9 Simple Ways to Use Inbound Marketing to Grow Your Business

As you probably know by now, the cycle your potential customers go through to purchase your product has changed. In fact, by 2020, Gartner predicts customers will self-manage 85% of their relationships with companies without every directly engaging a human.

Therefore, it has become your job as a business owner to make sure that this information is coming to them at the right time, in the right format, and on the right platforms. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean you have to undergo a complete overhaul of your existing strategy and/or marketing efforts. I’ve put together a list of 9 simple ways to use inbound marketing to grow your business.

Research

1) Set your goals

• What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to measure?
• What are your revenue goals?
• What does growing your business mean to you?
• How many leads would you like to have coming in?
• How many customers are you looking to acquire?

Make sure to set these up as S.M.A.R.T goals, so you may measure and track your progress/results. By going through and defining where you currently are, you can set realistic goals that will help measure the success of your efforts. Make sure to look up some current industry statistics for your goals to ensure they are realistic and attainable.

2) Understand your customer

The best way to go about this is to go through and set-up buyer personas for what you would consider an “ideal” customer. Use your sales team, your marketing team, and any existing customers that fit your persona profile to develop your persona. Look for things such as:

• What are their pains?
• What problems of theirs can your product or service solve?
• What are your customer demographics?
• What questions do they often ask when engaging with your sales team?
• What messaging do they respond to the most?

These are just a few questions to get you started, if you’d like to see more example questions, check out this article.

Content

3) Determine the right content

You can use blogging and social media to bring visitors to your site, but you’ll need to develop content in order to convert these visitors into leads. Be sure to create content in the different stages of the buyer’s journey; awareness stage, consideration stage, and decision stage. That way you can appeal specifically to your lead’s current interest, as well as you the varying levels of offers to help determine your lead scoring on the backend to ensure that your leads are qualified.

4) Try different types of content

Everyone takes in information in different ways. Some of us like to read pdfs, others to listen to podcasts, and others to watch videos. By creating different types of content you can engage the varying types of learners you are sure to have in your database. Sure, it is important to focus on the type of content your buyer persona prefers to take information from, but don’t be afraid to explore different types of content as you may find a new stream of audience opening up. Some different types of content include:

• Ebooks
• Webinars
• Whitepapers
• Slidedecks
• Checklists
• Podcasts
• Charts
• Case Studies
• Kits

Blogging

5) Publish the right content

Your blog is a great way to build up a steady stream of visitors that you can turn into leads. You’ll want to focus on writing the right content by using your buyer personas. Write content around the questions, issues, and challenges that your buyer personas (potential customers) want answers to. This will help your readers not only find valuable information, but also introduce them to your brand.

6) Publish content consistently

A big key in developing your steady stream of visitors via your blog, is publishing consistently. Readers are more likely to come back if they know that there will be new content waiting for them. By publishing on a consistent schedule your audience will be more likely to return.

7) Use calls-to-action

A steady stream of visitors to your blog is great, but it won’t impact your bottom line unless you can convert those visitors into leads! By using a call-to-action (CTA) at the bottom or on the sidebar of your blog post you can help grow your leads and sales. Remember that it’s important that the CTA’s content offer is relevant to the blog post topic.

Lead nurturing

8) Use targeted messaging

You can lose leads by sending them too much information, too little information, the wrong information, or the right information at the wrong time. In short, to keep your lead interested your messaging must be targeted and helpful to them. That means your messages should be crafted around your specific buyer personas, and their position in the buyer’s journey.

You don’t want to ask a recently converted lead to sign up for a free trial, you just met them! By crafting messages full of helpful information, based on the buyer persona and their location in the buyer’s journey, you can nurture those leads into sales-qualified-leads (SQLs) that your sales team will have a much easier time closing.

9) Refine your messaging

Once you’ve completed your campaign, go back and look through your lead nurturing. Which messages did well? Which did not? Look for the similarities between those that did well and replicate those traits in other emails. Make sure to go through those that did not do well also, and re-write them using the information you’ve gathered to try and increase their success rate.

I hope these 9 tips have given you a better understanding of how integrating inbound marketing can help grow your business. If you are looking for more information as you dive into the world of inbound marketing, please subscribie to our blog.