INBOUND MARKETING. Motivating Results For You & Your Business. Written - By David O Rourke. DAITHIOROURKE. Inc

Transcription

1 INBOUND MARKETING Motivating Results For You & Your Business Written - By David O Rourke DAITHIOROURKE. Inc

2 INTRODUCTION Your Personal Guide to Inbound Marketing Inbound marketing is the method used to increase and solidify your marketing strategies through the use of tested material. Today, this is a vital portion of your online marketing work. Personalized content designed for individual customers and clients produces a highly valuable and effective marketing method. The focus of inbound marketing is always to attract more visitors to your website or company through valuable, unique content, converting those visitors into loyal customers, and creating a firm foundation of respect. When you focus on the unique needs of your customers, visitors turn into subscribers to what you have to offer and they leave feeling more empowered during the buying process. This guide has been developed to help you understand the essential elements of inbound marketing, and to provide you with an in depth overview of the entire process. There are four main ideas relating to inbound marketing are to: attract, convert, close, and delight your customers. Let's take a look at how these elements can affect your visitors and improve your overall performance as a company or business owner.

3 Getting Started 1. Defining Your Brand 2. Defining Your Motivation 3. Buyer Uniqueness and Personality Defining Your Brand You must start with a solid brand foundation before you can find success in any business. Depending on your current company branding experience, you may need a complete overhaul, a few tweaks, or no changes at all. Look closely at your brand as a whole, define your message and mission, and be sure that it addresses the needs of your target customer. DEFINE YOUR MOTIVATION The number one goal is to increase the ROI on your marketing investment. To get there, you need to define a few things: your target audience, your financial goals, and the paths to converting visitors to customers. Starting with analyzing your business goals is the best option, then move onto building successful sales funnels that will produce excellent performance from your campaigns. Inbound Marketing Increasing Revenue Image Source: Mashable.com

4 Buyer Uniqueness And Personality Here we get inside the mind of our potential customers and buyers. who is your ideal customer? Knowing the answer to this question will help you to develop a direct process to build your business. The buyer persona, the type of customer you are trying to reach, will help you align your marketing strategies to better address their needs. Learn what issues concern your customers and how you can help to alleviate those problems or concerns. Throughout every single marketing activity that you engage in, your primary focus must be on your anticipated target buyer. Your website must also be experienced by viewers as personal to each and every one of the visitors that arrive at your pages. CONVERSION PATHS How you customer moves through the buying process is the actual conversion path you've created. Designing a clear path for your customers is an important and essential element of any inbound marketing strategy. When creating your company website, pay particular attention to the conversion paths you have set up. Always have your conversion paths start with a clear call-to-action. Guide your viewers through a specific and personalized sales funnel. Your message and mission need to align with the target customer. In doing so, it will provide higher conversion rates as you solve one or more of their perceived struggles through the content you are providing.

5 Inbound Marketing Sales Funnel

6 THE INBOUND MARKETING METHOD: ATTRACT, CONVERT, CLOSE, DELIGHT We want to attract potential clients to our website or business, convert this traffic into strong leads, close the leads, turn them into customers, and finally delight your customers with the service you provide to them. This unifies our marketing and sales process to produce the ultimate results. ATTRACT Before you do anything, you must think first about how your traffic is going to find you. Structure an outline that will guide you (and your viewers) through the various inbound strategies. This is what will drive the traffic to your website, and will keep them coming back for more. The content has to direct your potential customers to your website, through the sales funnels, and convert them into buyers. Blogging Your goal to connect your audience and drive traffic to your website can be accomplished by blogging. By creating relevant, unique, personalized and interesting content for your target audience will build a firm relationship. On average, a company that blogs will generate 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages. 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog. Inbound marketing, blogging is a crucial part, costs 62% less per lead than outbound marketing (paid search, PPC, PR advertising, etc.)

7 THERE'S MUCH MORE TO BLOGGING THAN JUST CREATING UNIQUE CONTENT. Integrating SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and social media should always be a major component when crafting blog posts and other content for your site. The end goal For creating a blog in the first place to to show up in the search engine results, because this is where people find you. The creation of strong, unique, and valuable content that is relevant to what your ideal, target client is searching for will result is a loyal and repeat customer base. Addressing and utlizing appropriate SEO strategies will make sure your content is optimized for the search terms you've identified. Social media Provides an effective method to promote your blog and content. Incorporating social media into your marketing plan is an excellent method to build followers and share your message over a wider range of potential customers. Another simple way to incorporate social media is to include "share" and "follow" buttons on each and every post you write. This opens up the door for more traffic, and therefore, more generated leads.

8 Social Media One of the best things about social media is that it provides a platform for conversation and engagement with your target audience. Being active and engaged in the social media space where your potential customers can be found means being able to learn about and address their unique needs and struggles. HubSpot tells us that "only 22% of all leads came from traditional methods in 2013" and "inbound marketing dominates lead sources, with social media and SEO driving the highest level of leads, with each driving 14% of all leads." You cannot ignore this important and integral part of your marketing strategies. Doing so would be to lose out on leads and potential new customers that are just waiting for the solution you can provide. Not only will social media open up the engagement between you and your potential customers, but it will also drive more targeted traffic to your site. Now is the time to research and determine exactly where your target audience spends their time online. Are they on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIN? You will want to have a strong presence on all of these platforms, but beginning with one social media space is a great place to start. Wherever you target customer is, then that's exactly where you should be also. Although it's important and obvious to share your own content in your social media campaign, you also need to be sharing content other than you own. Be sure to choose content from reliable sources and material that is relevant to your potential customers. You want to build a relationship with other businesses, entities and people, who may then be willing to share your content to their followers.

9 Finding the right balance isn't easy There are varying schools of thought from sharing at a 50/50 ratio to sharing 80% non-sales content and 20% of your own unique material. The goal here it to increase your traffic, leads, and engagement. If you are always posting and sharing out your sales message, it will get old quick and the audience you are trying to reach will fall away. Website Optimization Today's online world demands an effective and functional website. Your efforts to optimize your website for inbound marketing is of extreme important. Defining clear paths for your customers to take that will lead them through your preferred sales funnels is a must. Building a firm foundation of valuable content and a clear call-to-action is where it all begins. By providing relevant content, users begin to see your website or blog as more than just a place to find out information, ease their struggles and problems, but also as a premier place to find out information about your company. You become a respected resource that they will know, like, and trust. Your website is the front door to your company and business. Design your site around your target audience. Keep their needs and struggles in mind, and address the pain points they may have that could prevent them from moving forward. Make the path clear which you wish them to follow. All this will allow you to match products and services with your unique potential customers and address their specific needs.

10 SEO Before you run for the hills, SEO is not a bad three-letter acronym. Search Engine Optimization is of major importance to your inbound marketing. Use the keywords that your viewers are looking and searching for, not just the keywords that you want to rank for. Focus on long-tail keywords, which will result in more specific and qualified traffic. Properly using Search Engine Optimization for your site or blog is not a difficult or overly time consuming process. There are many excellent tools that you can avail yourself of to make this easier and more valuable. Google Analytics, AdWords, Moz, and HubSpot are a few such tools to consider. These will help you determine the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword, as well as show you the monthly search volume (how many people are actually searching for the term). Obviously, there's no guarantee that you'll rank for a particular keyword, but it can give you a good idea of whether or not the word/phrase is worth targeting to begin with. Inbound Cost s Less Image Source: Mashable.com

11 A Few Definitions To Clear Things Up. In case you are unfamiliar with a few of the terms we've just mentioned in the previous material here, let's examine a few definitions to clear things up. Long-Tail Keywords: provide a more specific search term that can be much more targeted to your particular audience. Taking a simple keyword like "blogging" will produce a very broad result, while being more specific with a term such as "how to write a blog post" will result in a more specific and exact match of relevant searches. Rank: your site's approximate placement within search engine results. The lower the rank, the higher you are in the results. If you have a rank of 1 for a particular keyword, then you would be the first result in the seach engine. Difficulty indicates on a scale of the level of effort you will need to break onto the first page of search engine results for a particular keyword. (Some tools may use a different scale.) Search Volume: is the number of times this exact keyword is searched on a monthly basis. Every single day, more than 5 billion searches are done on Google alone. When you think about how much traffic there is online, it's easy to see how important SEO for your website really is. By using SEO best practices and long-tail keywords on your site and in your content, the odds of ranking for your chosen keywords increases significantly.

12 The Five Key Elements Where You Should Be Adding Keywords For SEO Purposes Include: 1. Page Titles 2. URLs 3. Page Headers 4. Content 5. Meta Descriptions Convert You've taken the time and made the effort to gain solid, steady quality traffic on your site, so the next logical step is to convert those visitors into leads. Enticing your visitors to provide their contact info, address or even name isn't something that is easily done. Visitors are hesitant to give up their personal information unless they can be assured of receiving something valuable in return. So what can you offer to your website visitors that will provide enough of an interest to obtain the contact information? People love free content and this is a great way to go about procuring personal information. Offer e-books, whitepapers, webinars, video series, or any other great content that your readers may find valuable and that aligns with their interests and struggles. This will provide you a much stronger position and a higher chance of converting your prospects into leads.

13 Premium Content Offers Premium content that you offer to your visitors is another simple way to market and promote your brand. Your visitors will naturally follow through the funnel you have in place with the content that you are offering them. Remember to keep your content in line with the needs, interests and struggles of your target audience. All of your content should be of high quality, valuable and needed information. Even though you are providing some free material to your audience, it still needs to be of a high quality in order to build trust. By providing a desirable informational content to your prospective customers, you will have a much better chance of obtaining their contact information. Once you have that info in hand, you can begin moving them through the funnel. Calls To Action (CTAs) The parts of your website that are a must in all branding and promotion activities includes the Calls to Action which drive the traffic to a specific landing page. Each page of your blog or website should include a CTA button in order to increase the odds of converting your prospective clients at every opportunity. Remember to keep your CTAs relevant to the content on each page. You will want to have at least one CTA for each current content offer that you have. Take the opportunity to include a CTA whenever possible - blog posts, website pages, marketing campaigns, etc. Visitors to websites are not always on the same level of interest. Keeping your CTAs available to all visitors as they move through the process will provide a a good chance for your customers to engage at the level they find appropriate for them.

14 Landing Pages Your CTAs have to go somewhere, so let's look at what a landing page is. A landing page is a page that is designed expressly for the purpose of converting visitors into leads. Once a visitor clicks on a CTA and provides their contact info, they are then lead automatically to a relevant landing page. When building a landing page, there are several important elements to keep in mind. Use this list of suggestions whenever you are building and designing out your website landing pages. Write clear, concise and persuasive headlines Remove all navigation links Explain the importance of the offer, using bullet points so the content is easy to read Select the number of form fields for your offer Include a relevant imagine that represents the offer and your business Add social media share icons Keep your pages easy to navigate for your visitors so they can get where they need to go. Carefully planned landing pages are vital to your online marketing strategy, and will go a long way to increasing your conversions. Thank You Pages Everyone likes to be appreciated. After your visitor has completed the opt-in form, provided you with their personal information, they should find themselves on a well-designed "Thank You" page. The Thank You page should have a similar look and feel as to your landing pages, but with a completely different purpose. This is where your visitor will receive the content they signed up for and allow them yet another opportunity to engage.

15 When Designing Thank You Pages, Let's Keep These Items In Mind: 1. Deliver the Offer 2. Provide your visitor with direction 3. Advance them into the sales process 4. Follow up with an 5. Include links to social networks 6. Include website navigation so they can click back to your site if they want to Close Your visitors have now turned into leads. They've been able to obtain valuable content from you in exchange for their personal information. Now it's time to convert these leads into paying customers. Lead Nurturing According to HubSpot, "50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. So if you are not nurturing them, you are simply burning money." How you handle and treat your leads is the next important step you can take as a business or company to convert these leads into paying customers. So what does this mean? Lead Nurturing is simply the method you have in place to provide ongoing information to your leads. You want to ensure that your company or product is at the forefront of their mind when they are ready to make a purchase.

16 Automation The first method of caring for your leads is in the use of automation. This is where your auto responder or marketing software will come in handy. As your customers move through the sales funnel you can be sending targeted s based on the content they have previously shown interest in. Building out your marketing campaign means providing appropriate, related, and well-timed offers throughout the process. If you potential customer arrives at your website through one offer, the automation system will present them with additional offers throughout the process. This allow for multiple opportunities to engage with your company. Building relationships with your leads and staying in contact with them is important to guaranteeing that your brand comes across as reliable and trustworthy. Your prospective clients need to know that you will there when they need you. Build every aspect of your website and marketing funnels to engage your prospective customers and solidify their trust and desire to know more about you.

17 Marketing Even in today's world, marketing is still a significant piece of the marketing methods. Build you relationships with targeted s by creating brand awareness and boosting social interactions. marketing is a relatively inexpensive way to promote what you have to offer. It plays a key role in lead nurturing and it's a great way to move your audience and potential customers through the sales funnel. Implementing an marketing campaign can be done through monthly newsletters, targeted s with valuable information and premium content, and enticing engagement methods. There are many superb ways to use to move your leads farther through the funnel. Tips For A Good Marketing Campaign Image Source wsiworld.com

18 Analysis Once you've achieved all of these pieces, have them in place, have tweaked and tested, this is the time to look at results and the direction things are going in. You'll want to figure out how you're going to use it all to your best advantage. Analysis of your marketing methods is essential so that you can properly evaluate how your inbound marketing campaigns are doing and even where you might tweak for improvements. Start by looking at the top of your funnel, which can be done with various marketing software like HubSpot. This tool allows you to search for a specific landing page, identify the number of views and leads received, and finally learn the conversion rate. You don't need to purchase or use a particular software to determine the efficacy of your promotions and landing pages. This is done simply by analyzing the information about views, leads, and conversions through your website analytics and page views. Inbound Marketing Methodology

19 Next, You'll Be Wanting To Analyze Your Offers. Make a list of your offers in whatever software you prefer such as Excel or simply in notepad. Segment these offers into separate categories to analyze them more in depth, such as SEO, social media, marketing, etc. This allows you to see which strategy is working best and which one(s) to use with each offer. Collect your data for each offer using your marketing analytics. Note the date you started the offer promotion, the landing page views, the number of customers that have been generated from the offer, and the conversation rates. Now, compare your results and prepare to draw some conclusions from the effort. You will be able to see the effectiveness of your offers and what needs improvement. With the data you have collected and begun analyzing, you will want to begin leveraging them. Think about how you can take these results and begin leveraging them for future returns. Stay in tune with your efforts and results by analyzing the data on a regular basis.

20 Delight And Provoke Emotional Response Even after you've brought in some loyal clients, you still have work to do to keep these new customers happy and engaged. Remember to make your clients feel valued by your company and keep them coming back for more through specialized offers just for them. Your continued attention to your new customers will be the key to your continued success. Engagement Campaigns Inbound marketing doesn't end here. An important part of your business results from every step above being followed, implemented, and each client engaged and secured. You must continue to interact and please your current customers. Your best future clients may be your past and present customers. Who better to engage, delight, and provide opportunities to upsell than those clients who have already purchased from you? Figuring out how to keep these customers coming back for more is significant. Get your thinking cap on to brainstorm ideas and potential offers. Your current customers bought from you first for a reason. You instilled trust and they followed the funnel to where they needed to be. Creating successful customer engagement campaigns is all about finding the methods to deliver your message without overloading the customer. You want them to come back for more, so let's consider some engagement campaign ideas. Some Engagement Campaign Ideas Monthly newsletter that shares relevant blog articles and content offers Quarterly customer promotions, exclusive offers for customers only Premium content offers exclusive to customers Social media engagement campaigns

21 Social Engagement Campaigns Next to marketing, social media is the top provider for your inbound marketing. Your prospective and current customers are most certainly on social media and spend a large amount of their time there. You should be there, also, and engaging with them whenever possible. The possibilities for engagement are endless. Building your brand, company awareness, trust and personality on social media tends to lead naturally to more business. Consumers feel more comfortable when they feel they know a brand on a personal level. Know, like, and trust...this is what your potential customers want and need. Your job is to build that belief through engagement and providing quality content. With the numerous choices in social media platforms, choose a few platforms that you find are the best fit for you and are where your potential customers hang out. Then get to work engaging them!

22 Social Media Cheat Sheet

23 Conclusion The focus of any great inbound marketing campaign is about content. Your goal is to deliver value to your prospects and customers. Before you get started with your inbound marketing campaign, remember to look at a few things closely. First and foremost, you will need a few essential resources, as well as a foundation for how you'll position your brand. Focus on *Campaign management/social media, *Copywriting, and *SEO. For the most part, you will be doing these parts all by yourself if you are a sole proprietor of your business. Once you grow and expand, there may be a need to obtain assistance through consultants, campaign managers, social media marketers, and copywriters. Delivering valuable content to your prospects and customers is a never ending process. You will spend time creating, tweaking, analyzing and implementing your content to determine what fits best and produces the best results.

24 Personal Branding SEO Social Media WordPress Web Design Blogging Helping People And Business To Communicate Their Value To The World