Most conventional marketing techniques

are either too expensive or unviable for SMBs and start-ups who wish to make it big. Inbound marketing for a long time was just one of the elements of the core marketing strategy of an organisation. But as the digital content consumption witnessed an unforeseen rise, inbound marketing has now become a focal point. Not only it’s cheaper than the traditional advertising and marketing techniques but also has an incredible power to attract larger crowds to a brand and turn it into a magnet.

Inbound & SEO Marketing Consultant for Inbound Authority, says “Inbound Marketing is so powerful because you have the power to give the searcher/consumer exactly what answers they are looking for at the precise point that they need it. That builds trust, reputation, and authority in whatever niche you are practicing this form of marketing in.”

If you are new to the digital marketing landscape, you might still be figuring out what inbound marketing is. Well, if you do figure out, you will realise that it is one of the most viable techniques that help you create the required impetus around your brand so that customers can discover you in several ways. A Gartner Research report predicts that “by 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship without talking to a human.” If this really comes true, inbound marketing will have a great role to play in giving your brand a voice that speaks to the masses. Listed below are some of the most pertinent inbound marketing strategies that don’t fail to deliver if planned and implemented meticulously.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is an essential pull factor when it comes to inbound marketing. Useful content that helps users find what they are looking for can significantly boost your visibility on the Internet. The content thus posted must be optimised so that it ranks well in the search engine pages. If promoted on both the onsite and offsite platforms, it can generate quality leads that may later become turn into buying customers. You may post blogs, articles, whitepapers, audio-visual content and a lot more to give your brand a voice.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

The best thing about inbound marketing is that it helps you get found by customers rather than you finding them. Getting organic placements on the search engine results pages (SERPS) is one of the best strategies for inbound marketing. Optimizing your website and content so that Google’s web crawling technology can identify and index your site’s content to appear in web searches can be a highly economic way to get significant traffic to your website.

SEO revolves around keywords, website structure, link-building and a lot more. Once you identify the most important keywords, optimize the heck out of them. Gaining the first position in search pages, improving your rank in searches and moving up the order in a range of other keywords could bring you great results. However, don’t try to win in all those keywords at once.

Social Media

Giving your brand a personal identity, a social existence is an important step towards making your content reach a larger audience. Creating content would be futile if you are not sharing it over different online social media platforms. According to a new survey by Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often.

While trying to increase outreach on the social media, one must not limit themselves to a number of limited sites and focus on proactively remaining active on multiple platforms. Robert Duke, Marketing Manager at Blue Mail Media mentions, “A lot of organisations in the B2B space make LinkedIn a focal point in their social media outreach. They probably believe that other platforms are not good enough in reaching the kind of audiences they wish to connect with. While LinkedIn continues to be the most used B2B social media platform, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook amongst others too are being used cleverly by organisations to create the right amount of buzz around their brands.”

Influencer Marketing  

Influencer marketing is somewhat intricate to practically implement but has a huge potential when it comes to influencing a certain audience. The idea is to identify opinion makers and influencers in your industry and work with them in content promotion and even casual interactions on your social media pages. The toughest part of influencer marketing is to persuade opinion leaders to contribute to your cause as they too expect to gain something from the activity. However, if you ensure mutual benefits, there is a greater possibility that they may agree to work with you.

PPC (Pay Per Click)

While marketing scholars and enthusiasts seem to be divided over the classification of PPC campaigns as an inbound or outbound marketing technique. PPC certainly helps you score a prominent position in web searches and gain considerable traffic to your website. However, it is highly advisable to optimise your PPC campaigns meticulously to do more with less. Failing to plan may lead to wastage of financial resources without bringing you the proportionate returns.

Inbound marketing like any other marketing strategy may get extremely complicated. It requires immense patience as you have to simultaneously work on multiple things and unify your efforts towards a common goal. Though marketers cannot be always certain of the outcome of their inbound marketing strategies, they can surely figure the best way out through trial and error. An inbound marketing strategy may not help you become successful overnight but it is one of the most beautiful ways to construct your way to glory.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member