8 tips on how to build an inbound marketing strategy

At the core of your digital marketing campaign is the product or service that you want to sell or promote. Your offer should not only be something that your industry wants but also offering a point of difference. Truly understanding what you core offer is will help you to develop an inbound marketing strategy that will ‘wow’ your prospects. 

Here’s some tips to help you structure and create your inbound digital marketing plan.

  1. Understand your brand identity – it’s key for business growth: One way to start building and understanding your brand identity is by thinking about your business as a person. What characteristics does it have? Is this person professional, an expert in their field, knowledgeable, creative – you get the idea. Start to jot down your thoughts and you’ll start to build a profile for your business. This will need to be translated to your website design and blog posts.
  2. Review the collateral you already have so you know your starting point: Here’s a few questions to consider – Do you have a company logo or brand guidelines? What are your company values and vision? What are the strengths of your team and what hidden strengths can they bring to the table? Having this background information to hand will help you form a well targeted marketing plan as messaging will be aligned to your values and visions.
  3. Create a persona of your target audience: For small businesses especially focus on the target audience, no matter how micro that niche is, and you will fly. Try to grab the whole market and you will end up getting nothing or, at best, poor fitting clients. Your knowledge in your niche will grow and will position you as the expert and the go to person. Think about the goals or challenges of your target audience and create a persona. If you start with their job role, imagine their personal goals such as business growth, saving the business money or a future promotion. Then imagine what challenges they face and start to note solutions for these. So, already you can begin to see a personality form in front of you. Then think about how your service or product can help them.
  4. Research your competition: Before setting out on your inbound marketing campaign, draw up a list of key competitors and the services and products they offer. This can help you make your offers and services stand out.  
  5. Develop keywords and phrases for your business: Think about what key term you would like to be found for. The more content you produce using keywords the more your website is recognised by search engines and improve you search engine optimisation. This means your website will make its way up the organic results pages. Find keywords that work with your business goals and target the areas you’re looking to promote. But finding out which keywords have the most traffic or competition isn’t widely available, this is where working with a digital marketing agency can help.
  6. Create a content plan with these overarching keywords at the core: Content marketing is a key focus for a successful inbound strategy. Create and align your content plan with any new product launches, service updates or industry report launches. You’ll then begin to get a picture of when to plot campaigns throughout the year and through what channels to be most effective. Develop specific content for your website to incorporate key phrases if you haven’t got relevant pages already. If you do, then they are likely to need updating. Also use backlinks to key pages on your website to help lower bounce rate.
  7. Tell search engines you exist: One of the first things you need to do when you’ve created your website, or if you’re embarking on a digital marketing campaign to grow your business, is to make sure you’ve told search engines that you exist. The most popular way to do this is initially is by populating Google My Business with your company details. It’s FREE to do. The very basics to complete are your website URL, opening times, address, contact numbers and email addresses and a short paragraph about your company. But it also allows you to upload blog content, images and videos, therefore another place that you can be found online to help SEO and your company to rise in the search rankings.
  8. Review results: With all the technology in the world at your fingertips, this alone is not going to be effective in getting a return on investment. Become data driven and review results of your campaigns will help you tailor, target and be relevant to the audience you want to reach. Through social media insights, PPC results or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, there’s tools at your fingertips to help you really tweak your campaign for the best results.

If you’re looking for more quality clients, become a lead generation magnet with a targeted inbound marketing strategy. Get in touch with us today or find out more in our handy resources. We are also a digital agency for accountants so check out our marketing services for accounting firms.

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