Laura Fitton, HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Evangelist, describes inbound marketing as
the art of marketing to make people actually want to consume your promotional material. It is focused on gradually building a lasting relationship with your target audience or content consumers to nurture towards making a purchase.
The benefits of inbound marketing to business publicity, lead generation and customer retention make it a highly effective marketing strategy. When implemented properly, inbound marketing can raise a business’s status from “little known” to the “go-to resource” in their respective industry.
If you want to build a strong brand with inbound marketing, you should consider implementing the following tips.
Personalize your content
The days of churning out marketing information for mass consumption is well behind us. Consumers have taken particular interest in every detail surrounding the product or service they are paying for - including the experience before and after the purchase. Now, you have to communicate to the heart of your one customer, a one-to-one communication.
Taken literally, you might think that personalization of message is difficult. However, when you consider the fact that a large percentage of your target audience have similar needs, you would understand that ONE customer is an umbrella term. The term covers all the potential customers who have a need that your product or service can solve. There might be slight differences between what your target audience wants, but the core need is the same.
With that in mind, you have to craft your company’s message, marketing materials, and other marketing contents that speak to the heart of your audience. A personalized message conveys the character of your company and identifies, discusses and solves the pain points of your target audience with an empathic tone.
Needless to say, to succeed at personalizing your content for your audience, you have to understand your buyer persona. You must understand the motives, traits and possible preferences of each buyer.
Organic SEO approach
The point of any form of marketing is to get in front of your audience. With inbound marketing, the goal is to keep your brand at the forefront of your audience consistently. If you plan to remain visible for a long time and at a low cost, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be a vital component in your brand building strategy. SEO is about integrating words (keywords) or string of words in your content that will be most likely searched by your target audience. When done correctly, SEO will help your content become visible to your target audience who are searching for information or solutions through search engines.
Blogs and articles are excellent contents to optimize for search engine visibility. They are often the first point of contact with your target audience searching for information to solve a problem. With your blog or article, you can attract visitors to your website, thus establishing a relationship that can lead to a purchase.
Confused about what exactly is SEO? Confused on how search engines work? Read this
Leverage social media
Social media, a watering hole for all ages, are web platforms where most people interact, consume content, keep up with trends, and more.
The relevance of social media to your target audience makes it an invaluable medium for communicating with them. On the right social media platform, you can communicate with your audience, find out their interests or understand the challenges that they may face, and provide highly relevant solutions to them.
That being said, just being on social media will not contribute to your brand growth. Rather, you have to develop an actionable strategy that emphasizes the use of core tools that your target audience utilizes. By way of example, Instagram is a great platform for visual content. This makes it very suitable for businesses in fashion industry. You can set up an Instagram account to serve the content needs of consumers.
Use analytic and CRM tools
Having an analytics tool, as well as a CRM are essential components of a brand-building strategy. The analytics tool allows you to track and measure the effectiveness of your brand building efforts over time while the CRM software helps you to measure and manage the customer's journey from their first contact with your brand to their first purchase.
Customer relationship management software (CRM) collects data that can be interpreted to reveal the inbound marketing strategies that influence your customers more.
On the other hand, an analytics tool can be used to collect data that shows which of your prospecting strategies is most effective.
The data from both tools can help you to fine-tune your product or service to give customers a rich experience.
Take a multi-channel approach
A multi-channel approach is one of the hallmarks of inbound marketing. Just as companies use a mix of print, radio, and TV advertising in their campaigns, an assorted mix of inbound marketing strategies help you reach more audience.
Companies that succeed with inbound marketing usually include SEO, content marketing, email marketing, and paid advert in their strategy. In the digital age, making information easily available to your target audience via their preferred channel is vital to inbound marketing effectiveness. It builds into the overall experience your prospect is having. The quality of the product is as important as the experience the customer gets before and after buying the service or product.
Recap
To begin an effective branding strategy, first understand your buyer persona. Having done that, set up the proper analytics tools and CRM software to start tracking and storing your website visitors and leads. Next, prepare and publish contents across multiple channels and see your website visitors skyrocket!
