Everything from the beginning of time has involved some form of communication, one way or another. This communication makes modern economies work, thrive, and grow.
What does this have to do with marketing, especially inbound marketing? A lot. The objective with inbound marketing is to simplify the approach to marketing. For too long, marketing in general has been overcomplicated and this puts a burden on everyone, especially the small guy. The way we all now communicate has changed that. The Internet changed all of that. What other platform can you expend energy on with tool sets such as blogging, and get great results in return?
Do the math:
- If it takes you 30 minutes each to craft out a brief, but informative post about your product or service, twenty posts would take about 10 hours
- Break it down over a few days and spend 3 hours writing blog posts
- If you were paying yourself $50 an hour to write these posts it’d come out to around $500, right?
You can easily blow through $500 on advertising! Don’t get it wrong, there are purposes for paid advertising, but the beauty of inbound marketing is that if you can generate the content, it pays dividends.
Why is blogging so important with inbound marketing?
View blogging as an informal medium that allows anyone to have a voice, from CEOs to entry level employees, to citizens to President’s and high-ranking government officials.
The nature of a blog system; system referring to the structure, layout and sharing elements, is designed for a flow of information to be shared and collaborated on.
The beauty of blogging is that it only requires user generated content. What drives success with blogging is quality content, good design, and how it’s promoted. Let’s break those down a bit.
Creating quality content
If time is put into the creation of the core message and purpose, the story comes out stronger.
Ideas: Video is great for capturing visually, and often audibly, a message that can reach out and connect with the viewer. If they like it, it gets re-shared with their friends. Reports and research, it doesn’t have to be boring to be a report and research but can be something highly relevant to a niche audience. This may apply better to business to business, but consumers like reports as well!
Good design
The visual appeal of a website and its overall branded image does matter. The design is the front door that has a welcome mat on it. Content is the key that unlocks the door and welcomes the visitors in to stay a while.
Ideas: Spend the time necessary to research layouts, themes, templates, whatever you might need to create, buy, hire out to produce something that is mostly if not completely unique to your brand. Strategize a bit – Is your content made up of one element such as video, or audio, or text? Do you want portions to stand out more than the rest. Think about the long term structure.
How should you promote it?
Better yet, how will you promote it. When social media first started hitting the mainstream there was a string of topical posts on how brand marketers where and are losing control over their brands. This is true, because what is going to stop false information from flowing, whether purposefully or accidentally? Or misinterpretations of a campaign which backfires?
The key to rolling with the punches is to be able to take them easier. With a well armed blog army, whether that consists of one or many contributors, a well written blog post can be crafted to clear up anything. What happens if its dropped out into no man’s land?
Common mistake: A new blog owner starts generating content and never gets feedback and gives up. The feedback might come from multiple channels; actual blog comments or social interactions from a social network or real time search engine. Use tools like BackType, Topsy, Tweetmeme, and Facebook Pages, to see how much interaction is happening out there.
Something to do right now: Set up a few Google Alerts for your brand name or service. Use the RSS option if you prefer or just receive straight email.
The place where outbound and inbound marketing work together
One of the places the two worlds collide with marketing is the collaboration of an online and offline campaign. It can be as simple as a sign up form on a website that is reached from some printed material that was handed out at an event, to something as complicated as a series of billboards that build up suspense for an online campaign. The possibilities are endless, and the basics are too easy to miss.
Ideas: Check your profiles – make sure your profiles are all linking back to your website and vice versa, when you drive someone to Facebook or X (formerly Twitter) from a cute sticker in your window at your location, you also want them to engage with your website and take other actions as well. This is done with social media nurturing, creating great content, and promoting your key areas of a website in multiple locations.
How it all comes together
Inbound marketing is evolving. Just as many say it has been around for a long time in different forms, but with the modern age, the here and now, it has evolved to a point where it’s not OK to ignore and sit passively while the wagon strolls by. No matter the industry or the apparent hurdles, it’s key to stick to the basic marketing elements which have driven commerce around the world to succeed on many fronts and apply them to bleeding edge technological changes and innovations that happen daily. Social networks are growing rapidly. Social media, a buzz word, but with purpose is leading a charge to empower all with a voice, from consumer to brand to connect on a different level than ever before.
In Depth: What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is about generating traffic, conversions, and converting leads through your website using: blogging, content management, email marketing, landing pages, lead nurturing, marketing analytics, social media, and SEO.
The three keys of inbound marketing are: inbound lead generation, lead conversion, and marketing analysis.
Get Found – Inbound lead generation
Content Marketing
Well written and search engine optimized copy is key to the success of Internet marketing campaigns whether it is organically, or advertising driven.
Writing high quality content for your website and online marketing materials is important. Not only does it make an impression on leads and customers, but it also directly affects your overall marketing efforts.
Search Engine Optimization
To get the quality leads that your business needs, you want your business to get found by the right prospects. With search marketing you can help your business to be found by future customers by focusing on tailoring the results to your audience.
Social Media Marketing
There is a story to be told about your product or service. Social media is about listening and telling a story at the same time. By telling your story, connecting with your audience, and sharing relevant information your network will strengthen and grow, increase customer satisfaction, and drive new sales.
Convert – Capture and Nurture Leads
Lead Conversion
All your lead generation efforts using search engine marketing, content marketing and social media marketing would be wasted if you didn’t have a strategy in place to fill the top of your sales funnel and help convert those sales leads into customers.
Analyze – Marketing ROI Analysis
‘Know Thyself’ – Learn What Marketing Efforts Are Fruitful
Make Smarter Marketing Investments
Marketing ROI analysis gives you greater insight into what is working and what isn’t working. Wouldn’t you like to know what investments in time, money and resources are having the greatest impact on the bottom line?
By measuring the core components of your brand and impact from lead to close you can better understand the closed loop marketing.
Key Components Measured
Source
How are your leads finding you? What is driving them to convert? Did a specific blog article or email campaign cause a spike in interest?
Measure the source of your leads to give marketing analytics that help make better decisions of where to focus efforts.
Reach
With content being generated on your blog and promoted across social media, who is listening and responding?
The measurement of success isn’t always how many followers or subscribers you have on one channel but often in your overall reach across all platforms.
Competitive Analysis
While measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns, and having closed loop marketing analysis is critical, having in depth understanding of how your marketing metrics stack up against your competitors can give you greater intel on how to target your market.
One can only improve when and where you know improvement can be made.