The start of an inbound marketing campaign involves taking inventory to see what is what. It begins with assessing a company’s overall online visibility and understanding where online fits within a company’s marketing strategy. As online visibility and online leads become a priority, the next step is to identify the key pillars that will support a winning inbound marketing plan.
Identify Buyer Personas that Represent Ideal Clients
Buyer personas are much more than target customer profiles. They are representations of an individuals’ wants, needs, and desires, and specifically, they are a representation of your ideal buyers’ wants, needs, and desires. Think about your current customers and what made them buy from you. If you don’t know, then ask them.
You’ll find that you have different types of buyers or individuals involved in the buying process. By identifying who they are and their motivations to seek out your services, you create a basis for finding the keyword phrases they use online to search for companies like yours.
Keyword Research that Reflects Your Target Customers’ Vocabulary
Developing a list of target keyword phrases for which you want to be found online using language that is used by your target customers creates a framework for the rest of your inbound marketing activity. While it’s tempting to target the keyword phrases with the greatest search volume, this strategy will typically not work for a small business website as those terms are highly competitive.
It’s more effective for you to target keywords that are more specific to your business and location which helps with bringing more relevant website visitors. An example is targeting “NYC nutritionist” instead of “nutritionist”, if you are a nutritionist located in the New York City area or targeting “commercial cleaning service nyc” instead of “commercial cleaning service”, if you are a commercial cleaning company located in New York City.
Position one on Google generally receives about 40% of the organic search traffic compared to position twenty which receives less than 1%. Nutritionist may have 500,000 searches per month, and NYC nutritionist 10,000 searches per month, but 4,000 (40% of 10,000) relevant visitors versus 500 (1% of 500,000) widely dispersed visitors is much more attractive.
Compelling Offers, Call to Action Buttons, and Landing Pages
By implementing these key inbound marketing components, you can have high visibility on Google and still not have anyone contacting you through your website. Once people arrive at your website, you want to direct them to your landing pages so you can convert them into a lead. How do you get your website visitors to your landing page? Easy — call to action buttons.
First, a landing page is a special page on your website whose sole purpose is to present a compelling offer such as a free ebook, widget, or calculator that will benefit your website visitors. In exchange for this offer, you ask website visitors to give you their email address and some additional information that helps you understand who they are so you can serve them better. Not a bad trade.
Second, a call to action button is a graphical button or banner that you can put on your sidebar, at the top of a web page, or at the bottom of a blog posting (this blog posting has a call to action button at the bottom). With the button, you want to briefly describe your compelling offer, then use an imperative statement such as “Download Now”, “Register Now”, or “Sign Up” to motivate your website visitors to click the button to view your landing page. You landing page content then needs to explain the benefits of the compelling offer so your visitors take the final step and submit their information.
Implement these pillars of inbound marketing and you will see a dramatic increase in the number of inbound inquiries from your website. While not every lead is ready to buy at that exact moment, there is no a much greater chance of them buying from you once they are ready.
What results have you seen after you’ve implemented an inbound marketing process on your website?
Image by izik
Free Inbound Marketing Plan Template
Online presence optimization is a key ingredient in your inbound marketing plan. You want to clearly identify your target customers and how they are searching for your services online.
If you don’t have one already, here is a free template that will help you make sure you have clearly identified and aligned your business objectives and marketing activity.
