Inbound marketing is a tactic that has helped thousands of businesses drive customers to their websites for the sole purpose of buying a product or signing up for a service. Is your company struggling to drive potential customers to your website? Don’t have the time or the personnel to handle such an initiative? There is a powerful connection that binds inbound marketing and content in a relationship that can help your business increase sales.
Importance of Inbound Marketing
Before we even begin to discuss the relationship between inbound marketing and content we must first dive into the importance of inbound marketing. Companies used to be able to use TV, radio, cold calls, print, mail and other advertising efforts to find new customers.
This essentially was a company chasing after customers for their business. These methods aren’t as effective these days due to technology that helps users block such efforts. Another reason why these methods have not been as effective is that the ads focus on the product and not what the customer actually needs.
This is where inbound marketing makes a leap into the conversation. Inbound marketing helps drive customers to your business and lets you stop chasing them for a sale. When a company creates an effective inbound marketing campaign it will help meet the needs of the customer and include them in the conversation.
Four Stages of Inbound Marketing
There are four very important stages of inbound marketing that every business needs to follow: attract, convert, close and delight.
When a company attracts customers it does so by leading them to the company website. This is done with a series of social media posts, blog posts, and new content on the website itself.
Now you need to convert those visitors of your website. This is accomplished by acquiring their contact information, which can be their name, email address, and/or phone number. Provide them with something free that they can get something useful out of, such as an ebook or tip sheet.
To close these new leads into paying customers you need to use marketing emails once you have their information. After they become customers you can work on delighting them as often as possible. Your best bet of being promoted via word of mouth is through repeat, satisfied customers.
It’s All About the Content
As you’ve likely surmised, inbound marketing is all about the content. You need to have valuable content created for all four stages of the inbound marketing process. If at all possible, this content should be educational so that it helps to solve the problems of the client.
You will also need to tie everything together when building content for your inbound marketing campaign. For example, if you write a blog post about a product you offer, that blog post should be promoted using content across your company’s social media footprint.
Each social media post should be unique and appropriate for the network on which it is posted. For example, the content used to share a blog post on Facebook should be different from the content used to share the same post on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Outside of blog posts you should be adding pages to the hierarchy of your company website on a regular basis, or when applicable. All of your products or services should have their own page, with at least 500 words of content, images, and sub-headers. All of this helps your SEO ranking with Google.
Your company cannot just get away with posting a new blog every week or every couple of days and hope that it drive customers to the website. This is just one component of an inbound marketing campaign.
Blogging needs to be done regularly along with nearly daily social media posts, email newsletters, web page content, SEO techniques, webinars, ebooks, video tutorials and more. When you are able to pump out all of this content you will have put together an effective inbound marketing campaign.
Content is the bread and butter of a strong inbound marketing campaign but it’s not the only aspect that must be done correctly. You also need to utilize the proper SEO techniques within that content and on the website in order to succeed.
Content is King and Vassallo Marketing Can Help
We’ve all heard the age old adage that content is king. Well, in this digital world, this is an important mantra by which to live. Your business might not have the time or the personnel in-house to put together an inbound marketing campaign that works. That’s where Vassallo Marketing can help. We are an experienced marketing firm that lives to produce meaty content for clients in a range of industries. Contact Vassallo Marketing today so we can put together an inbound marketing campaign that meets your company’s needs.