You're probably thinking your content strategy is pretty awesome, and by now you published some incredible content. Let's question that with: just how many people are actually stopping by? Lots of people should, right? Yes, especially if you're publishing great content, but the reality is many people only go to select sites and never stray far from their corner of the Internet. If you don't believe this, think for a second about how many sites you visit; which ones do you frequent? Do you ever branch out? Not many of us do, which means that you will need an inbound marketing strategy to go along with your excellently crafted content.
Let's take a look at how inbound marketing can help your content and website out in major ways!
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a great way to get your company out there by using several different marketing techniques such as blogs, great content strategy, social media, and utilizing SEO. It isn't just writing up a blog with keywords, though. You have to make it engaging and, like any marketing bit, you have to make it stand out. If you don't stand out in the crowd of your competitors, you will lose customers. Inbound marketing doesn't seek out customers like outbound marketing does, it, in fact, builds a base of trust with clients and makes your company easier to discover.
Mixing Inbound Marketing with Content Strategy
Inbound marketing goes very well with content strategy. You're already crafting content, or at least you should be, so it is easy to just add inbound marketing to your strategy. The good new is, you can utilize several different methods of inbound marketing with your content strategy and we are going to take a quick look at a few of these methods.
1. Buyer Personas Are Crucial. The base of every content and inbound marketing strategy needs to have a defined buyer persona. What do we mean by a buyer persona? We are talking about a group of made up customers who represent the customer base you specifically want to reach. You need to research what they expect and how they communicate to know what content you need to craft. This is important for content strategy because you must know exactly how to write your content. It is also important to inbound marketing because you need to know how to, well, market.
When creating your buyer personas, consider these key elements to help create the best ones possible:
- Consider any problems you foresee, as well as any objections your customers might have.
- Now the general persona background - who are you specifically trying to reach?
- Consider any potential challenges that could arise between your company and your personas.
- Learn the marketing messages that will work the best for these personas.
- Know how you will pitch your product - social media, general advertising, or other methods.
Work with your sales division to make perfect buyer personas to prepare your strategies as best as possible. If you don't have a sales division, but just one person over sales, still involve them in this process. Sales people will be able to think of some other areas that need to be worked on that you might forget.
2. Social Interaction is Imperative To All Strategies. In our social media world, social interaction is key in inbound marketing and content strategies. If you just write your content with zero interaction, your business is going to go downhill fast. This is how inbound marketing can help your content strategy. You can either utilize this in interacting with people on your social media pages such as Facebook or Twitter, or you can form a sort of interaction on your website.
A few ways to form interaction on your company site can be:
- Setting up question and answer sessions and allow your clients to submit their questions.
- Hosting a live stream event or webinar for people to watch.
- Comment back to clients on blogs or articles.
Never ignore social interaction, ever. People are less likely to comment continually or to use your product if they don't receive any response from you. It will also be important for you to comment directly to them whether by responding to a blog comment or by emailing them. Addressing customer questions and concerns in a broad setting might make a lot of customers angry. Only address a question in a broad setting if it is specifically for your question and answer session. Once you've begun to interact with your client base, your search rankings will actually improve.
3. Keyword Research Will Get Your Content Noticed. Inbound marketing can really help the SEO approach in your content strategy. By researching your client base and your market, you will also begin researching the keywords that will get your site noticed. These keywords are part of the way Google ranks your site and you can get quite the amount of viewership just by utilizing important words. Take some time to learn about your market and the necessary keywords. If you are a little lost on how to do this, you can always hire an SEO professional, but you will probably at least have an idea. Try out a few keywords and see which ones bring in more viewers and fine tune your SEO strategy. Just make sure you don't stuff your content with keywords; use them sparingly.
Combine Your Inbound Marketing and Content Strategy
By using these three methods of inbound marketing and content strategy, you will find that you are not only creating great content, but also content that sells. This is ultimately what you want from your content, even if it is just a simple, little blog. Your blogs and other written content will be what bring in the sales and just one simple blog can bring in significant revenue for your company. As you sit down to create your content strategy, bring along your sales people and begin combining your inbound marketing techniques with your content. This will spell tremendous success for your company and your revenue will be incredible. What are you waiting for? Start the combining process!
Photo Credit: Marketing and Content/shutterstock