Inbound Marketing - A way to success

As I work for sales, I was always wondering how I can work on improving the Lead Generation so that we have enough funnel to generate revenue. Sharing my learnings one by one, started with "Inbound Marketing”.

What is Inbound Marketing?

It is quite simple, it's a pull mechanism that means you attract the people/potential buyers/clients towards your product or services when they are actually looking for it.

Why inbound marketing?

It is the best mechanism to reach out to genuine buyers, as only people who are looking for your product and service are getting attracted. The best part is, Inbound marketing consists of entirely organic leads, so it relies on brains rather than budget.

What is the impact of good, well-planned, and strategic inbound marketing?

This will help you to generate inbound or organic leads by "X" folds. Say for example from 2 leads per day to 10X that is 20 leads per day. You can plan it as per your business module, budget, planning, and OKR or goals set.

How does it work or how can I plan it?

Start with extremely basic things such as:

1. Create a list of questions for yourself on where do you stand now?
2. How many leads you are getting per day? What are the sources of leads? How many visitors are you getting on your website? Where are they from? What is the time spent by these visitors? What is the bounce rate? What is the category of visitors you are getting? Are they really from the targeted segment which you need or not? So and so forth

This is important to do self-analysis and understand what your pros and cons. are.

2.      Once you know where you are lacking then plan your journey towards making all odds in your favor:

a.      On-site activity

·      Improve visitors and conversion on the website.

·      Page with a question in URL

·      Use landing pages for all clicks - conversion.

·      Connect dots for visibility to increase organic search tightly.

b.       Offsite activity

·      Improve referrals by using community, groups and educate them about products and services you offer.

·       Understand the vision that the group or community has and then support their vision with your goal to achieve the target.

c.      Use of social media:

·      Do not use social media as reseating tool.

·       Improve user engagement by creating polls, opinion sharing or creating downloadable material.

·      Social media is more towards making people speak for you and then drive them as well as their audience towards your website.

d.      High traffic landing pages

·      Google ranks pages with higher conversion as a part of the algorithm

·      Short lead form: use field what is really required, and people would like to fill to buy your services.

·      Less information asked helps to convert more leads and higher google ranking.

·      Visuals has higher impact compared to wording - people are keener on what they are getting so offers and download has higher hit rate.

·       Create attractive heading and subheadings for pages.

·       Define page roles and be specific to them - do not create additional navigations.

·      Keep landing pages short and to the point with minimum content - people want ideas of what you offer and share information with you.

·      Use high profile keywords, phrases, and questions for page indexing.

e.      Use content strategically:

·      You need to plan the journey of a user inside the website or app.

·      You need to have pages or flow for awareness about your product and services, then consideration and then for decision making

·      How you build trust and showcase what you have done is all at the end.

·      Give priority to show what you are, what you do, and how you do.

f.       Make it more compelling:

·      Do not try to sell what you have as an offer.

·      Better understand what problem you will solve for someone by giving your service and create an offer around it.

How does it work?

You need to ensure that you are making you right content visible to the right people as and when they need it. As inbound marketing, you must ensure all your services, products, pricing structure, and plans and kept handy and easily accessible for decision making. Apart from this, you must ensure that you provide content to attract, retain and educate the people who are looking for it. You have to put your customer in a driving seat.

What common problem it can solve?

1.      Improve brand presence.

2.      Improve brand visibility.

3.      Improve quality leads.

4.      Improve conversion ratio.

5.      Improve revenue.

Will it give ROI?

Yes, for some companies ROI came in hardly 3 months to 12 months duration depending on the services and products offered. The sole purpose of Inbound marketing is to generate the organic leads in X folds that help with higher revenue and a strong funnel.

What precautions should be taken?

1.      Higher right people, agency, or team: it is important to have the right set of people to work for you or you do it by yourself. It's very cost-effective and not highly-priced.

2.      Define your business goals and buyer personas. Identify your target audience and learn all you can about them. You cannot write content to inform your customers until you know your audience.

3.      Provide content at every stage. Pre-emptively answer the questions that your customers are likely to have at each stage of their buying journey. Determine your unique, compelling story. Why should your audience listen to you? The concept of what we call transformational inbound marketing goes beyond traditional inbound marketing techniques. Unlike traditional inbound, transformational inbound leverages valuable content to attract and retain customers throughout their entire lifecycle, not just before they are a customer, but after as well. Additionally, transformational inbound marketing puts a greater emphasis on personalization and relevance. 

4.      Choose your delivery platforms. The more valuable the content you create for your audience, the more likely you are to win them as customers. Determine the best way to reach them, whether it is through Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, your blog, or elsewhere.

5.      Create and execute your content calendar. It is important to create a schedule that will consistently turn out fresh and relevant content to continue to engage your audience. By keeping a constant stream of content that addresses your customers’ questions, issues, and pain points, you will maintain relevance and build your brand as a trusted thought leader.

6.      Analyse results and optimize your inbound marketing program. There is a variety of metrics to choose from when measuring the success of your inbound marketing efforts. Whether you decide to analyze SEO rankings, inbound links, or the number of articles published, these resources will provide valuable insight into how your campaigns are performing. Set aside time for analysis on a weekly basis. This step will aid you in understanding how effective your inbound marketing efforts have been and how they can improve.