Inbound Marketing Feels Like Personalized Marketing!
Are you getting frustrated because your web presence is not receiving the attention you think you deserve? You keep ask yourself why your ranking is low, why you are not attaining more qualified leads, all while you have a beautiful website and are plugged into all the popular social media outlets. The reason may lie deeper than what meets the eye.
Let’s talk about Inbound Marketing!
Inbound marketing is a way to create valuable content that people want, it’s a concept that may require you to shift how you communicate and pursue new customers.
Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects' attention through old fashioned interruption methods such as TV Commercials. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to find, and draws customers to the website by producing valuable content for the target market. It can be time consuming creating content marketing, but wouldn’t you rather have people come to you because of what you offer, than you having to go track down customers and telling them you have the solution to their problem?
Inbound marketing requires many things to be successful, and many of us in the Marketing field are still figuring it out, but here is my two cents:
Know your customer: Discover who your actual customers are. Are they who you thought they were or are they outside your target market? When creating SEO and using marketing outlets, make sure to use phrases and language that is in common with your product users. A great tool to make sure your marketing works for your target market is to create “personas” of your different customers. Give that persona real life demographic and psychographic information based on your knowledge of your customer, give them a problem that is a common complaint of their work environment. How can you relate and sympathize with their problem?
Imitate your customer: Know what their hobbies are, know the phrases they speak, and integrate those into your communications and contact messages for those customers. If you are a pet store selling fish, you would never consider selling fish with their true Latin names because your target market is most likely more familiar with the term ‘Goldfish’ rather than ‘Carassius auratus’
Stop trying to recreate the wheel: There is a reason that all websites have a logo in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, and have familiar sections such as Home, About, and Contact. It is because that is how people know to navigate and find the information they need from a site, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Some times it’s best to be original within a framework and demonstrate your creativity in other mediums.
Quality content adds tremendous value: If you offer a blog on your site you can position yourself as an expert in an area. Not only will it add more words and links for SEO to pick up on it also creates credibility that you know what you are talking about. A blog is usually a make or break moment for a buyer when they are looking for true credibility. The goal of inbound marketing is to add value to your brand.
I want to make any of you that are not already aware. You can get certified in inbound marketing from Hubspot for free. I have read the reviews and unfortunately I have heard things such as “The first thing to know about Hubspot’s “Inbound Certification”, is that it doesn’t certify you in inbound marketing. It certifies you in Hubspot’s self-created definition of inbound marketing.” But not all feedback is negative. I am still working my way through the program and I would have to say that the video learning makes for easy learning and I already feel like I am reinforcing ideas that I have learned about in my marketing classes. I’ll let you know after I pass what I think of it, but in the meantime it never hurts to keep learning, so go and do it!
Click here to learn more about Hubspot’s Inbound Certification!
