If you want to sell to the modern consumer, then the right inbound marketing techniques will help your business more than an entire room full of new sales agents. Podcasts, blogs, video marketing, and proper product placement with good distribution are the secrets to the sauce. No matter your industry, inbound marketing is the answer.
How do you incorporate inbound marketing into your advertising program? Here is the last listicle that you will need for inbound marketing, at least until the next list comes out next year!
Leverage Your Online Profiles to Your Advantage!
Your online presence needs to move past the notion of a single landing page. You must appeal to the social media that your audience prefers, and if your audience is cross-sectional, then you will have to create more than one social media profile or landing page.
Finding the social media “soup” that comprises your audience may take a bit of work, but you can speed up the process. Take a look at the social leaders on each site. If these weathervanes of popularity fit your target market, chances are that the audience of that social media site will fit your target as well.
Create only as many pages as you are able to maintain in a workday. Less is more. Each page must keep itself up-to-date in order to be effective in the intra-web of pages that you are trying to create. Once you have established each page individually, create your own web through the connection of all of your pages to each other. Ideally, this will increase the overall stickiness that your potential customers have on your websites.
Start a Blog and Contribute to Top Blogs in Your Industry.
Content marketing is king today, and it will be king for a long time to come. Starting a blog becomes harder each new day that you wait. Literally, thousands of blogs make their way onto the Internet each day, and even if those blogs are not in your industry, they create noise that may take away the time your target market has for your content.
Your blog should establish you as an expert in your field. This is the essential branding component that you will need to begin a comprehensive inbound marketing program. Not only will your human visitors begin to trust your brand more, but the major search engines will pick up on your efforts as well. Blogs are perhaps the best way to help increase your website rank for keyword phrases.
Make sure your keyword phrases are localized long tail keywords. Focus them on your target audience. Use the free tools that Google gives away to find the relevant keywords. Good research will reveal laggards in your industry that leaders in the industry have not bid up the price on quite yet. This is your opportunity; seize it with fervor and will find more visibility within your intra-web of pages (as long as you make sure to connect your blog to the rest of your social media pages).
Continue to build your link profile through guest blogging opportunities on industry-leading blogs. Once you have created a small name for yourself, larger bloggers may contact you because of the audience that you have gathered to yourself. However, do not be afraid to contact them as well. If you truly have an independent and unique perspective, top bloggers will gladly co-opt your expertise to make them look good. Make sure that you negotiate focused anchor text and one-way links back to your content as part of your agreement to write for these blogs.
If you do not have an in-house writer, you can outsource the content to a professional for virtually peanuts. Imagine building your link profile every day without having to ward off carpal tunnel from typing! Look into the power of crowdsourcing if you have not done this yet.
Upgrade Your Content Across the Board.
The links that you are constantly building must link to something relevant, hard-hitting, focused, and modern. You are not linking back to a conversion page if you are smart. Savvy businesses these days link to podcasts or entertaining and informative videos that increase the brand of the product in the mind of the customer.
What you are looking for is the total time spent on your content, not a quick sale. If you go for a quick sale, you are likely to completely turn off the modern consumer. They will simply move towards a brand with more visibility and more money put behind the marketing campaign. People today need to find out about who you are and what you stand for just as much as they need to find out what you make.
If you do not have anyone in-house with the personality to pull off a blog, a video, or a podcast, you can outsource this talent as well. Do not let anything stop you from creating modern content that will appeal to younger, more digitally-minded consumers. This is the only way that you will be able to establish your brand in the coming years as the major search engines continue to clamp down on direct sales efforts.
Much success,
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