7 Tips To Grow Your Business With Inbound Marketing

Praveen Kumar

Apr 6, 2016

5 min read

Today the internet is overflowing with information and your potential buyers are being over-saturated with it. In fact, Sirius decisions has reported a 22% increase in the average sales cycle over the past 5 years because of more involvement of the decision makers in the buying process.

To make sales you need to provide these decision makers the content that they are looking for that helps them make a decision exactly why your company is the next stop where they should buy the product from. Giving this informative content at the right time, and on the right platform has become your top job priority.

There are simpler ways to use Inbound Marketing to grow your business and we’ll have a look at it.

1. Research

To do a research, you don’t need wikipedia go throughs or searching over the internet for case studies or white papers to make your own strategy. All that is needed is you need to know your business and objectives, knowing about the competition and what kind of inbound strategy they employ and last and most important thing is to know your customers.

Just ask yourselves these simple questions:

Knowing your business

How would you measure the performance of your efforts?
What are your revenue goals?
How do you describe the growth of your business?( revenue generated, amount of leads coming in, customers acquired, etc.)
Defining the sales process? (producing content used to educate prospects, what is the length of process, etc.)

Knowing your Competition

If you think that you know it all about your industry that might be correct for some cases but businesses overlook the fact that they shouldn’t care much about the changes taking place in the industry, updates and innovations. If you want to stay ahead of the herd then continued industry research is a must.

What kind of content is posted by your competitors on their website?
Is there any major changes taking place, news and updates?
Does a business to business marketplace exist for your industry?
What is the current scenario regarding your industry stats? Are your goals realistic and attainable?

Knowing Your Customer

Constantly staying in touch with your sales team is important because they are the ones who are in direct contact with your potentials customers and they are the ones who can provide an insight about what your customers want. Some questions to ask them are:

5 key points that are commonly answered by the sales people?
How is your product helpful in solving the customer’s problems?
Most responsive customer demographics?
What kind of communication the customers respond to the most?

2. SEO

Creating content as per the needs of your customers is as important as optimizing it for keywords. Knowing in depth about what keywords your customers are searching for and optimizing each and every page of your website for such keywords is the process that your business needs to follow. When it comes to SEO keeping a tab on these takeaways is helpful:

Including keywords in the page content in elements like header and page text
Including keywords in the page properties such as URL, meta description and alt tags for images.
Most importantly linking keywords in your content to the other pages of the website or to the other websites or landing pages for backlinking.

3. Content

Most important and integral part of Inbound Marketing is the content. Creating an Inbound strategy that includes contents like blogs, content on websites, landing pages, on social media or email to which your customers respond the most to should be the area you should focus your energy.

To see results you can even ask your customers by creating the premium content and fill out a form that how helpful or informative do they find your content.

4. Blogging

Posting blogs on your websites and optimizing them for keywords is the way how you bring organic traffic to your website. It is highly recommended that you use blogging to grow traffic on your website. Some simple tips for a robust blogging strategy are:

Writing content around the issues, and challenges that your prospects face and penning their solutions and mentioning about how your products or services can solve your problems.

Maintaining the frequency

The amount of content that goes out in a day whether it be in any form: blogs, content on social media sites etc., maintain the frequency according to the response you get from your customers.

Learning from competitors

Your competitors have already been blogging, so learn most of the stuff from them like what kind of content they post, what is the response they get in the form of comments, shares etc.

Using call-to-actions

Providing call-to-actions at the end of the blog like a button re-directing them to your products or services page after you have addressed their concerns through your blog.

5. Lead Communication

After that you have successfully implemented all the above steps and let us assume that you have got some qualified leads, now is the time to actually focus on communicating with them. Based on the type of leads or queries that have been generated by various types of customers: who they are and what is their demographics, what kind of service or product are they looking at, which question they want to be answered by you. All these need to be taken care of while communicating with the customer.

6. Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the time when you get to know whether a lead is sales ready or not so that the sales team is not wasting time on unqualified leads. Here are some tips:

Refining your messages

Giving your customers with the relevant content or asking them more questions to know exactly what they want to know. They exactly need to hear something from you like an offer or something that entices them towards your company.

What to give your customers

Blogging comes in handy for this purpose. Keep sending them blog posts or updates in the lead nurturing e-mails to inform them or getting them back on your website.

7. Conclusion

We hope that these 7 steps in your Inbound Marketing will help you grow your business. Creating the right content, optimizing the content for SEO will attract the right kind of visitors you are looking on your website and certainly generate queries for your products or services.