Magnet symbolising inbound marketing

6 reasons why you should use inbound marketing

To know why you should use inbound marketing, firstly let’s just touch on what inbound marketing means. It’s about content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, Pay Per Click advertising and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s the digital marketing tactics we employ to help attract prospects to our services and products.

Here’s an overview of the reasons why you should be using inbound marketing for your business.

  1. Building brand awareness and trust: Marketing is all about building awareness of your products and services. There’s approximately 7 touch points needed for there to be an inbound sale or a clients success on boarding, therefore for you to get your message out there you need to continuously be talking about it in a variety of ways. That’s where digital marketing fits in. From blog page to social media platforms or email marketing, there’s a plethora of ways to get your business out there – you just need to be targeted.
  2. Reach the potential customers that you want to: Once you know the audience you want to reach you can get really targeted with your inbound digital marketing campaigns. Create a persona of the audience you want to reach. Think of their goals, challenges and how your service and product can help them solve their issues which will improve customer acquisition.
  3. Engage with your audience through social media marketing: With the raft of social media platforms and content being consumed in our daily lives, it’s worth remembering that this is yet another avenue for a company to reach potential new business. Importantly, it puts you in direct contact with your audience, allows you to engage directly which helps build awareness and trust. A successful digital marketing campaign will engage with people searching for your products or services. 
  4. Developing insightful content to build your brand as a thought leader: A blog or news pages on a website are not only key for keeping content fresh on a website which in turn helps SEO, but also helps build you as a thought leader in your industry. Being an authority in your field of business, offering relevant information to website visitors, helps build domain authority in search engines. It also helps you rise in the organic search rankings.
  5. Create additional touch points for your business to be seen: SEO, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, these are all digital marketing tools to take advantage of which increases your chances of being seen by your target audiences. Creating a bespoke campaign using relevant channels for the messages you want to get out there will create an effective outcome through engagement, awareness, interest. It’s key to have these touch points to move your prospect through the lead generation funnel.
  6. Be focussed: 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years (Source: Venture Harbour, 2017 via Hubspot). Marketing automation frees up time by automating repetitive tasks, it also allows tailored automated responses, tracking of prospects activity on a website as well as chat bot automation.

If you’re looking for more quality clients, become a lead generation magnet with a targeted inbound marketing strategy. Get in touch with us at Smart Cow an inbound marketing agency in London, or see below and find out more in our handy resources and other marketing services from web design to video marketing.   

Digital marketing resources:

Here’s some further information on inbound marketing for your business.

Digital marketing mix n match

Digital marketing mix ‘n’ match

The rapid growth of digital marketing and the evolution of technology to suit a business’s every want and need makes it crucial for firms to stay one step ahead of their competition as changes occur much faster than ever, with much greater collateral than 10 years ago. Therefore, to take full advantage, it’s important to understand the nuances of digital marketing, and to realise that one size doesn’t simply ‘fit all’ anymore, as seen with Kodak film failing to adapt to digital cameras and losing their market dominance. A mix and match of disciplines is key to delivering results, and it’s all about giving customers a good brand experience.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This is a combination of strategies to make it easier for a website to be found online. There is a mixture of on and offsite changes which can be made to optimise your visibility and ranking against competitors. When we start working with clients, we initially look at core aspects such as how your website is built, target audiences and keywords you use, then fit this in with tailored campaigns and consultations to create more brand awareness and business for your company.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Online markets are becoming incredibly competitive, even saturated at some points, and so it can be difficult as to how best to get your business noticed above this herd of competitors. Pay Per Click allows you to place an advert where your target market may be looking, be it on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Adwords, with a call to action or purely promoting brand awareness. This provides instant results and therefore is great for a new and growing business. Many firms have found this is a great substitute for those without efficient SEO campaigns in place or to help boost initial SEO activity when a website is launched.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can be extremely efficient in growing an online customer base and awareness. As a popular inbound marketing strategy, it helps build rapport; with Facebook still the most utilised social network with 2.2 billion monthly users, social media channels will still be a go to place for many to get company insight and an idea of other consumer experiences of products. From bespoke content to sending targeted messages, this type of activity on social media channels will all help to increase brand and product awareness while remaining cost effective.

Email Marketing

Utilise an email marketing campaign to send tailored messages to your core audience. Utilise content already produced in your blog and re-purpose for short and snappy bursts of product information.   clients whilst performing full reports on the success of leads, allowing you to store data for the future on how best to target particular customers. We use techniques such as De duplications and bounce reports to provide a wide market reach in a cost-effective manner in order for you to grow a strong digital customer base.

For more information on any of these services and more, make sure to visit our website or simply saymoo@smart-cow.com

Digital market is growing; let us help you to grow with it!

Day 29: SEO competitor analysis

The SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) analysis workflow is divided into four sections:

Identify your potential SEO competitors

This initial section is helpful if you’re starting with an SEO process that you don’t know anything about.
It’s good to know that these are not all limited to companies or websites that offer the same type of content, but can be any website that competes with you for your target keywords.

Validate your SEO competitors

After you’ve found the potential competitors that you have gathered from different sources it’s time to make sure they’re valid. But how do you do this? By analysing and filtering those which are already ranking, and to which degree for the same keywords.

Conduct SEO competitor analysis

You now have your SEO competitors and potential target keywords, you can gather, list and compare your website to your competitors, using all of the relevant data to select and prioritise those keywords. This information is likely to include keyword relevance, current rankings, search volume, ranked pages, as well as domains’ link popularity, content optimisation, and page results characteristics, among others.

Select your target keywords

Now it’s time to analyse the data you’ve previously gathered for yours and your competitors websites using the specified criteria to select the best keywords for short, mid and long term use in your SEO process, the ones with the highest relevance, search volume, and profitability.