Best Practices in Inbound Marketing Campaigns

While your internal sales team is crucial to converting leads into sales, and your service team is vital for maintaining ongoing relationships with clients, it’s really the foundations that your marketing team lays through inbound marketing campaigns that are the key to building and maintaining business over time. It’s the purpose of your inbound strategies to attract, educate, engage, and delight potential clients in your brand’s message in order to create long-term value and help your sales team convert leads. 

The danger in inbound marketing for the uninitiated is that your company is likely not taking a wide enough approach to inbound strategies, and instead focussing efforts on only a limited number of channels. In this post, we explore various best practices we believe our clients should remain focused on in order to maximize the impact of their inbound marketing campaigns.Focus on the Power of SEO

Search engine optimization comes in many shapes and sizes across the infrastructure of your website. Much work can be done behind the scenes to optimize your page to attract Google’s attention, but you can also employ a number of tactics on the surface of your website and across the internet in order to consistently guide users back to your page and into your lead conversion sales funnels.  

Local SEO is One of the Strongest Tools You Can Deploy

If your business is based out of a brick-and-mortar location, localizing your SEO efforts is one of the most powerful steps you can take in strengthening your inbound marketing strategy. If your business depends upon traffic from the surrounding metropolitan area, the most important thing you can do for your business is to set up your local, free “Google My Business Page,” build up your online reviews across multiple review platforms, and include location-specific keywords and information across social media. This will help searchers looking for local services to find your business easily.  

Internal Page Linking Creates Relevance, Relationships Between Topics

The ranking algorithms for Google and other search engines are becoming increasingly complex in that they rely less upon keywords and more upon the relationship of written material to other pages throughout your website and their relevance to the overall business. By linking a landing page to a relevant services page, and using keyword phrases for links, you’re creating a map for Google as to how you intend for audiences to use and navigate the site, giving Google more confidence that your brand is trustworthy and that you intend to educate and inform visitors on top of trying to secure their business. 

Linking Up With Relevant Online Services in the Same Industry

Google rankings are now as much about the authenticity of the content you have on the page as they are about the keywords you’ve included. The goal is to ensure that the links Google delivers up for search results are considered informative and helpful. Also referred to as backlinking, link building with other sites means that you’re actively creating quality content others will find helpful and link to in blogs, social media posts, and other places, signaling your authority on the subject in question. At GoingClear, we also encourage our clients to seek out mentions of their brand and request that the mentions link back to specific landing pages. 

Honest, Engaging Content Marketing Across Multiple Channels

When we refer to content marketing, we’re talking about a wide range of mediums through which we can communicate with potential clients. While leveraging blogs, eBooks, social media messages, and infographics might not be new tactics for you, the way that you should be using them in 2020 and beyond might be. 

Content marketing should no longer be about the hard sell — leave it up to your sales team to convert qualified leads. Your content should be engaging and delighting readers, guiding targeted demographics to the first steps on their buyer’s journey with your brand. That means that you’re educating them about services you offer in a general sense, and positioning your content to be readily available and appear in searches for solutions to problems they are trying to solve. You should be providing content that readers connect with on a personal level, which will translate into their incentive to choose your brand when the time comes to make a purchasing decision. 

Leveraging the Power of Video Marketing

It’s important to drill down into a very specific kind of content marketing in order to remain relevant in the business landscape of 2020 and beyond: video marketing. According to Hubspot’s 2020 Ultimate List of Marketing Stats, more than 50% of consumers prefer video marketing content to other forms of information, including emails, social media posts, and blogs. This leads to a whole other host of amazing statistics about the power of video marketing, one of the most telling perhaps being that a product video can increase purchases by 144 percent. By incorporating video throughout your inbound content channels, you’re increasing engagement, brand recognition, and the chance that those viewing the videos will in turn convert to clients down the line.     

The Tried and True ROI of Email Marketing

While email seems to be an archaic method of marketing, it still remains one of the most lucrative. For every dollar spent on email marketing efforts, businesses are still seeing an average return of $38, a mind-blowing 3,800% return on the initial investment. While newsletters remain important email tools, the true value comes when emails are personalized and used as a way to ask recipients, “how would this service or product benefit me and how can it help me solve the problem I have at hand?” Content that relies on short, easily consumable facts and remains informative and helpful without pushing for the sale have the most impact and the most chance of making it through junk filters into the recipients inbox to be read. 

Your Multi-Channel Strategy Starts with GoingClear

Strategic planning of your inbound marketing approach starts and ends with how you plan to help potential clients solve the problems they need solved. Your approach needs to be multifaceted and designed to engage and reassure readers that your brand has more to offer than a flashy logo and a gimmicky slogan. Competing with other marketing agencies in the Boston economic landscape has taught our talented team at GoingClear some vital best practices that we want to in turn share with our clients. Learn more about what our agency can do to help you rise above the competition by crafting the most efficient and effective inbound marketing strategy possible. Connect with GoingClear, your Boston inbound marketing agency today.