Woohoo! This is an exciting time of the year. With 2011 just right around the corner, the opportunities are ready for your business. Whether or not you were able to reach all of your goals in 2010 is water under the bridge now because 2011 is coming upon us fast.
Taking the big picture in mind, as you prepare to earmark budgets and resources to meet your business growth and sales goals in the next year and beyond, here are three key things to add to your inbound marketing strategy for 2011.
1. Actual Content Marketing Strategy
Ok so you have a fancy pants blog with a great design and you are wanting to prove that you truly can generate those leads you always hear comes with blogging.
First, a mind shift. Let’s get away from the term blogging and use a more descriptive view of what you are trying to do: content marketing.
- Write to your customers – Identify the personas, the type of prospects your business would like to do business with
- Talk less about yourself – There is a science to blogging. Your content marketing strategy should focus on writing for customers, sharing useful, high quality, resources and information.
- Spend more time producing – Do what is going to be most profitable for your business and drive those leads. Spend less time doing it yourself, patching servers, tweaking design and more time producing high quality content. Let experts in design, inbound marketing strategy, and SEO do the “hard” stuff for you.
- Be an informed content marketer – While to get to the point where you are able to actively produce the kind of magnetic content that drives leads, pay attention to analytics and marketing events (such as an email newsletter campaign) that are producing visits and leads. Do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
(Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report .PDF)
2. Use Inbound Marketing Tools and Resources
To put your content marketing strategy into play you need the appropriate tools.
- Social media management – Balancing time and available internal resources with current demands and job requirements sometimes have little available time available for social media interaction. Explore the tools you need to get the job done and interact with your audience while building a brand and driving leads to your website.
- Go local, everywhere – Your business relies more on getting found today than it ever has before. As more and more people begin chucking the yellow pages in the trash, you must appear where your prospects are looking for you. Keyword research is a critical component to your inbound marketing strategy. You must know and use in your content the keywords that will be most relevant and drive traffic to your website.
- Work with an inbound marketing expert – An inbound marketing strategist can guide your business down the path to set goals, and meet them for your business. To get the revenue results needed, for less of the cost of hiring an employee to focus on online marketing, put together a plan with an inbound marketing company.
3. Nurture those relationships
Make 2011 the year your business does an outstanding job of nurturing relationships with customers and prospects.
Using email marketing as your channel, you can effectively build and maintain relationships with your buyers, at the same time reducing your advertising costs.
Bottom line is, when done right, email marketing can lower costs and increase profits.
Focus on two areas in your email marketing in 2011 to see the lower costs turn around into increased sales:
- Direct email readers to the appropriate place to make a sale – As long as you do a good job making your emails interesting, and actionable, your click through rates should be increasing and maintaining good levels. But where those clicks land is even more important. The email should drive the recipient to a specialize landing page, or offer page, on your website where they can take an action.
- Segment your email list – As you build a list it is easy to think that the work is headed in the right direction. While it is good to build a larger list, the numbers don’t mean anything. The groups or segments that exist inside of your email list is more important. Use your email marketing tool and expert guidance to identify VIP customers, hot prospects, and those who have little interest now but might later. If you send the same old email to the same old group of email addresses, your effectiveness may not be as great as you intend. Break it up into customer and prospect segments to realize the value of increased sales.
Look forward to the future
The opportunities that exist with a well thought out and planned inbound marketing strategy, coupled with the sub plans of content marketing such as social media focus and email marketing, etc. your business can see increased leads and sales in 2011 and beyond.
Keep an open mind, use the expert resources available, and remember that hard work, and a destination in mind always pays off.