Inbound Marketing

Every business in this modern era looks to drive more leads towards itself. There has been a surge in online businesses for the last ten years and it will only become a norm than fade off. Business owners are struggling hard to move with the times and get more people to visit their sites. There are innumerable ways to generate leads for your small business.

Inbound Marketing

A technique used to bring new customers to your website is called inbound marketing. The common channels or mediums including email, social media, and on-site. Before the mass usage of the internet, outbound marketing was the norm of the day where businesses employed a frequent and aggressive strategy to generate leads.

Marketers and business owners of late have been using inbound marketing to organically attract their target audience.

Let us look into the five ways you could drive traffic to your small business with inbound marketing.

1. Develop an engaging content marketing strategy

Having a content marketing strategy in place is the key to a huge inbound marketing opportunity. Whenever customers visit a business owner’s website, they are looking for a wide variety of informative and engaging content such as blogs and videos.  While creating content, there are a few factors that need to be considered, such as:

Target audience: Gathering information about the potential customer’s goals, pain points, and interests helps in creating compelling content.

Budget: Knowing one’s budgetary and production capacity helps marketers plan outposts well in advance.

Medium: Having an understanding of the platform or channel to share posts effectively to reach out to the maximum target audience.

We recommend you to take time and effort to create blogs, videos, infographics, ebooks, etc. The more engaging the content is, the more sharable it is and this can be an excellent inbound marketing tool.

2. Neglecting technical SEO – a strict no-no

Most marketers and business owners use a comprehensive SEO strategy while targeting words within their content. However, we have come across some people who ignore technical SEO in the process.

For this, we need to understand the concepts of On-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. On-page SEO deals with the words and phrases that are in the front and center of the website, while off-page SEO includes backlinks from various publications. Technical SEO concentrates on the backend of the website and assists Google index the site based on the keywords used. To throw in a statistic, Google processes 79, 456 searches per second. This is a reason enough to have an excellent SEO rating which helps your inbound marketing strategy considerably.

When people are unable to find your website while searching, the traffic starts plummeting and then it is a struggle to reach and connect with your customers from thereon. Running a monthly site audit (Google Search Console) is the best way to improve technical SEO. Google considers over 200 factors when crawling any page.

3. Segment your leads

Lead segmentation is a strategy to separate the generated leads into different categories based on their interests. This helps in achieving greater personalization and you can send targeted offers to your customers as they sign up for an email list or when they visit your site. Personalizing emails lead to a 26% increase to the open rate.

If your objective is to get more people to visit your website and engage with your emails, lead segmentation gives you the freedom and flexibility to adjust your offers for individuals.

4. Spend time on social media

Did you know that your users spend an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media every day? This should be enough to prompt you to spend time on your social media marketing campaign. You have to reach these users while they are browsing your profile or engaging in groups related to your industry, or commenting on your posts.

Though there are several ways to drive people to your website through social media, showcasing positive reviews of feedbacks on the social media page is the best way. You can strengthen your brand by engaging with people in large social media groups featuring your industry. When consumers see that you are interested in the community and passionate about what you create, they are more likely to visit your website. 

You will get the chance to build unique experiences with these people as they transition between consumer and customer. 

5. Analyze results and refine

Inbound marketing strategy and analytics go hand in hand. Your website’s analytics provides you with a wealth of information about the target audience and the popularity of your products and services. The data you would have gathered from various sources such as email, social media, and on-site can help you create personalized content and marketing material that appeals to your ideal users.

You will want to look at all of the factors surrounding your business before making updates to your inbound marketing campaign. It’s recommended that you check your analytics weekly and track sales, traffic, and link sources. Understanding this information will help you fine-tune your campaign and eventually yield big results for your small business.