3-Step Inbound Marketing Strategy

Trevin Shirey

27 Sep 2016

If you’re in need of a marketing campaign for your business and you’ve decided that inbound marketing is the way to go, the next step is to set up a strategy with successful methodology.

No successful campaign ever takes off without careful planning and a clear strategy for reaching your goals.

Here, we hope to provide a basic outline of a successful, 3-step, inbound marketing strategy that will help your campaign soar!

Step One: Determine your goals

If you don’t have goals in mind to work toward, it’s impossible to know what methods to take to get there.

That’s why the first step to creating an inbound marketing strategy is setting goals that are both attainable and ambitious, which may sound contradictory, but are both necessary qualities in setting worthwhile goals.

Your goals should be attainable in the sense that they’re not completely out of reach.

For example, if you set a goal to attract 10,000 site visitors in the first week of your campaign, that’s probably an unattainable goal.

Your goals should also, however, be ambitious. If you choose a goal that doesn’t challenge your company, like attracting 10 site visitors in one week, you’ll be happy about success that hasn’t really done anything for your marketing campaign.

It can be hard to strike a balance between attainable and ambitious, but when you find that happy medium, you’ll have a better idea of what you need to get there.

Step Two: Determine your audience

Many marketers define their audiences only by general demographic information, like age and location. Creating a successful inbound campaign requires more information, like what they read online, which social media platforms they use, and what information they searched for.

By discovering these aspects of your audience, it will be much easier to reach them because you’ll have an idea of what they’re looking for–and where they’re looking.

It will also be far easier to write for them and cater to their needs with your content. After all, if you’re spending time and resources to create content, you want to make sure that it’s suited to the people who are most likely to become customers.

Step Three: Create content for your audience

Creating content for your audience is the most important method for your inbound marketing strategy.

Without quality content, nobody will have a reason to visit your company’s website–not even your target audience.

Ensuring that the content you are creating for your website is quality means that it is accurate, helpful and unique.

If one of your competitor’s posts a fresh, unique blog on a regular basis, for example, you might think it’s a good idea to write posts on the same topics that perform well for them.

That’s actually a bad idea.

Not only is it wrong to rip off others’ content, but it doesn’t provide your readers with any new information. If they can already find it on your competitor’s blog, why would they visit yours?

When creating content geared toward your target audience, here are a few things to remember:

Link to credible websites

When you Link to credible websites are speaking on a subject, but don’t feel like writing 5 pages of in depth information, you can link to another website to provide additional information.

However, make sure that the website you link to is trustworthy and has accurate information.

When you link to a site, you’re vouching for it’s quality– and if you’re wrong, that reflects poorly on the quality of your own site.

Utilize video and photos

When readers see nothing but a wall of text, it’s hard to convince them to finish the whole page, especially if it’s a long read. There is nothing wrong with long pages, but a large wall of text can be a turn off to readers.

To ensure that visitors stay on the page long enough to read your entire page, break it up with videos and photos.

Content that utilizes a photo is viewed nearly 94% more than content that doesn’t utilize photos – meaning that adding a few throughout your pages is definitely worth your time.

Don’t be scared of long-form content

Though you might not think you have the time to write long-form content, you may want to reconsider.

The sweet spot for number of words in a piece of content is around 1,890 words. That’s the average number that appears in a piece of content on the first page of Google. Articles that are around this length tend to rank better in Google, meaning that they’re more likely to attract potential customers to your site.

Are you ready to take your inbound marketing strategy to the next level?

Do you need a little help starting your inbound marketing methodology? We can help!