5 Inbound Marketing Tips That Work

With a solid inbound marketing strategy, you’re able to attract customers at a point when they’re actively seeking out your products or services. This is much more effective than more traditional techniques like direct mail or TV ads. However, it does take some skill to do it right. Use these inbound marketing tips to help your company create a successful campaign.

Create a Strategy

Inbound marketing techniques include writing e-books and blog posts, creating videos, sending newsletters, recording podcasts, and marketing through social media sites. Not all of these techniques are necessary or effective for all types of businesses. Think about which methods are most likely to work for you. Once you’ve chosen a few methods, set a schedule and follow through. For instance, you might plan to post a new blog post twice a week, or update your social media sites every morning.

Get Sign-Ups

It’s great when people come to your site through the search engines, but it’s even better when they’re actively coming to your site on a regular basis. To make this easier, have people sign up through your site. They might enter their email address to sign up for newsletters, like your Facebook page, follow your Twitter account or add your RSS to their newsfeed to let them know of updates. Sometimes, you need to give readers a little push to sign up by offering incentives. For instance, you might let people know that you offer exclusive coupons through your Facebook page or email list. This makes readers eager to sign up.

Promote Yourself

Your efforts shouldn’t exist in a void. One of the best ways to get more visitors to your website is to have a prominent blogger share your piece. Get to know the other people in your industry. When you write a piece that you think someone else’s readers will enjoy, let those blog owners know about it through email or through a Tweet. Don’t forget to return the favor, either. When you’re willing to help others out, they’ll be more willing to help you as well.

Convert Visitors

It doesn’t do you any good to get a lot of visitors to your site if those people aren’t becoming paying customers. Whether you’re writing blog posts, e-books, or newsletters, it’s wise to end with a “call to action” (CTA) that tells the readers what you’d like them to do. The type of call to action you’ll use depends on the main purpose of a particular piece. For instance, if it’s an article that you’re posting on someone else’s website as a guest post, your CTA might ask readers to visit your website and sign up for your newsletter. A post on your own site might have a CTA asking them to set up a free consultation or purchase your product. After providing useful information, a brief CTA doesn’t come off as overly salesy.

Monitor and Tweak

It’s not enough to know that inbound marketing works. You need to understand how it works for you and focus your efforts on those areas. Do this through constant monitoring and tweaking promotions to see which methods work best. For instance, if you see that most of your sales are coming after a guest blog post on a prominent website, you should aim to do more of that. Alternatively, you might split-test different sales messages, sending one style of email to half of your customers and another style to the other half. You’ll then be able to see which style your customers prefer.

Developing an inbound marketing strategy is a complex process, but you don’t have to do it on your own. At Allison’s Alligator, we’ll work with you to create a plan that’s right for your company. Contact us to get started today.