Inbound Digital Marketing
Are your traditional marketing efforts continually leaving you with a lower than expected ROI? It could be due to a lack of inbound marketing techniques which are becoming more essential to capturing new customers than ever before. But what is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing focuses around the creation and effective placement of engaging and relevant content related to your industry that consumers will come across in their web browsing. The idea behind developing this content, is that when a potential customer is searching for information regarding a subject that interests them, they will come across your content and become familiar with it and once there is a certain level of trust, they will be more likely to listen to your suggestions. Within the content, there will undoubtedly be opportunities to plug your product or services, and because of the fact that you have already created value for them, they will be more likely to choose you over competitors. This content can be hosted on the business website itself, or elsewhere on the web, providing links to your website.
One of the keys to successful inbound marketing is the quality of the content. The goal should be to focus your efforts on creating content that is accurate, interesting, and genuinely helpful to the consumer. Any content that you create will reflect on your business. Even if people aren’t aware that your business is the one creating the content it will reflect on you because the links to your website will create a trigger in the minds of the consumer, causing them to associate the bad or biased information with your business.
The people who are reached have already proven an interest in the product or service, therefore, they are farther along in the customer awareness cycle. These people now just need to be brought into the stages of brand liking and preference, which is accomplished through the trust you develop by continually striving to provide the most accurate and helpful content. A customer who believes that you are the most knowledgeable and well-intentioned in the industry will not only become your lifetime customer, but will also become one of your biggest salespersons. Through their word of mouth, reposting, and the buzz they create in the social media world, these customers will help drive traffic to your business, increase your sales, and reduce your need for expensive outbound marketing techniques that are less likely to have as high of a ROI.
Effectively Measure Social and Email, While Guaranteeing Content Optimization
Hubspot is an inbound-marketing software company that has been helping businesses rethink the way reach their customers for years. They recently introduced new products that will change our ability to measure success in our social media and email marketing efforts. They have also developed software that optimizes content across all platforms.
Social Inbox
I’ll start by introducing Social Inbox. This software program allows you to identify which social media interactions are from your customers, and which ones are from your leads. This gives you an increased ability to coordinate your social media efforts more efficiently and provide more human interactions with your customers than ever before.
By taking a database of your leads, opportunities and customers, Social Inbox connects them to your social media interactions. This distinction increases the human aspect of communication because you are able to address them in a more appropriate manner considering your current relationship with them. This is great for a marketing manager or a sales team who is able to identify high potential leads, and personalize an approach to them based on their profile information.
Signals
Signals is another software program that helps companies to manage their email campaigns and measure success. Signals allows the user to analyze emails on categories such as:
1. Did they open your email?
2. Did they click through?
3. Where did they click through?
4. What they are doing currently with regards to your content
5. Whether they became a potential sales lead.
These types of measurements are important to a business, not only for the fact that they let you know about the above mentioned items, but they give you the ability to see if your campaigns are effective, or if you’re just wasting your time.
Content Optimization System (COS)
This tool is one that is going to make user interface experts very happy in the future. The responsive design that is built into the program means that when you look at the website, social, email, blog, or any other online marketing campaign, the content will be optimized for your viewership by automatically adapting to the context of the users device. Cell phones, tablets, desktops, laptops, and whatever crazy next generation devices they throw at you.
Joe Marketing- Discovering the Digital Age 