Inbound marketing: the new frontier in generating leads, gaining sales, and promoting your 
business. Just like outbound marketing, for inbound marketing to be successful, you need a plan, a strategy, that will act as your springboard for both attracting and keeping clients. But strategies don’t become fruitful on their own - so what do you need for this strategy to work? Below are three things that your inbound marketing team needs to have to achieve and exceed their goals:
-
Subject matter and industry knowledge: You need to attract users to your site, and not merely for the products or services that you offer either. Therefore, you need to offer more, and that requires information. This information should relate to what clients want to know in general. By being experts in a variety of topics and areas related to your industry, as well as providing useful tips, discussing the latest happenings in the industry, and monitoring potential issues, your inbound marketing team can demonstrate their in-depth knowledge, reliability, and creativity that can create both trust in your business' knowledge and interest about what you do. It can also demonstrate your team's flexibility in how your business responds and adapts to changing market trends and needs.
-
Corporate expertise: It’s one thing to know what’s happening in your industry; it’s another to know how specifically your business fits into that industry. You want to provide solutions for clients, but you can’t do that with empty promises. Therefore, the next thing that your inbound marketing team needs to know is what specifically your business can offer clients. For example, can your business provide the right solution to address current issues, are you able to offer an affordable compromise, and how can your offerings meet your clients’ needs? Providing concrete and accurate information, presented professionally and given in a timely manner, can bridge the gap between what is needed and available in the marketplace, and how you match those needs and adapt when needed.
-
Ability to write engaging content: The final piece of the puzzle is to engage your reader.
Your content may be chock full of information, but if it reads like a mechanical recipe without any eye-grabbing pictures, who would want to make that meal? Content is only as useful as it is interesting to your readers. Therefore, this requirement is two-pronged: content must be engaging in general, and it must be engaging specifically to your readers. Engaging content isn’t engaging in the end if you don’t match your visitors’ personalities, understand their likes and dislikes, or challenge their minds. So how do you know what your visitors like? By getting them to interact with you. For example, you can invite comments on your blog posts, ask them for suggestions, or prompt for guest posts. You can also use web analytics to discover who visits your site, which pages they visit and for how long, and how many are repeat visitors. Your inbound marketing team can then begin to tailor content accordingly to create a long lasting relationship.
It’s one thing to offer a great product or service; it’s another to promote it to your current and potential client base to get them to return. To gather subscribers to your web site, followers to your Twitter account, and likes for your FaceBook page, you need to have a solid strategy for your inbound marketing team. And if you have followed the tactics above, you’re sure to increase your following, and ultimately your sales, in no time at all.
Do you have other unique or tried-and-true inbound marketing strategies that work for your business? Contact us and let us know!
