This article summarizes HubSpot Partner Services Manager Karen Rafferty's presentation at the London HubSpot User Group meeting (London HUG) on September 27, 2017. The full transcript of the talk and video presentation can be seen at this link.
Note: Use this link to download this guide as an eBook for reference.
Have you worked hard to develop 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 strategies successfully and achieving their marketing goals. Karen works with a team of channel consultants who assist HubSpot agency partners in reselling their services successfully and making inbound marketing work for their businesses.
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 your business's sales and marketing activities.
The purpose of inbound marketing is to attract good-fit leads or opportunities for your business. This can only be achieved when you produce meaningful content, enabling 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.
The inbound methodology starts with the concept of attracting these leads or prospects to your business, acquired through any digital platform, such as 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 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 on retaining your customers. Customer retention is an ongoing process throughout your marketing life cycle.
Your purpose as a business owner or a marketing manager is to ensure your website is visible on search engines. Positioning is crucial because you can't be all things to all people.
And 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.
If you effectively promote your unique selling point online, you will have more room to grow your profit margin and less prospect quips about 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? If you do understand that, are you effectively promoting that online in a tiny search listing position where you have a very small window of opportunity to get your message across?
Since inbound marketing is about being helpful and human, think about those prospects and the things that keep them awake at night, so in their business, the stuff that's stressing them out, can you solve their problems as a business?
And if you know how to solve them, you need to start there.
Imagine at the outset that when people are 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, but most businesses go wrong if they start optimising their website around the products or services that they sell.
Find out the most competitive keywords that you can try to compete for. It is pretty challenging 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 challenges, their aspirations, and 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 challenging 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 excellent tool from Hubspot.
You can start to develop authority around a subject matter, and that's very important for anybody looking to improve their organic search listing positions or their website's domain authority in a particular topic area.
That's how search engines work today.
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 you're trying to attract and the customers you're trying to retain.
Make sure you convey your positioning consistently, not just on your website but across all of your digital footprint, and that your content is developed with your persona at the forefront.
If your SEO specialist hasn't performed the keyword research and strategy with a proper understanding of the personas in mind then your content strategy is at a disadvantage.
Don't just focus on keywords. Remember that you need to think about a core topic, of course, subject matter that you ultimately want to own.
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 find the best-performing content on a subject.
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. This is a very fun game because you've run through all of these topic areas that you're interested in having ownership of in the online space and challenged yourself to see, can we beat that?
By adding these techniques to your inbound marketing strategy, you will be able not only to retain but also improve your search engine ranking.
Understand your audience and their needs and try to address them directly via engaging content.
Read our eBook Tips for a Successful Inbound Strategy