6 inbound marketing strategy tips every business should use

Whether you are a startup or large corporate, every type of business needs to have some kind of marketing strategy. The question is, what kind of marketing strategy is the most effective for my business? For many businesses, conventional marketing approaches are too expensive or unwieldy to be employed effectively. This is why many sensible businesses are opting for an inbound marketing strategy.

Inbound marketing is much more of a whole approach than a list of tactics. An inbound marketing strategy, at its core, is more about attracting prospects to your business rather than finding prospects and going in for the hard-sell.

Whereas traditional marketing relied on techniques like email lists, cold-calling, billboard advertisements and direct mail, a modern inbound marketing strategy uses organic search traffic, opt-in email forms, and content publication to attract customers.

Many savvy business owners and entrepreneurs agree that inbound marketing is the best approach for today’s businesses, whether B2B, B2C, SaaS, tech, e-commerce, brick-and-mortar and so on.

At Artonezero, we are an inbound marketing agency in Shoreditch, and we have worked on inbound marketing strategy with many clients. From our experience, we have put together the following six inbound marketing tips that we believe that every business should use as part of their inbound marketing strategy.

1. Give away a free guide or ebook that is directly related to your services

At Artonezero, we are big believers in creating and giving away free ebooks and guides, and we think that you should be too.

An ebook or guide should be thousands of words long, which will make them a good source of organic traffic for your website. When creating an ebook or guide, never see it as an activity to get your words out there; it needs to provide reliable, solid information. If employed as part of your inbound marketing strategy, an ebook or guide can help you to build a very valuable list of email contacts for your future marketing efforts.

One of the biggest publishers of free guides and ebooks is Hubspot. Hubspot has a huge library of resources and is a good model for any business using ebooks and guides as part of their inbound marketing strategy.

However, Hubspot is a huge business and can, therefore, afford to publish a huge quantity of resources. If your business can’t match Hubspot’s level of output then don’t fear, keep your guide relevant to your business and as specific as possible. Remember that you are publishing your ebook or guide to gain a certain type of visitor – one who will convert to be a customer.

To see our example of an ebook, download our free ebook: A Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing. Our ebook will help you to learn how to increase leads and grow your website traffic with an inbound marketing strategy, today.

2. Choose one or two keywords, and optimise them as part of your inbound marketing strategy

SEO (Search Engine Optimisations) is a huge part of your inbound marketing strategy, and there is a lot you will need to know. One of the most important parts of SEO is keywords. In order to gain traffic for your chosen keywords, you need to tactically use them on your website.

While some people say that keywords aren’t as crucial as they used to be, you still need to be aware of – and use the words- that your customers might type into search engines when they are looking for content like yours.

Many marketers make the mistake of trying to rank for a large number of keywords instead of focusing on a few relevant terms and variants that mean the same thing.

If you are using keywords as part of your inbound marketing strategy, then try to do the following:

• Gain first-position for head terms: head terms are the most commonly searched terms. However, choose them wisely as you are not going to gain first position on Google for terms like “iPhone” or “computer”.
• Improve their keyword rank: while you should aim to improve your keywords’ rank, remember there is more to SEO than just this. Improving your keywords’ rank is great, but it won’t necessarily yield better traffic.
• Try to gain position for a large variety of keywords: but remember, while it is good to have a comprehensive list of keywords that you are tracking and targeting as part of your inbound marketing strategy, it’s a waste of time to try and win all of them at once.

The best solution is to focus on a smaller number of valuable keywords and create specific pages on your website that target those keywords specifically.

3. Build your personal brand

 If you want to be a truly successful marketer, then you’ll need to build your personal brand. This approach is an important part of your inbound marketing strategy regardless of the size of your business, but is especially effective for startups. Today’s startup environment is saturated by personalities who can successfully advertise themselves as leaders, as much as they advertise their organisations as innovators.

As a business owner, you will know that it is virtually impossible to separate yourself from your business. It only makes sense to leverage your personal brand to build your business. This has worked for many entrepreneurs who have built businesses that are founded upon their personality and their advice.

If this approach doesn’t sound like the right choice for your organisation, you can try to build your brand and then use your personal brand to promote it.

4. Engage on social media

Social media helped to turn inbound marketing into an interactive online experience. Now, instead of just hearing about companies and following them, potential customers find companies, followed by other companies, and now interact with those companies.

However, social media (on its own) yields a low rate of conversions. Other tools such as email and organic search are much better for conversions in your inbound marketing strategy. This being said, you should engage in social media as it is a powerful tool in inbound marketing. While it may not bring conversions, it does help to enhance your brand.

It isn’t enough to just have a presence on social media platforms. Instead, you also need to engage these platforms. Social media is exactly that: social. Therefore, behind every follower and like, there is a real person behind the engagement. In order to connect with those individuals, you need to ask questions, answer questions, respond to tweets, and be a presence.

5. Create an email popup

Email popups are controversial. Even though many people claim to dislike them, they have been proven to be successful. With this, it is worth considering having an email popup or some sort of email opt-in to build your email list.

A GDPR compliant email list is one of the single most important factors in building your business. It is a valuable resource that you can leverage to create compelling email subject lines and other inbound marketing activities to grow your business further.

If you want to utilise email in your inbound marketing strategy, then try using a popup opt-in form, just make sure (above everything else) that it is fully compliant under GDPR.

6. Guest blog

Guest blogging is a powerful weapon in your inbound marketing strategies arsenal for many reasons

• Powerful backlinks
• Reach a bigger audience
• Personal brand building

Another reason why guest blogging is such a powerful asset in your inbound marketing strategy is that you can include the list of publications where your article has featured on your own organisation’s website. By publishing these on your own site, it lends a sense of prestige and influence to your brand. If you are mentioned in a big publication in your industry area, it shows that you are important and what you have to say needs to be listened to.

In conclusion

There really are hundreds of reasons why your business should use an inbound marketing strategy. These six are just the beginning. The best way to work out which inbound marketing approaches work best for you is to try and test them for a few months. That way you can measure the impact for yourself.

If traditional marketing methods are failing to deliver, at Artonezero we can get you more leads with an Inbound marketing strategy.

We are an inbound marketing agency based in Shoreditch, East London. Whereas most Inbound marketing agencies want you to spend your budget on expensive Inbound software contracts, we are different. We focus on creating you the best Inbound strategy and then integrating your existing CMS and CRM software. This means that your budget goes directly into getting more leads and not into expensive overheads.

Inbound marketing generates 54% more leads than outbound methods, so get in touch today and we will develop an inbound marketing strategy that will help you to gain more leads.