Inbound Marketing – The introduction
Google Ventures, Salesforce.com and Sequoia Capital made a massive investment into Hubspot. Hubspot is one of the leading Inbound Marketing companies that have experienced impressive growth and have reached over 4,000 customers in just 4 years. Hubspot displays the power of SEO, content marketing and social media marketing – the cornerstones of Inbound Marketing. The founders of Hubspot authored a book on Inbound Marketing (NYTimes best-seller), and millions are using the Grader series of tools.
Google Ventures along with the other two investors investing in the company, which was at the forefront of Inbound Marketing movement, is indeed inspiring. This move also suggests that the SEO industry is moving to a more mature market. Such increasing adoption also ensures industry growth, which will further result in growth in employment and higher salaries. However, it may even bring along greater competition.
Difference between traditional marketing & inbound marketing
Traditional marketing usually relies on salespeople, paid branding, cold-calling, advertising etc, whereas, Inbound Marketing is cheaper and may yield much better results. In includes certain best practices such as getting targeted traffic from search engine results, articles, infographics, blog posts, webinars, white papers and other content. In addition, it includes getting traffic from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, forums, Digg, Delicious, the Blogosphere, and social news sites. And these three business giants investing in Hubspot proves that “Inbound Marketing” is there for real.
Google and Salesforce’s CRM both have data about the factors that drive web traffic and conversions on the Internet. And since they both have invested in the leading Inbound Marketing Company, it seems both the brands are seeing the positive signs for Inbound Marketing. And Hubspot was the best choice as hardly any other companies have reached their numbers.
It is been observed that Twitter is the number 1 source of Hubspot’s social media traffic, though the best-converting traffic comes from LinkedIn. Facebook is number 2 source of social media traffic; however, this social networking site has occasionally overshadowed Twitter in traffic sent in recent months. Organic search too has sent considerable number of web traffic to Hubspot and its clients.
So, if you are yet to apply Inbound Marketing strategies to your business, it’s a high time to evaluate your online marketing strategies. Apart from Hubspot, Starbucks, Google, Uber are strong examples of successful inbound marketing campaigns.
How to improve your inbound marketing campaign and succeed
Here are 10 methods of doing inbound marketing effectively & successfully.
10 Best Inbound Marketing Strategies
The internet has seen tremendous growth in terms of marketing this past decade. For marketers, the internet has been the avenue to where they can turn to and finds prospects, customers and even business partners without without having to give up a significant investment like how it was before the digital age. Sadly, I feel that even some of the most tenured internet marketers of today still are underutilizing the internet’s true value.
If we are to take a look at how they spend most of their time, we would see that it gets divided to sensing email out to purchased lists, purchasing add space in popular websites, finding out contact details of prospects or leads for the purpose of cold calling or so they could send direct mail. Although, these methods still work, if we analyze these carefully, we’d see that they are merely just reflections of how we have done things the old fashion way.
The Age of Inbound Marketing Has Come
All we need to keep in mind is that 78% of internet users are online because they are looking for something they would be willing to pay for if found. Since that obviously makes up the bulk of people online why don’t we, internet marketers, devout much of our efforts trying to make sure it is our online doors that these people find? This is the whole premise of inbound marketing.
10 effective ways of inbound marketing
And today I’m going to list 10 effective ways of making sure that you’re one of those taking advantage of this next phase in ecommerce.
- If your website represents a brick and mortar business, be sure to claim your spot on popular search engine listings such as Yelp, Google maps, Yahoo local and CitySearch.
- Request reviews from your customers and add them as testimonial on our website. These are so valuable that business websites often place them on the home page.
- Avoid flash or video content to dominate your home page as these will as of yet be indexed by the search engines.
- Integrate social media more particularly social networking sites on your site as it adds a touch of viral possibility once properly placed.
- Make sure to not leave out Quora. I know it isn’t as big as Facebook or Twitter yet; or if it ever will be, but currently I’m seeing far too many quora posts at the top of my search results on Google.
- Reserve a tab for a blog. Content marketing is an indispensable part of inbound marketing as it is capable of making a simple website/blog into a melting pot of sought after information on the industry it is founded on.
- Dig out those golden keywords. It doesn’t matter much if your site has tons of content if they’re not designed to be found by your business’ target audience.
- Get social media to get your website’s back. Streamline your newly published posts to be shown on all major social media sites to get maximum exposure and be relevant to people who may be looking for your product or service.
- Use Google Mobile test & page speed test to view how your website looks online so you can arrange necessary changes. Mobile computing is said to increase several folds the next few years and you want to position your business as early as now.
- Instead on hating on Google’s panda or penguin update, why not make it your friend? The algorithm is all about content and once you’ve removed all those spam and replace them with good ones you’ll realize it easy to befriend the panda.
More Inbound Marketing Tips
- Segment your audience & Create a buyer persona.
- Produce awesome content.
- Start guest blogging.
- Maximize your SEO effort.
- Acquire leads with freebies.
- Start an influencer marketing campaign.
- Build effective email marketing campaigns.
- Make your website convert well.
- Leverage Social Media
- Create strong lead magnets & lead funnels
- Build effective landing pages
- Track result & re-strategize
Didn’t know about inbounding much before. Really informative and interesting article.
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