Inbound marketing refers to attracting the attention of prospects to your website rather than outwardly advertising your products or service. As a concept, inbound marketing is fairly simple to understand, but once you begin diving into it, you soon realize there’s a lot that goes into getting potential customers to find your website, engage with your content and eventually become paying customers.
With this in mind, let’s dive in and take a look at four strategies you can use to make more money online through inbound marketing.
1. Make sure your website is optimized for SEO
Regardless of the industry you are in, targeting the right keywords, using a live chat plugin to bring in new leads, having a frequently updated blog, and bringing in new backlinks is always going to help you bring in more traffic organically.
It could be argued that optimization is essential for successful inbound marketing rather than a strategy. A well-optimized website that proves a visitor with a positive user experience is the bedrock to any successful inbound marketing campaign. So before thinking about any other kind of inbound marketing strategy, you need to make sure you’re providing visitors to your website with the best user experience possible.
If you are brand new to SEO, it’s worth taking some time to educate yourselves on the basics. This way, you’ll have an idea of some of the steps you can take to start optimizing your site. Even if you want to outsource your site’s SEO work to an expert or an agency, educating yourself on some SEO best practices will give you a better understanding of what it takes to rank a website. This will allow you to start the process of driving relevant search traffic to your website.
Let us use an example- Roman & Gaynor, a personal injury firm is trying to rank better on Google. To do this they have doubled down on their content strategy, and you can see that the work is paying off by taking a look at their Ahrefs profile.
The site ranks for over 1500 competitive search terms in the law industry and it brings in regular organic traffic from search engines. Most sites could improve their site’s SEO by simply targeting the right keywords. You could do this by using the Ahrefs ‘competing domains’ feature.
For example, once you input Roman & Gaynor into Ahrefs, and go to ‘competing domains’, you will find a list of domains that are ranking for similar keywords that worth targeting and that they can very possibly rank for (since their competitor with a similar backlink/ DR profile is already ranking for them).
Whether it is SEO for lawyers, construction companies, agencies, or real estate practices- the right on-site practices can help your customers find you which is also far more cost-effective than paying out large amounts of money on the latest Facebook ad campaigns.
2. Utilize video content
People love watching videos, particularly in the business world. There’s a number of 59% of company executives that would rather watch a video than read a text, and up to 80% of people can recall a video ad they’ve seen in the past 30 days.
All of the inbound video content you create should always address a problem experienced by one of your visitors. There’s a lot that goes into creating compelling video content, and the type of video you create will depend on the larger goal you’re looking to achieve and the stage your visitor is at in their buyer journey.
When you’re creating video content, try and keep the following general tips in mind:
Consider your purpose
This will ensure your creating video content that resonates with your audience. For example, are you creating a product video to educate your customers about one of your products/services? Are you creating a video that summarizes the USP of your business?
Documentation
Whatever the goal of your video is, try and document it before starting your video; this will help you stay on track and create the best content possible.
Storytelling
Use storytelling in your videos – we all get hooked on stories, so if you can, try and weave an element of storytelling into your videos. This could include having a beginning, a middle and an end. Or you could use a storytelling format such as the problem, agitation, solution model.
Identify pain points
You can use the beginning of your video to identify a common problem or pain point a visitor to your site is facing. You can then agitate this problem by going into more detail before ending the video by showing the viewer how your product or solution can help to solve the pain point they’re experiencing.
For an in-depth guide on the different kinds of video you may want to create and how to create them you could check out this excellent video marketing guide by HubSpot.
3. Create long-form written content
While short-form content has its place, long-form content gives you the chance to cover a particular topic in-depth. With long-form content, you can also showcase your expertise in your specific industry or niche and provide comprehensive solutions to questions your audience may have.
Long-form content also tends to rank better in search engines than short-form content. In a study looking at the length of the top 10 ranking pieces of content for around 200,000 keywords, Search Engine Land found that the average length for a top 10 piece of content is 2,000 words. Why is this? Quite simply, long-form content provides more value to the reader, generates more engagement, and keeps readers on the page longer.
Examples of long-form content
As with any piece of content, it’s essential to define your goals before creating a piece of long-form content. This will include determining your target audience, having a thorough understanding of the topic your writing about, and an idea of what the top-ranking content for the particular topic your writing about looks like.
CoSchedule blog
There are many blogs out there, but some brands get it right when it comes to producing long-form content. One such brand is CoSchedule, an agile marketing company that provides marketers with useful tools to help them stay organized and maximize productivity.
Neal Schaffer blog
When you navigate through the Neal Schaffer blog, one of the first things you notice are the catchy article headlines. Then, you’ll soon notice that each article is packed full of valuable tips that the reader can act upon/use right away. When you’re creating content, always try and keep in mind what takeaways you want your reader to be able to take after they’ve read/consumed your piece of content.
For example, if you’re looking to create an actionable piece of content that teaches someone how to start a podcast, you would need to consistently keep asking yourself throughout the content process if what you are writing is helping the reader achieve that goal.
4 Content distribution and promotion
Promoting and distributing your content is the part of the marketing process where the worlds of inbound and outbound marketing combine. If your site is well-optimized and you have created a great piece of content, you may already have great amounts of organic traffic. But, while all of this is useful, if you really want to start seeing some tangible results from your content creation efforts, you need to promote your content.
There are multiple methods and various channels you can utilize to do this. The first step you’ll want to take is sending your new piece of content to your existing subscribers (if you have them). One of the most useful and easy ways is to outline an email marketing campaign and email your subscribers. You can use an email service provider such as Mailchimp to send your subscribers an email every time you publish a new piece of content.
You can also promote each article on your social channels, and to really get your piece of content out there; you can utilize paid promotion methods such as Facebook or Instagram ads to promote your content to a specific demographic.
If you have professional contacts within your network, you can also reach out to some of these contacts to see if they’re willing to share a new piece of content you create.
Wrapping It Up
While we’ve managed to cover a few inbound strategies in this article, there are many inbound strategies out there, so take some time to research and work out which strategies are best for what you’re looking to achieve. If you take the time to get your inbound strategies in place, you’ll have created a reliable, consistent method of generating relevant traffic and leads for your business.
