Inbound Marketing Will Give You an Unfair Advantage
“Winning is everything”. “2nd place is the first loser”. We have heard these statements countless times from professional athletes and ruthless executives, but do youpossess this mentality as a marketer or a business owner? If you do, keep reading because I am going to show you 7 ways to crush your competitors with inbound marketing.
Just to be clear, we are not talking about putting anyone out of business. However, you need to couple a killer instinct with your marketing strategy to dominate and take advantage of every dollar you spend. Building a large social media community is great. Dramatically increasing the overall traffic to your website is even better, but if you aren’t converting leads and customers, you have nothing to show for it. Real success is known among marketers as ROI, and we are all about ROI-driven marketing. Here we go:
Start Creating Customer-Centric Content
This is pretty simple. Stop telling your customers how great your company is, and start answering their questions with compelling content that offers value. The easiest way to do this is with a business blog.
Start by checking at least five of your competitors’ websites to see if they blog. Unless your industry is marketing, I can pretty much guarantee that most will not have a blog, and if they do, it won’t be consistently updated or focused on answering customer questions.
Ask your sales or customer service reps what the top 10 questions are that customers ask on a daily basis, and start answering them in your blog. This practice will separate you from the rest. Here are some benefits of writing content focused on your customers’ most frequently-asked questions:
• It positions your company as an industry authority.
• You build trust with your customers, but only as long as you are NOT selling in the content. Remember, this about your customers, not your company.
• It speeds up your sales cycle. Since you are answering customer questions and building trust, your customers will be further down the sales funnel and closer to purchasing your product or service.
• Search engines will love you. Each blog article you create will be indexed as a brand-new
page by search engines. If you are optimizing your articles around keywords, yourSEO will receive a big boost. The more indexed pages your website has, the more opportunities for customers to find you.
Content Distribution Strategy
Now that you are one step ahead of your competition because you're creating content, it is time to start putting down the pedal with a distribution strategy. Producing compelling, customer-centric content is great, but if nobody can find it, it’s a waste of your time.
Most marketing softwares like
HubSpot allows you to auto-publish your blogto your social media channels. If you use a Wordpress theme you can add a social media plug-in for distribution, but this is not enough. You need to repurpose your most compelling content multiple times via your social channels,especially if it is getting shares and driving leads to your landing pages (which we’ll discuss in a minute).
Now that you have social media channels covered, start distributing to bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious and others. These sites won’t drive as much traffic as social media will on a consistent basis, but they are a vital way to get more eyes on your content.
Target Leads on LinkedIn
Let’s digress back to social media for a moment, and talk about how you can use LinkedIn to your advantage. LinkedIn is a social media channel for professionals which is underutilized by most business owners and sales professionals. You should be able to auto-publish your content to LinkedIn via your blogging software, but this is not enough because the content is only posted to your status updates.
Get involved in LinkedIn Answers, and start answering questions that potential
customers are asking about your industry. This is an easy way to expand your reach with these potential leads and expand your authority. You will also have an opportunity to include links back to your content that has more information regarding the topic you’re answering. This will drive traffic back to your site and add extra value to the answer you are providing.
LinkedIn Groups
Each LinkedIn Profile can join up to 50 Groups. Take advantage of every last one of these and target groups that are industry-specific. Chances are your potential customers are also members of these groups for the purpose of educating themselves about your
industry. Group membership among prospects is especially common for B2B companies.
Posting your content on these targeted groups is the first step.. Commenting on other posts and providing added value to dialogue without selling is step #2. You must become an active member of the group and engage in real conversations.
Once you’ve started a conversation, ask yourself if it would be appropriate to follow-up on LinkedIn’s private messaging option, InMail, to add even more value. Be sure to discuss ways to continue the conversation outside of the group and keep nurturing the relationship.
Calls to Action
It amazes me how often I see websites, emails, blogs, and newsletters that do not have Calls to Action. What’s the point? You must have CTAs everywhere to start the lead generation process and drive traffic to a landing page to capture their data.
You have 8 seconds to capture the attention of a visitor to your website.
Having a well-designed CTA or two located above the fold on your web pages is crucial. Using CTAs for driving business requires an irresistible offer and top-notch design. Here is how to Design and Implemement
Effective Call to Actions.
Capturing Lead Data
Way, and I mean way, too many businesses do not have landing pages to capture the data of their site visitors. This is a travesty, but great news for you if you’re starting to implement landing pages. In my humble opinion,
landing pages coupled with lead nurturing are the single biggest factor that separates you and your competition.
Landing pages should be linked to every CTA button and every ad that you place online or offline to enable you to capture contact data and start nurturing leads into clients. Here is
an article on how to create landing pages that convert.
Nurturing Leads Down the Sales Funnel
Lead nurturing is automated email campaigns which are designed to push your leads through the sales funnel and turn them into customers. These emails are integral to keep your leads from getting stuck in the middle of your funnel. How many times have you forgot to follow up with a potential client and lost their business? That doesn’t happen once you setup your campaign. You can even customize the frequency to match your sales cycle timing and segmentation.
Need Some Help?
Do you want to crush your competition, but you’re not sure where to get started? Contact us today to get a Free Marketing Assessment and learn how we can help you reach your goals. Inbound Marketing Agents is a Certified Gold HubSpot Partner Agency that offers custom services for clients, from full agency service to consultation packages to meet your budget and exceed your goals.