What is Inbound Marketing?

With its promise of potential customers coming to you rather than you having to go out and grab their attention, it’s no surprise that many business owners are interested in inbound marketing. But what is inbound marketing, and how can you make the most of it?

Let’s find out.

A definition of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a way to ‘pull’ people to your business by creating engaging, highly shareable content — rather than relying on advertising spend or public relations (PR) to ‘push’ potential customers towards it.

A key advantage of an inbound marketing approach is that unlike traditional outbound marketing, it doesn’t necessarily involve a large advertising spend.

Content creation can be done fairly cheaply — or, if you’re creating it yourself, for free — and it can be remarkably effective in providing a new business with an audience, leads, and ultimately sales.

Remember however that although inbound marketing campaigns might not always require a lot of capital to start, they can nonetheless be resource intensive.

It takes a lot of time and effort to create the kind of strong content needed for a successful inbound marketing strategy.

And, as you scale things up, costs will inevitably creep up — you may find yourself needing more writers and editors, along with better technology for creating or hosting your content.

But done right, inbound marketing works great and you can technically start doing it without any cash.

So, let’s look at the key steps involved in creating a successful inbound marketing campaign — starting with keyword research.

1. Start with keyword research

The first step to creating an effective inbound marketing strategy involves keyword research.

In simple terms, this just means identifying topics to write about that are likely to generate organic traffic — and the right sort of it.

For obvious reasons, these need to be related to your business area and your target audience.

For example, there is no point in blogging about hats for swimmers if your goal is really to sell iMacs to entrepreneurs. The content you’re creating needs to align with your buyer personas.

Generally speaking, in order for your inbound marketing strategy to work, you need to ensure that:

In other words, you usually need to find a ‘content niche’ — a sweet spot in search results where there is demand for the sort of thing you want to publish, without there being a huge number of articles (particularly on popular websites) that already cover that ground.

To find this niche, and create the most relevant content for your audience, you’ll need to make use of a keyword research tool.

There are quite a lot of these on the market, but the big hitters are probably Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz.

You can use keyword research tools to find out two key pieces of information that will help you find your niche, which are:

Let’s consider an example.

Imagine that you have made an iPhone app for runners and want to sell it to people with an interest in staying fit.

You enter a few phrases into your keyword research tool to see which ones would make potentially good blog post titles.

You quickly find out that there would be little point in publishing articles called ‘iPhone’ or ‘iPhone apps’, because although there are huge volumes of searches for these phrases, the search results are absolutely dominated by pages from the Apple website — and you are very unlikely to outgun Apple in search results!

However, you might also establish that there is a potential gap in search results for phrases such as ‘free running app for iPhone’ or ‘best iOs apps for runners.’

The trick is to find phrases that generate a reasonable number of searches from people who are most likely to be interested in your business — but which are also possible to rank for in search results.

(The video below shows you how you can do simple keyword research using Semrush.)

2. Create amazing content

Once you’ve found your niche, it’s time to create some fabulous content that will really draw people — and search engines — in.

Generally speaking, ‘long form content,’ in the form of detailed blog posts that cover a topic in depth, is the best type to create.

There are quite a few reasons why long-form blog content is a good starting point for generating traffic, but three important ones are as follows:

Another advantage of starting an inbound marketing campaign by writing detailed blog posts is that the activity doesn’t involve much in the way of equipment or investment. Unlike, say, making videos — which will potentially require things like expensive cameras, lighting, voiceover artists etc. — all you need to start blogging is a keyboard and a computer.

Now, the key thing about any content you create for an inbound marketing campaign is that it has to be absolutely amazing — regardless of its format.

‘Amazing’ can mean informative, touching, or hilarious — but the main thing is that it has to be something that will really satisfy your users and make them want to share it.

And speaking of sharing…

3. Encourage content sharing

Inbound marketing campaigns work best when your site visitors share the content that you have produced for them.

There are two types of ‘shares’ you need to achieve for your content:

Social shares

As you might expect, social shares generate traffic to your content by increasing its visibility in social media feeds and driving clickthroughs. They are vital to the success of any content marketing strategy.

Accordingly, it’s a good idea to:

Basically, you want your site visitors to conduct a social media marketing campaign on your behalf — and the easier it is for your audience to share your content on social networks, the more likely it is that you’ll achieve that goal.

Displaying social proof can also encourage people to share your content — if you’ve got a piece of content that a lot of people have shared, it can be beneficial to display the precise number of shares involved.

Not only will the social proof make new site visitors more likely to invest time in reading your content, but it can also nudge people in the direction of sharing it too.

Backlinks

Backlinks — links from other websites to yours — are hugely important for ensuring visibility in search results. Generally speaking, search engines treat them as ‘votes’ for your content: the more of them you have, the better your site’s visibility will be.

Accordingly, the more backlinks you can generate to your content from reputable, ‘high-authority’ websites, the better — not only will they help you from an search engine visibility point of view, but they’ll also drive more traffic to your site when people click on the links themselves.

Now, I recommend being very forthright in asking readers to create a backlink to your site from theirs.

Though not all your readers will have their own site or blog, a certain proportion will, and you’ll get valuable ‘link juice’ if enough of them oblige. So it can’t hurt to include a ‘please link to this’ call-to-action in your content!

In most cases you’ll also need to engage in backlink building in general. This involves reaching out to bloggers and webmasters with the view of getting links to your content from theirs.

4. Turn your site visitors into leads

Once you’ve got visitors to your site, you need to convert them to leads.

In many cases the best sort of lead is an email subscriber — not a social media follower.

While it’s undeniably useful to gain social media followers as a result of people consuming your content, capturing an email address is arguably the most effective sort of lead generation, for two main reasons:

Now, in order to capture email addresses, you’ll need to use an email marketing tool and embed newsletter sign-up forms prominently on your site.

This typically means ensuring that:

In essence, you want to make it incredibly easy for people to sign up to your email list.

What’s more, you want to make the prospect of joining your list extremely appealing.

In other words, don’t use a boring old ‘join our mailing list’ call to action — spell out all the great stuff that the subscriber is going to receive when he or she joins your mailing list (see the image above for an example of search engine optimization expert Brian Dean doing exactly that).

Once you’ve captured a visitor’s email address, it’s tempting to view this as an opportunity to immediately start trying to sell your products and services to that subscriber.

And, while it’s obviously very important to promote your products via your mailing list, if you are serious about inbound marketing you should be equally focused on using your list to promote your content — valuable blog posts, videos, etc. that your subscriber may find interesting (and even better, useful).

This is because the more subscribers who encounter your most valuable content via your e-newsletters, the more clickthroughs you’ll get to it, which in turn can lead to more social shares and backlinks for your content (and — happy days — more traffic).

Now, you can promote your content really easily — and automatically — by using a marketing automation platform (for example GetResponse or AWeber).

These let you send autoresponders — automated e-newsletters sent by your email marketing tool at intervals of your choosing — and create customer journeys that promote your content automatically.

Obviously encourage your subscribers to share this content on social media or create backlinks to it when you do so!

5. Create a sales funnel

To get the very most out of inbound marketing, you need to have a clear idea about what you want to do with the leads you’ve captured from your content-creation efforts.

A clearly defined sequence in the form of a sales funnel will help you out here.

A sales funnel (also known as a ‘conversion funnel‘) is essentially a set of pre-defined steps that each lead is taken through once they have subscribed to your mailing list or used your contact form.

The nature of your sales funnel will depend very much on the type of business you’re running, but the aim is to design a subscriber journey that efficiently converts your lead from being a ‘cold’ lead into a fully-fledged customer (and perhaps even a passionate ambassador for your brand).

Ideally, this conversion process should be as personalized as possible. Use data segmentation along with email copy and phone call scripts that let your sales team deliver the most relevant, targeted information about your products and services to your leads.

Again, autoresponders can help here, as can CRM tools — particularly those that facilitate sophisticated workflows that look at user data and how your subscribers interact with your e-newsletters to provide a highly customized, automated series of communications.

6. Analyze, optimize and repeat!

When you’ve got a successful inbound marketing process up and running, don’t think you can leave it at that!

Your next job is to analyze what’s working and what’s not, then optimize the process accordingly — and repeat!

Use all the data from your keyword research tools, website analytics, email marketing and social media profiles to find out what content really works best for you — and what sort of content you should be creating in the future.

Similarly, keep an eye on your sales funnel, autoresponders, customer acquisition stats and CRM tools to see what’s working well in terms of generating prospects and clients — and how you can streamline and improve this process as you grow your business.