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Tips for a successful Inbound Marketing Strategy

This article is a summary of the presentation talk by HubSpot Partner Services Manager Karen Rafferty at the London HubSpot User Group meeting (London HUG) on the 27th of September 2017. The full transcript of the talk and the video presentation can be seen by following this link

Note: Use this link to download this guide as an eBook to keep and reference

Have you worked hard to come up with a great inbound marketing strategy for your brand?

Are you struggling with implementing your inbound marketing strategy?

Karen Rafferty, a renowned Hubspotter, who currently serves as a partner services manager at HubSpot provides essential tips for marketing agencies implementing inbound marketing strategy successfully and achieving their marketing goals. Karen works with a team of channel consultants that assist HubSpot agency partners in reselling their services successfully and making inbound marketing work for their businesses.

Inbound marketer working on content

Top 3 Challenges Businesses Face Today

  1. Not Attracting the Right Traffic To The Website
  2. Traffic Isn't Converting Into Leads
  3. Not Closing Enough Leads Into Customers

Almost 65% of businesses find it extremely hard to generate traffic and attract leads to their website.

The concept of inbound marketing is to help make your interactions with customers relevant and meaningful. So the most effective solution to deal with this challenge is to invent and employ a strategy for both your sales and marketing activities in your business.

The purpose of inbound marketing is to focus on attracting good-fit leads or opportunities for your business. This can only be achieved when you produce meaningful content that enables you to have meaningful interactions with your potential customers.

In simple terms, it means, having good social etiquette, as a brand you should be responsive to your customers and attend to their needs.

Marketing manager climbing

How Does Inbound Marketing Strategy Work?

The inbound methodology starts with the concept of attracting these leads or prospects to your business, acquired through any digital platform, for instance, search engines, online forums, social networks, etc.

This means that you can attract leads not only through your website but also through your social profiles.

It can be any online channel or forum that you participate in, that can give your business, your brand and the people within it visibility.

The main purpose of boosting traffic to your website is to convert it into leads. At this stage, you need to nurture those leads coming in and convert them into customers.

Once the leads turn into sales, you must focus your attention on retaining your customers. Customer retention is an ongoing process throughout your marketing life cycle.

Light bulb inspiration for content creation ideas

Brand Auditing

Your purpose as a business owner or a marketing manager is to ensure that your website is visible on search engines. Positioning is important because you just can't be all things to all people.

And you can imagine if you have a business with 50 prospects, like different types of prospects that you're trying to target, imagine the amount of content you'd have to produce to target those prospects in a meaningful and customised way.

It can be very time-consuming, so you have to get very focused initially when you're trying to make inbound digital work for your business.

Businesses in a busy town

Promote Your Business Effectively

If you are pushing your unique selling point effectively online, you will have more room to grow your profit margin and less quip from prospects over price, which is ultimately where everybody wants to be.

Reflect on how well you want to position your business online. Do you know what is unique about your business? Do you understand why somebody should choose you over similar competing alternatives and if you do understand that, are you effectively promoting that online in a tiny search listing position where you have a very, very small window of opportunity to get your message across?

Looking for marketing inspiration

Optimize Your Webpages

Since inbound marketing is about being helpful and being human. Think about those prospects and the things that keeps them awake at night, so in their business, the stuff that's stressing them out, can you as a business solve their problems?

And if you know how to solve them, you need to start there.

Imagine at the outset when they're having a problem, what are the types of things that they're searching for online when they're looking for help? This is a useful starting point where most businesses go wrong if they start optimising their website around the products or the services that they sell.

Choosing the best website optimisation methods

Build a Keyword Strategy

Find out the most competitive keywords that you can try to compete for. It is quite difficult to retain a good search engine ranking for specific keywords.

But when you take the reverse approach and start with the press, the prospect, your customers' pain points or their challenges, their aspirations, what they're trying to achieve, and create a strategy from that perspective, you can start to build a keyword strategy from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel.

HubSpot offers a keyword tool that will essentially help you determine which of the keywords you're interested in are either difficult to compete for or more likely for you to be able to compete for on how many of those terms have a high versus low search volume.

The content strategy tool is another great tool from Hubspot.

Marketing agency office in London

Develop An Authority

You can start to develop an authority around a subject matter and that's very important for anybody that's looking to improve their organic search listing positions or their website's domain authority around a particular topic area.

That's how search engines work today.

Looking to help your buyer personas

Understand Customer Personas

Customer buyer personas are the most neglected piece of a successful marketing strategy today. Not just an inbound strategy, but any marketing strategy. It has to start and stop with the people that you're trying to attract and the customers that you're trying to retain.

Make sure you're conveying your positioning consistently, not just on your website, but across all of your digital footprint and sure your content is developed with your persona at the forefront.

If your SEO specialist hasn't performed the keyword research and strategy with a true understanding of the personas in mind then your content strategy is really at a disadvantage.

Don't just focus on keywords and remember that you need to think about a core topic, of course, subject matter that you ultimately want to own.

Choosing the right inbound marketing tools

Skyscraper Technique

You can implement the skyscraper technique which is a clever technique.

In this technique, you use sites like Buzzsumo, Google News, and Open Site Explorer to search for the best-performing pieces of content around that subject matter.

The topic area, but you want to own these sites will essentially produce reports back to you and tell you what currently is the top-ranking piece of content on that subject matter and this is a very fun game because you've run through all of these topics areas that you're interested in having ownership off in the online space and challenge yourself to see, can we beat that?

Research your buyer personas

Conclusion

By adding these techniques to your inbound marketing strategy, you will be able to not only retain but also improve your search engine ranking.

Understand your audience and their needs and try to address them directly via engaging content.

Recommended Action

Read our eBook Tips for a Successful Inbound Strategy

Tips for a successful Inbound Strategy cover

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