Building the right inbound marketing strategy is crucial to both SEO, and getting your message across online. Without a good strategy, your content gets buried and ignored in the 2.73 million posts published everyday.
The details of your strategy will depend on your organization’s goals, but building a basic strategy is simple if you follow these four steps.
1. Select Your Audience
On the internet, you have a potential audience of 3.5 billion. However, reaching everyone would be impossible. Even aiming for an audience in the millions would be prohibitively expensive and ineffective. Just because a person hears or sees something doesn’t mean he/she will respond.
What you as a marketer needs to do, is select your audience. Find out through careful research who would be the most receptive to your message. This includes your existing customer base, and potential new customers. These people are the most likely to become useful leads.
Focus your research on your selected audience’s;
• Profile (age, marital status, income bracket, etc.)
• Designation (work field, career trajectory, etc.)
• Social platforms they are most active (for both work and leisure)
• What article topics they most consume and share
Google Analytics, or similar tools is a great place to begin.
By performing these checks regularly, you may discover people in unrelated fields are interested in your content. You can build a separate content marketing strategy for them when you have time. They might become potential leads if approached correctly.
2. Understand Your Audiences’ Problems, Questions and Motivations
Once your research is completed, you should have detailed information about who you’ll be targeting, and where they are located online.
Go to where your audience is most active, and discover what problems, issues and questions they have. The material you collect is an excellent jumping-off point for creating engaging content.
3. Build Engaging Content
A lot of failed content marketing strategies rushed to this step. The problem is that without a disciplined, deliberate and data-backed approach, your content will just be another ignored post on the internet.
Use what you’ve learned about your audience, and combine that with what you know about their problems. Don’t just produce content meant to sell a product, give your audience content they want to actively engage with.
Some examples are FAQ posts addressing common questions about a topic of interest, covering the latest trends in a field of interest, and how-to guides so readers can achieve a specific goal.
Have this content be structured around a content calendar. Doing so will ensure accountability when it comes to publishing dates.
4. Make an Effective Promotions Plan
Like with steps 2 and 3, this step also involves drawing from your research.
You want your content to be seen, so publish it where your audience is the most active. This step requires more than just hitting publish however. Engage your audience, respond to comments and questions, and don’t forget to promote your content on other social media channels.
And that’s it. You now have yourself an inbound marketing strategy. Of course, this plan is basic. You’ll be adding to it in the coming weeks, months and years.
Your strategy will change as your goals and strategy change, but this simple strategy will get you moving in the right direction.
