Your company’s inbound marketing campaign should be developed with the end goal of driving leads, boosting business, and showing results.
TechTarget.com defines inbound marketing as: “A strategy that focuses on attracting customers, or leads, via company-created Internet content, thereby having potential customers come to the company rather than marketers vying for their attention.”
Inbound marketing is quite different from outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is a more traditional form of marketing where a company initiates the conversation and sends its message out to an audience.
To better understand the concept of inbound marketing, it is important to know the difference between inbound and outbound marketing as described above.
Here is an infographic that depicts the difference:
Successful inbound marketing results in several benefits:
- Ensures the efforts of sales and marketing are working together
- Creates brand awareness
- Generates quality leads and loyal customers
Tips to Boost Your Business with Inbound Marketing Campaigns
To make the most of your inbound marketing campaigns, it is important to keep in mind some important points that will help boost your business:
Loyalty Programs
Establishing a solid loyalty program helps to capture customer enthusiasm and ensure customer engagement in the long run. Such a program helps to generate leads and boost the sales team’s efforts.
Loyalty programs act as an incentive to customers, business partners, and employees to become evangelists for your company’s products, services, or brand. Participants complete challenges and earn points, badges, or other types of rewards based upon their activity. They can also cash in on a variety of perks and privileges which can be an easy way to garner new business and revenue opportunities.
Social Media Ads
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube offer paid advertising campaigns. Running such a campaign as part of your inbound marketing strategy can help to gain new leads. With targeted pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you can identify the verticals you wish to target by geographic location, age, social group, or some other defining factor that is specific to your business goals.
Paid Content Distribution
The use of paid content distribution, which is when you intentionally pay for the distribution of your content, is a great way to boost traffic to your website. Content distribution across various platforms will allow links to your content to be displayed as “recommendations” or “suggestions” on a user’s news feed or timeline.
The algorithms on these platforms make use of behavioral targeting to increase and direct traffic to your website. Paid content distribution allows you to target new audiences that may not be on your radar.
Start an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar is a great way to stay organized and keep your team on track with creating brand awareness and attracting new business. To marketers, an editorial calendar can be a very valuable content management tool to build a solid content strategy. It helps organize marketing campaigns around occasions, events, themes, or special activities scheduled.
The editorial calendar need not be in any one format, nor does it have to be anything fancy. Depending on your company size and the number of campaigns running, an Excel spreadsheet may suffice. The objective is to align your content with the calendar.
With these tips in mind, you can create a solid inbound marketing strategy that makes the most of brand awareness efforts, converts leads into sales, and turns customers into loyal evangelists of your brand.
