Our Top 3 Inbound Marketing Recommendations You Need to Implement Now

We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of inbound marketing. It’s easy to mention that this quantifiable, highly targeted form of marketing brings in the best leads by educating your prospects and building trust with them long before they ever contact your company. It’s even easier to talk about how important it is to go “all –in” with your inbound marketing strategy, to give it the time and attention it needs to build a solid marketing foundation for your business and begin the increasing lead generation process that follows a well-planned strategy.

So, with all the benefits, it’s time we give you the top 3 inbound marketing tools you need to gain the lead generation benefits your company needs to grow in 2013.

Ready?

• Hubspot.

You have probably read an article, post or seen a presentation from Hubspot. They are the foremost leaders in the inbound marketing services industry and have built a manageable, powerful suite of tools that allow business owners to build and manage their inbound marketing program.

From their website:

At a high level, Hubspot offers analytics tools that will track your site performance, as well as the performance of your calls to action and other lead generating aspects of your website. It also track your leads in real time giving you the up-to-the-minute view of your lead generation efforts.

By beginning the inbound marketing adventure with a Hubspot account, the tools are then in place the content push that makes up your inbound marketing strategy.

•  Email Marketing

No, email is not dead. As a criterion of your inbound marketing strategy, email marketing drives significant lead nurturing opportunities at an average rate of about 13-15% of the list total. You can also use email to cross-sell existing customers by keeping them in the loop about updates to your existing service offerings or products. What does that mean? In layman’s terms, if you have 2000 people on your email lists, then you can estimate that about 26 of those recipients will click through to your website landing page from the email content.

The power of email marketing lies in the ability to track the response rates within a day or two of sending content out, as well as the ability to grow your contact list via lead-nurturing, email programs. It is a trust-building tool that is still one of the most consistently reliable tools available.

•  Blogging

We all have some sense of the volume of content that exists online these days, but don’t think that means that well-written, keyword-oriented blog content falls into the online void. You can drive regular leads and increase conversions with well-written, educational and keyword-oriented blog content.

 Three points to remember:

                i.      Who is your audience? It’s crucial to know to who you are talking to when you write your blog posts. When you decide the target market of your posts, keep in mind how they would speak, i.e. education level, vernacular, and state of mind.

                ii.      What keywords are they searching? Research the target market to find out how they’re searching online (Hubspot offers a great keyword tool) and then integrate those keywords into your blog content to be sure your prospects can find your content online.

                iii.      What’s “NEWS” to your prospects? Stick with current headlines, relative content to your target market’s region or what’s new in the industry that would be of interest to them. These guides will give you fodder to build engaging and informative blog content.

The most important recommendation is to approach each day with an  inbound marketing mindset so that you create “pull”  with customer centric decisions that add value to  their business while benefiting yours.