How To Use Inbound Marketing For Business

Are you a business owner without a team of Internet and inbound marketing professionals? Do you feel lost when trying to use the internet to maximize the potential of your company? Do you lie sleepless at night, manically dreading the reality that you may in fact need to tweet something in the morning? If you answered yes to questions one and two, you are in luck. Inbound marketing is a modern approach to modern business.

Inbound marketing, as opposed to traditional marketing, runs on the principle that great media brings the right customers in to you, rather than going out after them. By creating the appropriate types of digital media, any business can easily use the internet to increase sales and reach goals. By the way, if you answered yes to number three…try yoga and/or Ambien. In my experience, Inbound Marketing success can be achieved by anyone, technical or non-technical, by following three golden rules:

1. Be A Giver
2. Know Your Goals
3. Constantly Measure, Constantly Adjust

The Inbound Marketing Process

1. Attract interest or attention to your business
2. Convert that interest into leads and sales
3. Analyze the results to increase the amount/quality of interest, leads and sales

Putting Inbound Marketing To Work For Your Business

Think of your business as a digital flower. Your goal is to spread its HTML as far as possible to your target audience. To do this, you need to attract some bees (bumblebees of course because they are bigger, smarter, better looking and just cooler in general). Flowers accomplish this goal by becoming the object of the bee’s desire – irresistible, tasty and vibrant. That’s your job; become irresistible to your market.

Step one: Attract Attention

It is hard to attract attention by talking about, posting about or emailing about your own company. Why? Well, in a nutshell: no one cares.

Apologies for the bluntness, but its true. People typically care about things that enhance their own sense of self. If you project neediness to your audience, more often than not, you’re a flower without a bee. This takes us to Inbound Marketing rule number one: Be a giver.

 Create content for other people”s benefit, not your own. More specifically, create content for the benefit of people you want to sell stuff to. Figure out what they want and make it for them. Giving attracts giving.

You give customers quality content, your customers give you quality business. Quality content can be created with any type of digital media: a blog, tweet, eBook, video or newsletter. Put your scent out there and get people onto your site by creating alluring media for your market. Remember, no matter how beautiful the flower thinks itself to be, if the bees don’t start drooling, it Tutti i tavoli finali di questi eventi verranno ripresi in diretta dalle telecamere di Poker casino italia 24 e trasmessi su SKY e sul Digitale Terrestre. gets no love. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and give them what they want rather than what you want.

Take Away: To attract attention, Be A Giver!

Step Two: Convert

You did it. Your flower is swarming with bees. It may even need a new server or two. Now that you have captivated your audience, you need to get them to drink the cool aide…ehhm, nectar. If your website traffic isn’t leading to sales, its a great big waste of energy. Converting visitors to customers is a critical part of the inbound marketing process. I like to break conversions down into three main categories:

1. strategic goals
2. on-page optimization
3. calls-to-action

Gibberish you say? Let me explain.

Visitor to Customer Conversion Breakdown

1. Strategic Goals: defining how you measure the success of your website. Do you want to generate online sales? Do you want visitors to submit their email address or call your business? Whatever the goals may be, they must be defined and integrated into the design of your website in order to create an optimized landing page (the first page a visitor sees on your website). This is step one in the conversion process.

2. On-Page Optimization: controlling the experience of website visitors to achieve your strategic goals. You only have a few seconds of attention once your visitors land, so they need to be used wisely. An optimized landing page has an extremely clear navigation structure and layout based on your strategic goals. Whether all roads lead to your “contact us” page or “buy now” button, you must make sure you website is geared toward leading visitors in the direction you choose. The last step of the conversion process is closing the deal with a great call-to-action.

3. Calls-to-action: a message that urges your visitors to complete a task. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get”, Gandhi. No matter how silly it seems, you must ask your audience to do exactly what you want them to do. Think of them as 6-year-olds with bank accounts. But keeping aligned with rule one, be a giver, you need to offer a favor in return. So instead of saying, “Contact Us”, say something like, “Contact us for more information”. Simple, I know, but the subtle subconscious offer of more information can make a huge difference in accomplishing your goals by shifting consumer perceptions towards trading information for information.

Take Away: To convert leads, Know Your Goals!

Step Three: Analyze And Evolve

Your site is looking great, you attracting and converting customers, you may be thinking, “time for that trip to Fiji”. Go for it, but bring your laptop.

Flowers, like everything else on Earth, must evolve to survive and thrive. Your digital flower needs to do the same by constantly trying new looks and features, analyzing the feedback and consistently improving based on the results. Analytics programs can track and report on almost all digital media – your website, twitter, facebook, emails, ect – so make sure you use them. Follow your insights and intuition. Constantly tweak your approach in order to maximize the ability for your business to reach full potential. The best online businesses are agile, responsive and original. Don’t wait to see what everyone else is doing, follow your gut and back it up with numbers.

An Easy Way To Start Improving Your Business

A great and easy way to start tweaking your business towards perfection is A/B testing. A/B testing can be done with a landing page, marketing campaign, and most commonly an email campaign. Lets use email as an example. To A/B test an email campaign, create two identical emails with two different calls-to-action. Maybe A says, “call now for 10% off” and B says, “enter your email for 10% off”. Send A out to half of your email list and B out to the rest. Based on the response, you can see what your customers prefer to do and focus on that next time around. Every time you create media you have the opportunity to evolve into a more advanced business.

Take Away: In order to evolve, Constantly Measure, Constantly Adjust

Remember…

The golden rules of Inbound Marketing:

1. Be A Giver
2. Know Your Goals
3. Constantly Measure, Constantly Adjust