Does your business use inbound marketing to attract prospects and generate sales? While outbound marketing is still an effective means of promotion, there’s been a growing trend towards inbound marketing tactics. In the most basic sense, it refers to the use of content marketing, social media and search engine optimization (SEO) to attract customers. Here are five tips to enhance your inbound marketing strategy.
Create a Newsletter
If you haven’t done so already, create a newsletter for your business website. When a user subscribes, you can send him or her high-quality content that’s relevant to their interests. Email marketing such as this is a highly effective form of inbound marketing. Furthermore, being that you can send messages to subscribers for as long as they remain subscribes, it’s also cost-effective, more so than other forms of marketing.
Focus on the User, Not Search Engines
When crafting content to use on your business website, you may feel inclined to optimize it for search rankings. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with SEO, but you should focus on the end user and not the search engines. In other words, create content for actual human visitors. Don’t worry about things like keyword density and word count, and instead publish the best quality content for visitors. If you do this, search rankings will soon follow.
Social Sharing
Social media and inbound marketing go hand in hand — you simply can’t have one without the other. So, after publishing a new piece of content, hop on your social media pages and profiles to share it with your followers. Perhaps some of those followers will share it with their friends and family, and some of them may also share it; thus, creating a viral content.
User-Generated Content
Another tip to enhance your inbound marketing efforts is to encourage user-generated content. Rather than trying to create all of your content manually, ask others to create it for you. You could run a contest, for instance, asking users to submit photos in exchange for a chance to win a prize. User-generated content such as this is a great way to diversify your inbound marketing efforts.
Go Beyond Text
When most business owners think of web-based content, text is the first thing that comes to mind. Whether it’s a blog post (such as this), article, social media post, etc., text is always a viable option. However, you shouldn’t limit your inbound marketing strictly to text. Other forms of content to consider include images, photo galleries, video, infographics, podcasts, PDF files, and more.
