Looking for the best practices to successful inbound marketing efforts sky high? That’s some Good timing – we’ve got just you covered!

If you love Inbound marketing as much as we do, then you’ll know it’s essentially the most important thing for humanising and personalising your marketing for your potential customers.

If you’re a business owner, or someone who works in the marketing industry, you know that digital marketing runs the spectrum of emotions: it’s colorful, it’s exciting, and even though it’s often challenging, it has its rewards as well. It’s ever-changing too. Over the last few years, the digital landscape has shed its skin many times. Compared to 10 years ago, digital marketing practices and strategies are unrecognisable, and a new strategy has emerged and taken the marketing world by storm: inbound marketing.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Successful Inbound marketing is a digital marketing strategy that organically attracts leads and buyers to your company when they’re looking for solutions, rather than competing for their attention.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people IN to your business and brand. They are already searching for answers online, researching your industry, checking out your competitors, and trying to decide if they really need your service or product. So, the goal is to have content that speaks to all of these scenarios and stages of the buying process in order to capture these interested prospects where they naturally are online.

The 7 Best Practices for Effective & Successful Inbound Marketing.

1.Nail your SEO strategy and optimizing

Heard of a thing called SEO? Of course you have because it is the most important especially for an inbound marketing campaign. Nailing your SEO strategy not only contributes to getting quality, organic traffic across all stages of the customer journey but is important to help you with lead generation efforts.

Best practice SEO strategy is to ensure you are ticking all the boxes to achieve SEO optimization. Firstly, from an on-page SEO perspective you should be utilizing keyword optimization, along with internal linking strategies to optimize your pages for both primary and secondary keyword targets. And finally, for local SEO optimization, ensure that your citations are all aligned across the web. When executed correctly, this can deliver a swag of organic traffic.

2. Make your content in-depth and high value

Gone are the days of posting endless amounts of content just for the sake of it. Today it is all about in-depth and high value content. Quality content provides customers with helpful value they couldn’t have found anywhere else. It can take the shape of video, images, a PDF flyer, a written blog or even an infographic! The world’s your oyster. It’s essentially the art of communicating with consumers without having to sell to them by pulling them through each section of the inbound methodology by being relevant at each stage of their buyers journey.

3. Use your amazing content to drive leads

So, you have all this amazing quality content, but what to do with it? Are you converting this traffic into leads? If you answered no, then you really need to listen up for this one because getting traffic to your site is one thing. Turning these visits to potential clients is another thing.

This is the point where optimizing your content is SO SO important. Having CTA’s (Call To Actions), such as pop-ups, newsletter sign-ups, gated downloads, find out more’s, gives the opportunity for consumers to act. This is a part that is often overlooked, but if implemented into your inbound marketing strategy it will do wonders to your growth as a business.

4. Video content

Do we really need to remind you to use video content? Well as it continues to be one of the leading content types, then yes, we do. Especially when it is a type of content that is often ignored, even when it has proven to drive great results. So while it can take time and be somewhat expensive to produce, it’s a really powerful form of content for growth. Not to mention it’s a great way to humanize your brand.

5. Content that relates to the different stages of the buyers journey

The buyer’s journey revolves around tailoring your content to the three stages of the buyer’s journey in the Inbound Methodology.

Firstly, when a customer is in the awareness stage you should look at delivering a stream of content in line with you SEO strategy such as:

• Regular blog posts
• Videos
• Tools
• Guides

To create content targeted at potential customers in the consideration stage you want to show how your company can help them solve their problem. You could deliver content such as:

• Case studies
• Demonstration videos
• How to content (like this article)

Finally, when the customer reaches this decision stage, you’ve got them interested, they’re considering and it’s time to make a decision. You should deliver content which will help them do that by providing content such as:

• Testimonials
• Product and service reviews
• A simple path to buy

6. Build keyword optimized landing pages

When buyers are at the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey with your business, creating landing pages which are keyword optimized, is an effective tactic to drive organic traffic. And we all know the way people search today indicates their intent, so each landing page still needs to have valuable content and is unique to each page on site. The key focus is lead generation and keyword optimization for each individual page by researching and picking the top 10 high volume, low competition keywords, create landing pages and start measuring its success.

7. Don’t forget about emails

Despite the purpose of inbound marketing is to do business in a human way, it doesn’t mean automation isn’t allowed. In fact, marketing automation is a great way for you to create personal and customizable messages to your potential clients. By setting workflows, you can nurture your leads through the stages of their buyers’ journey. By providing high value, relevant content and tying back into your high-quality content, you are nailing the successful inbound marketing game and will be turning them into clients in no time.

What Is the Inbound Methodology?

The inbound methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.

Why? Because when your customers succeed, you succeed.

The inbound methodology can be applied in three ways:

1. Attract: drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
2. Engage: presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals so they are more likely to buy from you. 
3. Delight: providing help and support to empower your customers to find success with their purchase. 

These strategies will help you effectively market to your target audience the inbound way. Below, you’ll see there are specific strategies for each inbound method of attracting, engaging, and delighting consumers to keep your flywheel spinning and help your business grow better.