The Five Pillars of Inbound Marketing Success
Strategy is arguably the most important element of any inbound marketing program. The good news is, if you’ve embarked down the inbound route, you’ve already made some commendable strategic decisions:
Despite these promising statistics, inbound marketing is not a program that works for every business. For items with a short sales cycle (like that of a B2C apparel business), the attract, convert, close, delight methodology loses effectiveness. However, if your business demonstrates the following characteristics, an inbound strategy has great potential to deliver outstanding results:
Once you’ve committed to an inbound marketing program, it’s time to begin documenting your strategy. In these early stages, it’s important to align all stakeholders to common definitions, marketing goals and measurable KPIs. In particular, spend considerable time aligning your sales and marketing teams, so that each function with defined processes like lead handovers and qualification. Fundamental questions to settle between marketing and sales may include:
The Mechanics of a Mobile-First Marketing Strategy
Mobile isn’t just big business, it’s most business.
SEO is a multidisciplinary activity that touches every aspect of your digital activity, which is why it’s an essential element of your strategy. Some of the most important SEO tactics you undertake may not even lie in content creation, but in website redesign to improve the user experience; reducing bounce rates and increasing time on site and page views per session.
4. Content Amplification
Many businesses fall into the habit of allocating significant resources into creating content, but fall short in their amplification efforts. Unfortunately, a ‘build it and they will come’ approach isn’t viable in inbound marketing. While you should be optimising your content to rank for specific long-tail search terms (even with keywords waning in importance as a ranking factor), you also must promote the content you produce via the channels used by your audience.
Possible content amplification tactics may include;
As you can see, amplification strategies can be comprehensive, however your efforts are best focussed on the specific channels used by your buyer personas.
5. Lead Generation
Lead generation is usually a primary focus of inbound marketing programs. The creation, optimisation and amplification of content should attract relevant traffic to your website, but your lead generation efforts will convert these visitors into leads.
A time-tested approach to lead generation is producing “gated” content offers - that is, content offers that can only be accessed in exchange for contact information. Downloadable eGuides, white papers, templates, webinars, eCourses and product trials are strong candidates for your gated (or “premium”) content offers.
The typical lead generation lifecycle can look like;
Years ago, businesses that published regular blog content were applauded for their content marketing prowess.
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