What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is a marketing method that relies on great content—often housed on a corporate website or social media—that draws in customers through the compelling nature of its thought leadership. Inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing, which reaches outward to consumers when they may not be looking for your product (e.g., radio or billboard advertising, social media advertising, video ads, or those Linkedin InMails from people you don’t know).
If outbound marketing covers everything your organization does to reach out to prospective customers to grab their attention, then inbound marketing is the collective effort to be the best resource when they do come looking.
[In a broader sense, inbound marketing can also be how your customers’ concerns are handled when they’ve already arrived, inbound, at your ‘properties’—whether that is on your site (live chat, the accessibility of your site), your social media profiles (social media listening & responses), your stores (customer service), or your phone lines (wait times and customer surveys).]
Below, we’ll focus on how great content, when produced thoughtfully, is a winning inbound marketing strategy.
Why does Inbound Marketing work?
Inbound marketing provides content that educates and offers insight, and in the case of B2B, it accelerates the sales process. These pieces need to be compelling enough to draw in readers and useful enough to keep them on the page, which in turn signals to search engines that this page (and site) have valuable content.
From an SEO perspective, that indicator will help down the line as search engines decide which results to serve up to particular users. The longer people look at your site—and choose not to go back to results to click on another option—the more likely your page(s) will get more impressions, and therefore clicks.
Well-written blog posts are the bedrock of Inbound Marketing efforts
You may dread the blog process. It may be like pulling teeth to get someone to write a blog post, but if you think of a series of blog posts as a strategic inbound marketing play, you’ll see that the effort is worth it.
Laying out your company’s best insights in the form of blog posts can accomplish the following:
Blogs establish your organization as a thought leader and give your organization a clear identity.
Blogs provide an opportunity to restate your mission and pull prospects down the marketing funnel.
Blogs can function as evergreen content and draw visitors to your site for a long period of time. (They’re also easy to update whenever details change!)
A well-written, resourceful article can attract not only organic traffic but qualified organic traffic. Organic search traffic is high-intent—a post that is a relevant, engaging fit for your target audience is more likely to rank well for the searches that matter.
Case Study: How an Insurance Brokerage’s Excellent Content Increased their Search Impressions by 50% in 2 years
One of our clients, a commercial insurance brokerage that has been in business for over 100 years, boasts some of the strongest industry-specific content we’ve seen. Week-after-week production of excellent blog posts, webinars, videos, and full-length guides has given them double-digit percentage increases year-over-year in their search impressions, with the past year seeing a 32% increase in conversions to boot.
Over the past two years, this company’s site has experienced a 50% increase in search impressions. The success they’ve seen with their arsenal of carefully-crafted content is a prime example of how Inbound Marketing is a vital part of today’s marketing landscape. This firm’s pieces are uniformly well-written, authoritative, substantial, and provide clear, useable information.
So how can your organization take a few pages from this book?
How Can You Emulate this?
Whether you’re B2B or B2C, consider these tips inspired by this client’s content machine:
Content Strategy: A long-term, multi-channel look
Content marketing teams are not meant to be reactionary. Yet, without a Content Strategy as a framework, many content marketing teams watch as the mission-critical content pieces get pushed off while one-off requests take over. Make strategic goals, create a regular check-in on your strategic plans, and help each other stick to them. For example, if your number one goal is to perfect your webinar game or to commit to a weekly blog series, think about how your other channels can support that or take a back seat when needed.
Editorial calendar: A view of what’s coming
Oh, the organizing. How will you know where the gaps in your content strategy are without mapping out your content calendar? Whatever tool you use, and however detailed you want to get, this is a key tool in balancing your audiences and sticking to your goals.
Subject Matter Experts: SMEs that bring the heat
Do NOT let just anyone write content for your site. Find your subject matter experts within your organization and support them however you can in producing expert content. Here’s why: many websites out there create garbage. They do it regularly so it feels like they’re accomplishing something, but search engines are getting smarter and smarter at identifying quality content that keeps readers on the page, gets shared, and causes people to explore more on the site. Well-crafted content starts with the thought leadership behind it. Now, if your SMEs do not have time to sit down and write 600 words, there are several ways that we’ve found at Fiddlehead to interview an SME on a topic or gather an outline of ideas that can be crafted into a final piece. Good copywriters can certainly transform a busy SME’s musings, rantings, or scribbles into quality content—so do not phone this part in.
Editorial: Many layers of editing
Invest in talented copywriters and editors. How many social posts or websites out there have ridiculous typos?! A great content marketing team will include people who absolutely love words, proper punctuation, and crafting a compelling headline. These skills will drive conversions and elevate your content—boosting your brand as a result.Timeliness
Insurance is not nearly as static as one may think. Listening to clients, watching the market, and monitoring the courts means that this client is often among the first to comment on breaking news that affects the market. This isn’t just about knowing what to say, although that is paramount, it is about having the infrastructure in your marketing, design, and web teams to get the content out there in a hurry. Could you get a post written, edited, designed, and published (then emailed and shared with your audience) within 48 hours?Knowing Best Practices
From knowing how to get a target keyword in all the right places for SEO purposes to standing up a landing page, a great content team knows their stuff and reminds one another when anything isn’t 100% publication-ready.
(But wait…) Testing those Best Practices
Marketers should never assume, however. Knowing best practices and knowing that they do indeed work for your audience are two different things. Whenever a new tactic is launched, the team should test and monitor it closely. Whether it is the placement of a pop-up, watching for clicks from the home page, or testing subject lines in emails, curiosity is what ultimately drives success.
We’re proud to be the digital marketing agency partnering with clients to get results like these. If your organization is in need of Inbound Marketing expertise that drives results, we’d love to talk.
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