Primer for Inbound Marketing

How can you take a stranger and change them into being a loyal customer and also one of your company’s biggest promoters? It’s simple really, by maximizing your inbound marketing potentials through four simple marketing actions: attract, convert, close, delight.

When it comes to doing business, trends have moved away from hardcopy material and instead have gravitated towards a concentration on creating quality online content that brings people to you. By creating content that aligns with your customer’s interest, it’s natural to attract traffic that enables you to convert, close, and delight.

First About Inbound Marketing

Before we delve into the actions, a bit more about inbound marketing. Inbound marketing revolves around the idea that quality content will attract your ideal customers to your business and develop a relationship that keeps them consistently coming back for more information from you.

Playing off of major themes such as shareable questions and needs, tailoring content to the evolving and developing wants and needs of the people viewing it, personalizing messages, taking multi-channel approaches to strengthen interactions, and integrating the combination of content creation, publishing, and analytics to enable you to ensure you are using the right content at the right time and in the right place is what inbound marketing is all about.

Four Simple Marketing Actions

1. Attract
In order to attract the right type of people that will become leads, then customers, and finally promoters, you need to know how to gain the attention of the people that encompass the personal and demographic information you are after and who also capture and believe in the basic mission of your business. To do this, there are several tools available to you:
-Blogging
As an area for educational content, blogging is the perfect way to attract new visitors and locate the right audience out of a group of prospective people.
-SEO
Search engines optimization rules the internet roost. In order for you for appear prominently, SEO with keywords and optimized pages can help create the content you need in order to earn you a place in front of your ideal visitors.
-Pages
Once you have people visiting your website, you want to ensure that you can hold their attention with thoughtful, clear, and concise information.
-Social Publishing
Since visitors spend a majority of their time interacting with your business without actually standing in physical store, social publishing allows
you to engage prospects with remarkable content to help build recognition and reliance.

2. Convert
Now that you’ve acquired visitors, the next step is gathering information from these visitors to empower you to maintain contact with them to give you the opportunity to convert them into customers. To do this, there are several different methods to aid in converting visitors including:
-Calls-to Action
To generate leads, you need to induce action in your visitors, whether through a button or link, you’ll need something to entice them to act.
-Forms
Gathering information through an optimized form is a great way to escort your potential customers through the conversion process.
-Landing Pages
This is an ever growing popular method. The use of landing pages that require a fulfillment of a call-to-action enables your business to make contact with a visitor that in turn can proceed into directly into a relationship.
-Contacts
Proper storage method for contacts is critical in order to optimize future interactions. We recommend keeping a centralized database that’s easy for you to access and understand contact history.

3. Close
Here is where you close on leads that turn visitors into customers. A few marketing tools handy when looking to close include:
– Email
Following up after initial contact with specialized messaging gives you the opportunity to pursue leads. Be sure to send focused and useful content to continue to establish trust.
– CRM
CRM stands for Customer Relationship management. It basically refers to any system used to facilitate sales by compiling the proper needed information to court prospects across your channels. Organized information can make tracking details of your contacts and companies more efficient and cost-effective.
-Closed-Loop Reporting
In order to verify how effective your marketing efforts are, you’ll need a closed-loop reporting system to examine how you are turning visitors into customers.
-Automation
Typically done with email, automation enables your business to identify and categorize lead groups before supplying the next logical step of information. This also can help reduce the double-hits and ensures you are messaging your targeted audience with their specific interests.

4. Delight
The most fun one of the tools, seeking to delight your customers, helps keep them engaged with your business and always ready for more. A few items to consider when delighting:
-Smart Text
By continuing to produce riveting text tailored to your customers interest, you not only continue to capture their business but also refine the category of customers you serve. This is the perfect chance to try out new products or services that you think this group will like.
-Surveys/Feedback
Asking your customers for feedback, not only helps them feel listened but gives you valuable information about how you are doing with your product or services.
-Smart Calls-to-Action
Smart calls-to-action means changing your offers to engage with your customer base by tailoring action items depending upon their previous responses.
-Social Monitoring
Again with the relevant content, by engaging on social media through social monitoring, including answering questions, commenting, liking, and disliking, you maintain a presence in the dialog.

To maximize your inbound marketing techniques, each actionable item should be given time and attention to create and deliver content that will capture your visitors and turn them into customers. By appealing to the right people through the right means at the most opportune times, you are sure to give your business a boost!