What’s your ultimate goal when implementing an inbound marketing strategy for your brand? Driving more people to your website? Generating leads? No. These are important factors in your campaign, but they’re still only a means to an end. You can increase the number of monthly visitors to your site by 10,000, but that number means nothing if they aren’t buying what you have to sell. And once they DO buy from you, it’s still your job to keep them connected with your company, so they’ll buy from you again next time, and the time after that. A good inbound marketing strategy needs to be focused on the big picture at all times. Here are a few tips for keeping your campaign geared toward the long term.
- Ask the Right Questions. There are a thousand different questions to be asked when it comes to inbound marketing. Some of them are dependent on what your company does and what your goals are with your customers. Others may help you figure out what approach you should take. But in the end, it all boils down to two: “What does my audience want?” and “What does my audience need?” They sound like the same question, but they’re not quite. “What does my audience want?” refers to the content that your brand offers. How can you best target that content to your potential customers? It gives way to questions like, “What is my audience looking for online?” and “What medium should my content take in order best to connect with them?” as well as “What social media channels is my audience most likely to be on?” Once you’ve got these things covered, you can move on to the second question: “What does my audience need?” This refers specifically to the product you’re trying to sell. What are your potential customers looking to do and how can you use your products and/or services to help them do it? If you have a good idea of what your target audience is like, you can begin to answer these questions, at least preliminarily. These questions should influence every aspect of your inbound marketing process, from content to social media to email campaigns. Having a policy in place for reaching out and connecting with potential customers and helping them with what they need—whether it involves selling them a product or just answering a question—is essential to your company’s inbound strategy.
- Quality Over Quantity. You need a lot of content to make your inbound campaign successful and cement your brand in people’s minds. But if all you do is try to churn out blog after blog, you’ll end up being counter-productive. If your content is shoddy, lackluster, boring or otherwise deficient, then having more of it just means more chances to show people how little your company cares about what they produce. First concentrate on creating the best, most useful content you can. You may want to farm this work out to someone with the time and experience to get things right. Once you’ve got that covered, then you can focus on releasing your content in higher volumes. The same principle applies to lead generation. Concentrate on generating fewer leads, but vet them thoroughly to make sure they’re more likely actually to buy.
- Keep In Touch. Once you’ve made your sale, keep the customer’s information on file. Have a separate campaign in place targeting existing customers. Stay connected, let them know you care about their situation, and position yourself to continue supplying them with what they need for years to come.
