What is Inbound Marketing and How Does It Work?
Welcome to our Inbound Marketing series! If you're here, you're wondering how Inbound Marketing can help you grow your business. Over the next four articles, we'll dive into Inbound Marketing and answer burning questions about how it can help any business grow and flourish.
What is the first thing everyone does before buying something that takes a bit of research? They look online for answers. Search engines have become the go-to tool to find information about everything. Everyone uses them, and that means they funnel a massive amount of traffic.
The bottom line is that people search for information about what you do. Wouldn't it be nice if they found you instead of the competition?
In a nutshell, that's what Inbound Marketing helps you do. It's not a quick marketing tactic. Inbound requires a commitment to a philosophy and a plan. Inbound Marketing takes time, but the results can pay big dividends.
Inbound Marketing requires four main steps and a lot of little ones between them.
- Attract strangers from search traffic
- Convert visitors into leads
- Close the best leads into customers
- Delight customers, so they become promoters of your brand
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Attract Strangers from Search Traffic
The first step is to attract strangers so you can move them to become customers. To do this, marketers have to create educational content those customers will LOVE.
That’s the heart of Inbound. It flips marketing around. You publish great content online that educates customers about what you do. When they search for solutions, they find YOU.
Education is essential. The content you create should be informative. You want to answer questions people are asking related to products or services you offer. By educating them, you build trust.
Content should follow an organized plan. Keywords, personas, and essential topics should drive what kinds of content you create. Choose subjects that are relevant to what you do. Figure out how those topics apply to your personas. What kinds of questions do they have? How can you help? Write about those things.
Always be helpful and informative. Visitors from search results found you because you are talking about the things you know. Those are the same things they want to learn about. Help them find answers to their questions.
Once you have fantastic content created, promote it! Organic traffic will reach you over time, but promotion can speed up the process. Social Media can be a great way to share your content. Choose Social Channels that your ideal customers most often visit.
Attracting visitors takes time and commitment. Create content on a regular schedule if you can. Be authentic. Educate your visitors. Help them learn. Stick to a plan, and you can rank well for keywords and topics associated with your business. When strangers search, they will find you and become visitors to your site.
In Part 2, we'll dig into what you do once traffic starts appearing on your site. You want to capture information from those visitors and convert them into leads!
