Inbound Marketing: 5 Secrets to Success

[Joseph Scorese]

Inbound Marketing: 5 Secrets to Success

With traditional marketing, you push your message out and hope folks respond, using online and offline ads, direct mail, emails, brochures. With inbound marketing, you pull people in with content they want to know about using blogs, opt-in e-newsletters, emails, social media, and website offers. Customers are in charge on the Internet, so inbound marketing is key to attracting them. Here are five secrets to inbound success.

Set goals you can achieve. It’s easy to go crazy with inbound marketing. Instead, prioritize your channels—blog, website, e-newsletter, emails, social media—and focus on those with the most potential. List specific goals: write one blog and one social post per week and one website offer per month; get 10 people a month to opt in to your e-newsletter.

Make blogging your top priority. Inbound gurus say your website blog is key. Every new post adds an indexed page to your site and another opportunity to show up in search engines. It tells search engines to crawl your site frequently for new content to rank. New posts are also new opportunities to pull in leads. Include calls-to-action (CTAs) at the top, bottom, or in sidebars, and include links to landing pages and other posts.

Spend time picking content. For topics, instead of thinking about your business, focus on what your audience wants to know. What are their questions, needs, interests? What will drive them to your site? Consider demographics such as gender, family makeup, life stage—and come up with topics for each segment.

Re-purpose current materials. Old school isn’t necessarily old hat. Your traditional materials contain good content. Post a print article or sales piece as a downloadable PDF and give it to people who opt in to your e-newsletter. Create a landing page offering a demo or consultation. Turn an overview brochure into an About Us page.

Keep tinkering. Measure results and adjust. Don’t go nuts, just track some of these: web page, blog posts, social page views; click through rates (percentage of visitors who clicked on your CTAs); email bounce rates; sources for leads; social followers and friends. These tell you what your audience wants to know, even help you clean up email lists.

Here's to your continued success, as you dial up your inbound efforts, while putting together your best year ever.... Enjoy a great month!