Just like any relationship, your website and inbound marketing need to work together to make your business succeed. To help you reach your goals, inbound marketing must undergo four stages.
- Attract – In this stage, you turn strangers into visitors and get to know each other.
- Convert – You have to convince them that you’ve got what they’re looking for so they’ll stick around.
- Close – Going through your products and information, they give in and become your customers.
- Delight – Happy customers turn into promoters. They spread the good word giving you free advertisement.
Sounds easy to achieve, right? Not quite.
Attracting relevant traffic might be easy with the help of keyword-optimised content, social media marketing, and paid social advertising. However, if the rest of your website is not optimised for search or your user experience is poor, don’t expect amazing outcomes.
A website created for your user’s needs and optimised for search can make a huge impact on your inbound results. Focus on optimisation so that users can find it easily. Consider these following areas:
- Budget for your website
- Control over the website changes
- A Content Management System (CMS) in line with SEO
- An understanding of the content you want to offer in your website
- Your branding and user journey
Don’t know where to start? Here is a list of essentials that will help make your inbound and content marketing successful.
Basic
Your website needs basic necessities to function well with your content marketing effort. These are:
- Insights – Your website is not about you. It’s about what your customers need to hear from you to make informed decisions. This is why you need an understanding of your customers’ buying habits, keywords, and preferences so you can apply these on your website.
- A Flexible CMS – Your content management system (CMS) should let you easily publish content directly to the Web as well as agile and responsive enough to let you update your content, add links, and tinker with the design yourself. This way, you can optimise it accordingly.
- A strong brand – Your brand is who you are. Make sure your clients can identify with it.
- Responsive design – A helpful user experience across all your devices will make your prospects and customers go back for more.
- A strategically beautiful design – This helps catch your prospects’ attention, get your message across, and help them act.
- Strong product or service pages – Give your customers strong visuals that are descriptive and compelling.
Intermediate
If you’ve gone past the basics, you can move up the scale and apply these strategies to get more traffic to your site:
- Optimise your web pages – Make sure your web pages are SEO-friendly, answer your prospects’ questions, and are regularly updated.
- Use a strong Call-To-Action (CTA) – A call to action helps convert your viewers to leads as well as get them to provide their details so make sure your blogs have one. Make them brief and use strong verbs such as “Sign up”, “Learn more”, or “Get started”.
- Create landing pages that capture leads – A landing page is very useful because it is where your website visitors land when they first reach your site. Make sure it attracts and engages the right audience and convinces them to respond to your call-to-action.
Advanced
Now, you’re ready to level up. What do you need when you’ve reached this stage?
- Case studies – As previously discussed, your website is not about you but your clients so talk about them and the results they’ve reaped.
- Content that solves visitors’ problems – A great way to go about this is to talk to your prospects about their pain points and their challenges.
- A blog and a resource section – Attract your personas with high-quality, valuable, and educational content. This is a must if you want to keep your customers.
- Personalised web content and experiences – Different people from anywhere in the world are looking at your web pages 24/7—at least that’s what you’re hoping for. This is where automation comes in. You need to adapt your web pages to whoever is looking at it. Use automation tools that will allow you to do this.
- Implement a lead nurturing workflow – A lead nurturing workflow leads to higher conversion rates and increased engagement with your contacts using automated touches. It helps you close more educated and qualified customers faster so make use of it!
Conclusion
A well-planned and properly executed inbound marketing helps you earn the attention of your customers. It also makes your company easy to be found and draws customers into your business. Do it correctly and your prospects will surely find their way to your website and make your business soar.
