According to a 2015 survey of nearly 4,000 marketers and sales professionals, companies are three times as likely to see higher ROI on inbound marketing campaigns than on outbound (HubSpot), making inbound marketing a high priority for virtually every business.
At Stream Companies, we have a team of inbound marketers who utilize a variety of proven marketing techniques to deliver result for our partners. But what if you only have a small, in-house marketing team with limited resources? Or worse, what if you don’t have a team at all? If that’s the case, here are three inbound marketing tactics that you need to start implementing now.
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Create Killer Content
A fundamental part of inbound marketing is content creation. By publishing relevant content that attracts and engages your prospects, you’ll not only draw traffic to your site, but you’ll also start to distinguish your business as a leading authority in your industry.
One of the most popular forms of content is the blog post. Having a blog on your company’s website is a quick and easy way to create and share content that educates, entertains, or simply engages your prospects. However, try keep your blog strictly informative—think top 10 lists or how-to posts. While informational content draws people in, sales-heavy content has the opposite effect.
Another form of content is the ebook. Both ebooks and in-depth guides make terrific premium content offers that could help you to generate leads and build your email list. You can think of an ebook like a much longer, more in-depth blog post. The information should be valuable to your customers or else they may feel like they were cheated.
The last kind of content we’ll mention is videos. Easy enough to create with your smartphone or tablet, videos make a great supplement to existing blog posts or even as a standalone page. They also can help you to reach visitors who don’t have the time or just don’t feel like reading an entire blog post.
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Optimize for Search Engines
Once you have plenty of relevant and engaging content, you want to make sure that your prospects can find it. More specifically, you want to make sure that the search engines can find it.
Here are a few easy ways to improve your content ranking in the search engine results pages.
- Easy on the keywords: While it’s important to make sure that the keyword or keyword phrase makes it into your blog post a few times, keyword stuffing can actually hurt your ranking, so don’t do it.
- Title tags and meta descriptions: If you’re using a content marketing platform such as WordPress, you can easily edit the title tags and meta descriptions to include your keyword phrases. This will help the search engine crawl your site.
- Clarity is king: Once of the best things you can do to improve your SEO is to write clearly. Not only will your readers know exactly what you’re trying to say, but so will the search engines when trying to rank your content.
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Share It on Social Media
After you’ve finished crafting the perfect blog post, optimized the title tags and meta description, and added a terrific supporting video, you’re ready to share your content with the world. Your company’s social media profile can be a great place for promoting your latest content as well as engaging with your customers.
It’s no secret that social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and advocacy, but it’s also a great for sharing your most recent content, asking questions, and interacting with your customers. Trust us, they’ll notice and it will get people thinking and talking about your brand more than if you weren’t.
What’s Next?
By implementing these three inbound marketing tactics, you’ll help your business increase web traffic, visitor engagement, and even conversions. But there’s a lot more to inbound marketing than simply creating a blog post, adding a keyword, and sharing it on Facebook.
If you’d like more about inbound marketing and how it can improve your business, download our free ebook Inbound Marketing 101. You’ll learn many of the basic concepts of inbound marketing and how to implement them as part of your business’ marketing plan.
All the best,
Chris
—Christopher Wirth is an Inbound Marketing Copywriter at Stream Companies, a full-service Philadelphia-area advertising agency.{{cta(‘bde44e78-7a29-4dcb-9c73-78bd13988305’)}}