What Is Inbound Marketing And How To Integrate It With Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Instead of always chasing customers down, you have to optimize your digital marketing strategy, so your customers will come to you instead. This strategy is what we call inbound marketing.

Website banners, social media campaigns, and all other marketing tactics made using a digital medium all pertain to digital marketing. It works perfectly well in growing brand awareness. However, if you want to have a marketing strategy that can work for the long term, integrating inbound marketing into your digital marketing strategy is the best option.

Before delving into the nit and grit of how to integrate these two marketing tactics, let’s find out the basics of inbound marketing and how beneficial it is to your marketing efforts.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is simply a marketing strategy, but it comes with clear, defined, and precise steps, practices, and principles.

Inbound marketing, like digital marketing, uses various digital marketing tactics like SEO, social media, events, blogging, and others. However, it is more focused on a set of methodologies that can draw increased traffic and generate leads.

You can consider inbound marketing as a philosophy that considers putting customers first and foremost. This marketing strategy aims to pull in customers or gain the attention of customers. As a result, it makes the brand easy to be found, instead of the brand attempting to find possible customers.

Inbound marketing aims at giving the customers exactly what they are looking for, whether those are products or answers to their questions, at the precise moment when they need it. That is why inbound marketing is powerful and effective. It is the kind of marketing strategy that builds trust between the brand and the customer. It also gives the brand the reputation and authority it needs to gain more customers as they passes on the 5 stages of customer’s journey.

4 Components of Inbound Marketing

Primarily, inbound marketing focuses on creating and producing quality and relevant content that can draw people towards the brand. This marketing strategy has specific steps to follow, and these are critical marketing funnels that make inbound marketing effective.

1. To Attract Customers

When it comes to the inbound marketing methodology, attracting customers comes first. In this stage, the brand or company provides compelling and valuable content for customers. Both at the right place and at the right time through various marketing initiatives. This includes social media marketing and search engine optimization.

By producing content that aims to appeal to or to answer customers’ specific questions, inbound marketing attracts their prospects to the brand and keeps them coming back.

The first stage of inbound marketing strategy isn’t all about increasing the traffic to the site. What it aims is to increase the right kind of traffic – the kind that can turn into leads.

2. To Convert Visitors to Leads

The first step was to attract people to visit the site. What comes next in inbound marketing methodology is converting that site traffic into leads. This is often done by obtaining the visitors’ contact information through the site’s landing page.

In this stage, is the exchange between the business providing clients with the content that they need at that moment. Then the client’s personal information happens. Lead generation is also an important aspect of marketing, which allows businesses to market to potential customers.

It is critical to keep the prospective customers engaged. There are a lot of channels to do this, including emails, live chats, or any messaging apps. Conversion tools like lead flows, forms, and CTAs will also be extremely useful in converting visitors into leads.

3. The Closing Stage

The third critical stage in inbound marketing strategy is the closing stage. It is when the prospective leads will be turned into brand customers.

During the closing stage, various marketing tools are being utilized, including lead nurturing, marketing automation, social media monitoring, and more.

4. To Delight Customers

Inbound marketing doesn’t end when the lead is closed. The marketing strategy continues into creating more content that will be valuable to existing customers. As well as future ones. This ensures that there will be additional leads. And past clients will keep coming back for more or become repeat customers.

The inbound marketing methodology involves being present and active in every stage of the journey of customers.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing + Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is excellent in growing brand awareness and increasing site traffic. But more than putting your brand name out there for people to see or boosting the reach of your page, you would also want to engage that traffic for your business and brand and convert them into customers.

If what you are looking for is generating leads and turning them into qualified and legitimate traffics, inbound marketing and digital marketing together is the answer.

Integrating the power of inbound marketing into your digital marketing campaign can help utilize your marketing efforts effectively. For one, being the ‘go-to’ for customers helps shape their brand preference and greatly influence their future purchases.

Inbound marketing efforts can also generate more shares on social media, increasing the brand’s reach, and generating inbound links. And being the ‘go-to’ provider of relevant and valuable content. Inbound marketing can also enable engagement between your business and your customers at the time they need it.

When compared to most traditional marketing strategies, inbound marketing is effective in generating leads, but for a lesser cost to you. The value of inbound marketing efforts as part of your digital marketing campaign also increases over time. Providing relevant resources to customers answers their immediate queries. It will also continue to be a valuable resource for customers over time.

In short, integrating inbound marketing in your digital marketing campaign can result in more qualified leads, shorter sales time and easier sales as well.

How to Integrate Inbound Marketing with Your Digital Marketing Strategy?

There is plenty of response you can get on how to integrate inbound marketing into your digital marketing strategy from every digital marketing agency. But, which ones will be the most essential for every business?

To be a valuable competitor when it comes to the digital landscape, you will need to focus your efforts in specific inbound marketing areas.

5 Inbound Marketing Tactics to Try Right Now

There are a lot of inbound marketing tactics you can utilize. But, as every digital marketing agency would tell you, there is no single inbound strategy that can work on its own.

Most successes found in inbound marketing campaigns usually incorporate several inbound elements.

1. Content Marketing

One of the common inbound marketing tactics you can add to your digital marketing strategy is content marketing. You need something to attract customers into visiting your website or purchasing your products or services. The best way to do that is to create and produce articles that can hook them to your brand.

In inbound marketing, creating useful and fresh content, although it might not be the only aspect, is one of the most critical ones. Without valuable content to offer, you wouldn’t have the chance and convert your visitors into prospect leads.

Providing customers with compelling content is also one of the best ways to keep them engaged in your brand and build trust with your audience.

Content marketing is not just about producing whatever content comes to mind. Your content has to stand out. It should be remarkable and will rise over the clutter of content in search engines.

So, where can you start with content marketing? For one, you can start a blog. It is one of the most common yet very effective ways to market a brand or business. A blog can be the hub of the valuable content you are going to write to attract new leads and keep existing customers engaged.

You can also create e-books, guides, and various downloadable content. Usually, these are long-form content compared to blogging content. It is an effective way to nurture the leads you already have.

2. Social Media

A lot of people, if not all, use social media. It is the easiest and most effective strategy to share information. Once you have created compelling content that can generate quality leads for your brand, there is no reason for you to neglect the benefits that popular online communities can offer in getting your brand out there.

After you’ve created a host of valuable content, the next step is to share them so they can reach your relevant audience, and social media is where you can do that easily and effectively.

Social media platforms are also the most convenient way to engage with existing and prospective customers. These networks can give immediate communication channels between you and visitors, which often plays a huge role in fast-tracking how to turn them into leads.

The success of utilizing social networks in inbound marketing mainly stems from people’s need to socialize, connect to the world, and create communities. These factors are also what make social media useful in inbound marketing strategies.

Choosing what social media platforms are most relevant for the kind of customers you are looking for is also key to gaining success in this area. However, you will never go wrong with using popular social channels in your marketing campaigns.

3. SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is another strategy that can effectively utilize the value of your content creation. No matter how relevant or valuable the contents you have produced, if they can’t be found by your targeted audience, then they will be of no use to you. It’s a critical part of inbound marketing campaigns because if people can’t see you, you’re not going to get some business.

SEO is another form, like social media, to get your content in the open and where customers can find it. SEO helps optimize the content you have on your blog or website and gives them organic placements on the SERPs or search engine results pages.

Having a quality website is great. But, optimizing your website’s contents is the cheapest but most effective way for your content to appear on search engine results when people are searching.

As effective as SEO is in optimizing your brand’s content, it can be head-spinning as well. This strategy and the aspects of SEO can get complicated fast. But, SEO is mainly a matter of structuring your content or your site in a certain way that search engines can easily understand.

4. Top-Notch Landing Pages

Going back to the inbound marketing methodologies, generating leads is one of the most important parts, especially for future marketing efforts. It is why creating top-notch landing pages is essential.

Your landing page is where visitors land after clicking on your marketing campaign or advertisement. It is where the conversion of leads into potential customers happens. Unless you want to jeopardize that, you must have a landing page that will hook customers right in, whether that is a subscription page or a fill-out form.

One of the best ways to create top-notch landing pages is to keep the relevance between your landing page and your advertisement or call to action in line. For example, if your call to action is for a free e-book after subscription on your site, it should be exactly what the customers will get after they have subscribed.

The design of your landing page is also essential in keeping the leads engaged. No one wants to land and subscribe to a boring landing page that does the opposite of attracting customers into signing up or subscribing. You can use various design elements like adding images, videos, trust badges, and testimonials to make your landing pages look more inviting and engaging.

READ MORE:

What The Process Of A Buyer’s Journey Looks Like
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What is Conversion Funnel And How Does It Affect Your Digital Marketing Campaign?

 

5. Remarketing

Aside from concentrating on gaining more leads for your brand and business, you also have to utilize converting past clients into repeat customers, and that is where remarketing/retargeting comes in. No business wants to lose customers they once had.

Remarketing is an excellent tactic that reminds customers to keep coming back to your business. And, there are a lot of ways to retarget past customers. It can be through showing advertisements after customers visited a certain page on your site or ads or notifications of their shopping cart that hasn’t been converted yet.

Utilizing these five elements or principles can make inbound marketing success. It would also boost your digital marketing strategy overall.

Tips for Writing Articles to Hook Readers

Valuable and relevant contents are the heart of inbound marketing. All the other tactics and strategies won’t work without the kind of articles or content that readers and customers will find useful and will use. They are the lures you need to have to get the leads hooked and engaged in your brand and business.

In that case, your content has to be the perfect bait. Something that they would want to read sentence by sentence, and even read again. Here are some tips in writing the perfect content to hook readers to turn them into leads and customers, eventually.

1. Craft the First Sentence in a Way to Capture Their Attention

The main purpose of the first sentence of your content or articles doesn’t need to be a summary of what the entire article is all about. What it needs is something to capture their attention that will attract them to read further.

You can use compelling dialogues or lines that will prompt their curiosity. In that way, there is a greater chance that they would want to continue reading. They will find out what the article is all about.

2. Craft Your Content Like It’s a Personal Message

There is a huge advantage in crafting your content to sound like it’s a personal message for your readers. It takes away barriers and fosters a connection between you and your brand to your readers. Articles that will hook readers without a doubt are conversational, easy to read, easy to understand and something that makes them feel like they are included.

3. Keep Leads Harmonized with Your Content

To create a better harmony between your content and your readers, what you write should be facts, accurate, and true. It also has to be captivating and interesting, as well as informative and valuable.

4. Keep Your Readers Interested Throughout the Content

Once your readers are hooked with your opening sentence, you want them hooked throughout the entire article. One of the best ways to increase your content’s readership is to write it in a way that readers get curious. For example, lines that offer a reason for them to read the next paragraph.

5. Refine Your Content

To create the best kind of content for your targeted readers, you should not skimp out on editing content before publishing. The value and effort you’ve put in post-production will show on the final product. It will determine how concise, clear, addictive, and effective your content will be. The best tip is to try to express what you want to your readers in the fewest words possible.

The quality of content you create will determine how effective your marketing strategy will be. No matter how much traffic you get from other marketing strategies, if your content doesn’t interest your audience, your efforts will be useless.

Tips to Utilize SEO

Getting your site or content where your leads are looking for is essential. Which is why SEO is critical in inbound marketing. Here are some tips to help jump-start your SEO strategies.

1. Target and Optimize the Right Keyword

For any SEO campaign, keyword search should be done first and foremost. If you want to reach prospective leads, you have to know what they are looking for.

If you are only starting to build authority for your site, choosing low competition keywords will be best instead of going into competitive keywords headfirst. It is also the quickest way for you to boost your search traffic.

Another excellent trick in looking for the right keywords is to find questions that haven’t been answered yet. Then answer them with excellent content.

2. Write Keyword-Appropriate Content

Once the keyword search is done, it is now the best time to start crafting content that is in line with the keywords you’ve chosen. It is one of the critical aspects when it comes to SEO campaigns.

Start writing a kick-ass intro that will attract your readers into reading further. Make your content valuable, and avoid fillers to make your content seem long.

One of the best tricks in writing keywords is choosing appropriate content that might help in your SEO campaign. Then linking out into authoritative and quality sites.

3. Use Keyword in Important Places

Great content, although it’s very critical, it’s not everything SEO is. Your content and your site should be optimized properly that readers and search engines alike can discover them.

In this case, you need to use your keywords in the right places. Just like the title tag for your page, content headings or titles, and meta descriptions. Starting your content with powerful titles that search engines can’t resist will help a lot in your SEO efforts as well.

Writing a compelling meta description is also a huge key to success in SEO. Your description serves as the advert of your content in search results. So it has to be engaging, exciting, and interesting. As a result, the readers would want to open and read your content.

4. Build Links

Link building is big when it comes to SEO. Unless you don’t want to rank your site higher on search results, start building links.

One of the best tips to do this is to put your focus on building links that will help drive more traffic to your site. Also, if you have broken links, fixing them first and foremost will be a sure SEO win as well.

These tips can give you sure SEO success. But, if you want to be more technical, you can ask for a digital marketing agency. In addition, you could also watch some comprehensive SEO tutorials.

Make Inbound Marketing Work for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing methodology aims for more longer-lasting benefits to your overall marketing strategy. There are a lot of ways to boost your overall digital marketing efforts by integrating inbound marketing. The heart of this powerful marketing campaign lies in creating and producing compelling and valuable content for your targeted audience that will make you an authority in your niche.

However, content creation is only a part of inbound marketing. The whole methodology involves other critical steps that will boost your digital marketing strategy even more.