Top 4 Winning Tips for A Newbie in Inbound Marketing

What are some good tips for a newbie in inbound marketing? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Tips for an inbound marketing approach:

1. Concentrate on a single persona.

A buyer persona is a representation of your target consumer that includes psychographic information about the people who buy and use your product or service in addition to basic data.

Interviewing actual consumers who have recently made a transaction with you is the greatest way to construct your buyer personas. When interviewing consumers, use open-ended questions to learn about their average day, how much time they spend at work vs. at home, what the most irritating aspect of their day is, and even what achievements they are most pleased of.

You can also conduct interviews with your sales team to learn more about the different sorts of customers they see, the frequent motivations consumers seem to have for choosing your company over a rival, and the most typical obstacles they encounter during the sales process.

Another technique to figure out who your target customers are is to look at buyer intent data. It’s critical to take this information into account when creating your personas in order to assure the accuracy of your inbound marketing efforts in the future.

Get Buyer Intent Data to Generate Leads

While most businesses have three to four buyer personas, your core persona should be the focus of your initial inbound marketing campaign. By focusing on a single persona, you can customize your messaging and create a highly targeted campaign that spans various digital media. Emails, blogs, sponsored search advertisements, social media posts, and any other content offer or communication you make are examples of these channels.

2. Establish SMART objectives.

Particular, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (or timely). SMART goals are essential for any inbound marketing campaign you run because you won’t be able to track and measure tangible results to help you plan your next one if you don’t have them.

A particular goal is something you could rapidly discuss with a teammate or leader that clearly communicates what you want to improve (think 10-15 seconds).

The term measurable refers to an objective that can be measured and quantified. If you can’t put a number on your objective, you’ll have no notion how far you’ve gone or how much work remains to achieve it.

While BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) are fantastic for visioning exercises, your inbound marketing goal must be reachable, otherwise your inbound marketing approach will demotivate you and your team.

Inbound marketing objectives must be relevant and serve a purpose. What role does your inbound marketing approach play in achieving the company’s overall goals?

Your objective must be time-bound. Goals have deadlines, which are critical for marketing and sales alignment, as well as budgeting and resource allocation.

Increase VTL percent from 2% to 3% in three months by developing five new pieces of content with a landing page that converts at 20% or higher is an excellent example of a SMART objective for a beginner inbound marketer.

3. Create a tempting offer

Take stock of all the different types of content you can provide your personas when designing your first campaign as part of your inbound marketing strategy. Whether your content offers are e-books, webinars, podcast episodes, checklists, or templates, they must be attractive, which means they must be something that your persona will find useful.

Keep in mind that the finest content will be informative rather than salesy. If your content is just focused on you and your organization, it will almost certainly underperform in your inbound marketing approach.

4. Create a conversion path that works.

A call-to-action (CTA), a landing page with a form, a thank-you page, and a corresponding thank-you email make up a successful conversion route. Take the time to examine your landing page thoroughly. After all, your target client will use this to assess whether your content offer is worth the money of their contact information.

Remember the three Bs if you’re in doubt:

• Brief: stick to the point
• Bullet point benefits: why is this valuable?
• Blink test: can you find the value on this page in two seconds?

Avoid using the “in-line response” option of your marketing automation platform. Yes, this appears to be a more convenient option than redirecting the form submission to a thank you page, but you want to keep the buyer persona engaged by providing the asset they requested and possibly suggesting other resources they would find useful. It’s critical to send a follow-up email, especially when material is consumed on mobile devices.

TIP: To guarantee that your email is well-crafted, read up on the foundations of email marketing.

Your buyer persona’s 10-page vendor comparison study is incredibly essential to them, so make sure they don’t lose track of it just because they downloaded it on their iPhone on the train during their commute. Your thank you email aids in the delivery of that useful piece of material, as well as further information from your firm, to their inbox.

5. Create lead segments and email routines

Congratulations! Your inbound marketing strategy is starting to pay off, as your persona-based marketing efforts are now producing leads. Now that you have these leads, it’s time to follow up with them in a useful and instructional manner.

You can support your future clients as they educate themselves and identify a solution to the problem you can help them solve by segmenting your database of opted-in leads and producing focused lists that are linked to either your personas or different stages of the buyer’s journey.

6. Use email to promote your campaign.

While putting your new content offer on your website’s resource library is great, your inbound marketing approach should also include sending a promotional email to the contacts in your database who you believe would benefit the most from it. The best aspect about this email campaign is that you’ve already done the legwork by writing the content and designing the landing page. For example, the copy you wrote for the landing page should function nicely in your email copy.

7. Create a list of long-tail keywords.

Blogging is an important part of any inbound marketing strategy, but before you start posting, consider what your buyer personas are searching for on Google when they have a problem or need help understanding a product or issue. Long tail keywords are three- and four-word phrases that your personas will type into a search engine.

Take some time to look into long tail keyword possibilities, and use SEO tools to locate keywords with a low difficulty level and a large monthly search traffic.

8. Create articles that others will want to share.

It’s time to start writing with your keywords in hand. A successful inbound marketing approach relies on articles that educate and bring value to the reader, just like the long-form material you’ve developed. Your article’s goal should be to generate something so valuable that your buyer persona wants to share it with their friends via email and social media.

9. Use social media to promote your material.

While your primary goal may be for your buyer persona to share your material on their social media networks, you should share on both company and individual team member accounts as well. Consider the social media channels where your persona spends their time before you share. For example, there’s little purpose in sharing on Pinterest if your buyer persona doesn’t use the platform.

Software solutions for social media monitoring can assist you in better understanding the best areas and keywords to engage with your ideal customers.

10. Examine and make adjustments

There is no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all” inbound marketing strategy. Your marketing automation platform has sophisticated analytics that you can use to assess your inbound marketing efforts, allowing you to optimize campaigns and develop even better, more productive campaigns in the future.

With these ten suggestions, you’ll be well on your way to creating an effective inbound marketing strategy. Remember that one of the benefits of digital marketing is the ability to A/B test different content subjects, offers, and channels.

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Contributed by Noorullah Jamakzii, Founder of Growthhackerspace.com