Achieving success with inbound marketing requires time, effort, and money – three luxuries that most business people do not have these days.
Is there a way to see results from inbound marketing immediately, even within days? Now, this is a really good question. To help you grow your business faster than you thought possible, the current article is about to give you a quick start over on inbound marketing. Here is what you need to do:
1.Develop a Website
Regardless of whether you already have a website, or you are about to build one, you have to make sure that it is easy to navigate, has a professional appearance, displays the right messages, is search engine friendly, and is mobile ready. From an SEO perspective, you can optimise your site by simply looking for the keywords that people use to search for your products and services, creating keyword-targeted content, and building quality links.
2. Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is one of the few tools you can use to assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. A few inbound marketing metrics you can track with this tool are pageviews, which indicate the most visited pages of your site or blog; new visits, which can help you determine how many people visit your site for the first time; bounce rates, which allow you to identify the percentage of visitors who leave your site within seconds after accessing it; and time on page and time on site, which shows how much time visitors spend on each page and on site. Additionally, you can use GA to get information about certain visitors, to determine which products or services need additional advertising, and even to compare different layers of data for better ROI management.
3. Set up a Blog
Having a great source of content can help you attract people looking for your products and services, drive more traffic to your website, and increase your brand’s visibility online – three elements that will translate into more opportunities for your business to be found. Blogs are great for that. Although setting up a blog may seem like a difficult task, it does not have to be. In fact, by using open source blogging tools, such as WordPress, you can build a variety of virtual platforms, from corporate websites to personal blogs, and everything in between. Once you set up your blog, a blog posting frequency of two times a week can help you achieve good results in a relatively short period of time.
4. Add Lead Capturing Tools
It is important to complement your website and blog with lead capturing tools, such as call-to-action links or buttons, which encourage visitors to take action; landing pages, which take visitors to specific products and services; and contact, comment, and newsletter sign-up forms, which can help turn visitors into leads. You can also use marketing automation software solutions, such as Pardot, HubSpot, Spokal, InfusionSoft, and Marketo, which focus on targeting and engaging prospects across multiple channels, increasing your company’s online presence, and ensuring optimal marketing performance.
5. Determine How You Will Respond to Leads
You have set up your website and blog; you have added call-to-action buttons and sign-up forms; you have even published a few blog posts. But everything is useless if you have not defined a process for what you will do with your leads. Who will handle phone calls when people will call? Who will reply to emails? Who will contact potential customers upon their request? If you do not have a strategy to connect and stay in touch with your prospects, the time and effort you put into creating a lucrative inbound marketing plan will be wasted. And you will not be able to get the results expected, now or in the future.
Yes, inbound marketing is very complex. However, if you implement the steps mentioned above, you will be able not only to get started with inbound marketing and enjoy some quick wins, but also to test your marketing strategy, build up some experience, gain confidence, and develop the necessary skills to make the most of inbound marketing for years to come.