In an age of information and connectivity, a movement of data-sharing and debate has led to huge advances in marketing efforts. Through producing useful content a leader, instead of seeking out a customer base can successfully drive interest through becoming a source of useful information and provoking discussion. This marketing methodology is referred to as inbound marketing.
Businesses that can bring their customers closer to their brand, engaging an audience with relevant information – through blogs, videos, podcasts, email newsletters and social-media marketing will outshine their competitors, position themselves as thought leaders and drive further innovation through sparking conversation.
We have selected the top 6 lessons from the experts that have succeeded in executing great inbound marketing strategies.
1. Pick a product you know well, and run with it
“At NetElixir, our mission is to help all businesses succeed online. We believe in knowledge sharing and regularly share news and insights through blogs, webinars, whitepapers, e-books, and videos. Our blog specifically focuses on reviews, tutorials and data analysis on tools developed by Google – such as Adwords, Customer Match Targeting, as well of some our proprietary tools, like LXRSEO. Our webinars focus on helping digital marketers succeed online and so our webinar topics range from SEO, Paid Search, Google Analytics, and so on. Our videos consist of short, snackable insights that managers can implement easily.
We send our clients monthly newsletters and also explore paid media solutions – using outlets where users are seeking knowledge and resources to run better campaigns.
We advise new entrepreneurs to pick a product or service that they know very well, and be willing to continue to learn and build upon their expertise. Being able to teach others fun and interesting content will help produce more thought leaders in their respective spaces.”
- Kelly Rafalski, NetElixir
2. Consider your video offering
“We specialize in helping small businesses deliver effective video content. We find many businesses have written content that we are able to repurpose into video and distribute, posting to social media as a teaser to draw viewers back to the original content. You need to make sure there is a definite action – clickable links and in-video email capture for lead generation are both great ways to let your audience connect with you. The web is going to be 70% video by 2017 – it is vital that when considering any inbound marketing campaign that video is prominent in this offering.”
- Avdiel Cano, Vidooya
3. Link-building to drive improved SEO
“The immense pace at which digital marketing is evolving can mean new entrepreneurs overlook useful theories and concepts that I believe are key for efficiency and productivity. Within inbound marketing – the link building process is one area that deserves attention.
Great content should use strong keywords to boost your search rankings. Consider your product, content and keywords – then look into your competitors that rank well for your chosen keywords. Identify those domains that are relevant to you and get in contact. On average 55% of backlinks are actually bad – be selective! It took us around 8 months to match the profiles of our competitors, today we have a far higher organic search market share as a result.”
- Mohsin Khan, hide.me
4. Compliment with social media
“We focused our inbound marketing efforts through growing our social media, and using this as a bullhorn to amplify both the content we host (videos) and the content we create on our blog. As a video discovery platform it came as a surprise that our written blog, through measuring and revising our various content types, would actually turn into one of our biggest assets.
It is essential to remain consistent, having a key figure responsible for managing these efforts is invaluable, so that they can apply learned judgements and identify trends that work – posting schedules, accounts to follow, reaching out to influencers, and understanding your users to tailor your posts, and incite actions.”
- James Patrick, Unreel Entertainment
5. Spark a discussion
“At Mailbird we rely on content marketing to drive organic interest and spark interesting discussions. Our experiences have given us a few guidelines on best practices. We create 1-2 blog posts a week on a range of industry related topics – relevant to our customer base, yet varied enough to still be interesting. We also include How-To guides explaining the tools integrated with our software to our customer base. We also tweet, interact on G+, post on LinkedIn, send out tailored Newsletters to different user groups. We try to be creative – right now we are experimenting with podcasts and videos”
- Christin Baumgarten, Mailbird
6. Analyse your readers, and review your content
“We use inbound marketing as a tool to share tips with our users, to guide their shopping experience. We use analytics to see where the interest is. Buzzsummo and Google searches allow us to research articles with similar topics. It is important make sure that the piece you are creating is original, bringing new information and perspective to a topic. We share everything through social media and boost the articles that get the most traction. We look at our blog as a voice to channel our knowledge to our fanbase. This voice cannot be pushy, or intrusive, rather by presenting genuinely useful and interesting topics we generate engaging conversations.”
- Ali Benmoussa, Searchub