand your ideal customer is to have open conversations with your sales team. After All, they’re the closest people to the customer in your organization. They hold the knowledge of what the customer’s wants and needs are and will help to answer the following questions.
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What questions are your sales team answering the most?
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What is the most common challenge for your customer?
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What demographic information is uncovered most frequently?
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What tone seems to get the best response from them?
SEO
We often see SEO get over complicated, but it’s actually quite simple if you know exactly which items to focus on. In order to get found by keywords your target customers are searching for, it’s important to optimize each page that’s created on your website.
Here are some suggestions to make sure your getting found:
4. Include Keywords in all page content
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Header
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Body Copy
5. Include keywords within the page properties, such as:
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Universal Resource Locator (URL)
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Meta description (provides metadata about the HTML)
6. Include keywords when uploading and inserting your images by:
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Save your images using keywords (example: closed-loop-marketing)
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Use an alt tag that includes a keyword
Premium Content
Premium content is a bit more in depth than blogging and should be used to convert as many visitors as possible into leads. This premium content should be valuable to your customer and help to nurture them until them become a lead.
7. Determine the right content for your customer
Premium content should be more granular than blogging and offer value that visitors will fill out a form in order to receive. Yes, blogging will bring people to your site but you’ll want to have premium content in order to convert these visitors into warm leads for your hungry sales team.
8. Figure out frequency
It can be hard to determine the frequency for premium content as it depends on the size and bandwidth you have. Some content offers can be very time consuming. You could find yourself creating one per week or one per month.
9. Try different types of content
There are plenty of options out there when it comes to content offers. Depending on where your customer is in the buyers journey you’ll want to consider all of the following:
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eBooks
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webinars
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whitepapers
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advanced checklists
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case studies
Have other tips to offer, let us know if the comment section!
