How to Craft a Winning Inbound Marketing Strategy: Your Ultimate Guide

Marketing is no more about overloading people with irrelevant ads. Today, business owners have to nurture their audience with top-notch content and combine several channels, including paid advertising, SEO, and social media. Such a combination is essential to get on customers’ radars.

Did you know that 62% of customers claimed that meaningful content aligned with their pain points affects their buying decision? Inbound marketing is causing a lot of buzz for a reason, so it’s necessary to make your company stand out from the crowd with a robust strategy.

In this piece, you will learn how inbound marketing works, the factors to analyze before producing a strategy, and ways to devise winning campaigns.

What Is an Inbound Marketing Strategy?

An efficient inbound marketing plan is focused on gaining customers’ trust with the help of insightful content instead of cold outreach like TV ads and direct mail. Inbound marketing applies techniques and tools to define and address potential customers’ pain points and provide them with meaningful information.

By offering users free and practical content and appearing through organic search, you can draw the attention of relevant leads that already trust your company. Once you share free-of-charge educational content and generate top-quality inbound traffic, you can think about effective ways to transform your leads into loyal clients.

Here are a few examples of inbound marketing tactics to drive more high-quality leads to your organization:

• Content creation
• Email marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Social media marketing
• Paid advertising

Moments to Analyze Before Creating Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Before you start reaping the benefits of advanced inbound marketing tools, it’s critical to do some homework and get to know your niche and audience. Here are some suggestions to make it happen:

1. Competitive Analysis

You have to specify other market players and figure out the core strengths and weaknesses of competing companies. It’s crucial to figure out what exactly your rivals are doing to obtain leads and turn them into paying clients.

Take a look at an extended number of advantages of learning more about your opponents:

• You will determine your unique value proposition and clarify what distinguishes your organization from competitors
• Competitive analysis will highlight what your rivals are doing right so that you can make sure your offers meet the industry standards
• Define your competitors’ weaknesses to find areas of opportunities and implement innovative strategies
• Use customer reviews to add fresh features to your products or services later.

Competitor analysis can be a tricky endeavor to perform as it’s compulsory to discover the right companies for your research, evaluate their strategies, and assess how their actions correlate with your goals.

If you want to outpace the competition, it’s vital to stay creative and keep in mind your company’s specific features and goals. A reliable digital marketing agency will let you examine your rivals adequately and use their strengths and weaknesses to your advantage.

2. Benchmarking

Besides monitoring page views and conversions, there are a lot of essential metrics to keep an eye on. Benchmarking will enable you to compare your business processes to those of the industry leaders, see any gaps in your performance, if there are any, and use these facts to drive improvements.

Here are some metrics to stay aware of to empower your inbound internet marketing:

• Organic traffic. This metric shows how many users come across your website using search engines. It is one of the core indicators to scrutinize the quality of your SEO efforts.
• Bounce rate. This benchmark shows the percentage of users who visit a single page on your website and leave without looking through other pages or taking any action (placing an order, sharing contact information, or downloading a whitepaper). A bounce rate of 26% to 40% is good. If this benchmark is over 70%, we recommend you review your content for clarity and accuracy.
• Social media impact. Track followers’ activity to alter your content and keep an eye on social media shares to understand what actions help you cooperate with your subscribers more efficiently.
• Email open rates. Concentrate on this benchmark to prevent your messages from ending up in subscribers’ cluttered inboxes. Remember about catchy subject lines and brand consistency to get your emails opened and read.
• Blog visits. Track unique users, total page views, and average time on page to understand if your content is influential enough to bring traffic to your website and hold readers’ attention.

3. Website Audit

A website represents your company online and can either motivate your leads to collaborate with your brand or discourage them. Before implementing inbound marketing tactics, you need to perform a thorough website audit to reveal issues that negatively impact UX and site performance.

A website audit is similar to regular health check-ups that help you spot and fix any threat in the initial stages before they become unmanageable. Thus, an audit like that can spotlight problems like broken links, 404 or low-quality pages, and potential safety vulnerabilities.
Here are some factors to check when carrying out a website audit:

• How logical is your website’s navigation? Is it completely user-friendly?
• Does the website reflect your values, mission, and unique value proposition?
• Are your CTAs straightforward enough? Can visitors understand what action they have to take next and what they will gain after clicking on a certain link or button?
• Is the font legible?
• Does your website have too many pop-ups that can annoy visitors?

You will acquire some valuable insights into your website’s performance and visibility. It’s also possible to understand why users bounce without converting and resolve the issues with inbound marketing services ASAP.

4. SEO Audit

SEO is your key to getting noticed online by leads that are already interested in your business but haven’t heard of your organization yet.
Take a look at the fundamental aspects you should cover to execute an efficient SEO audit:

• Ensure every page has a Meta Title and Description
• Analyze the top keywords your website is found for
• Check if your content brings value to users
• Refresh outdated content
• Ensure your landing pages include relevant offers for various buyer personas
• Check website forms to figure out if they contain the right questions and aren’t too lengthy
• Verify that your website is optimized for mobile
• Fix broken links and pages

5. Social Media Audit

With SMM, you can attract cold leads and reach a wider audience before your powerful SEO strategy starts to show palpable results.

What’s more, 78% of buyers are more likely to collaborate with businesses after having a positive interaction with them on social media. To offer such a satisfying experience to a buyer, you have to estimate your current strategy and acquire insightful data to bolster your efforts.
We have handpicked a few tips to make your audit run more smoothly:

• Compile a list of all social media accounts your organization has
• Analyze the engagement these accounts have and collect metrics like demographics, conversions, impressions, and reach
• Detect your top-performing content
• Learn the demographics of your followers on each channel
• Define what you want to enhance in each social media channel and set measurable goals
• Analyze the information obtained and use it to alter your profiles and strategy

6. Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a detailed portrait of your perfect customer and a vital part of an inbound marketing methodology. Keep in mind that it’s better to produce several buyer personas, as you probably deal with different types of customers.

Gather and process information from social media, your customer database, and Google Analytics. Personalize your buyer persona — work through their name, preferences, demographic details, and shopping behavior.

To make your life easier, we have compiled a list of aspects to cover:

• Who are you marketing to?
• Their age, gender, income, location, marital status, education, and occupation
• Pain points they endure
• Objectives they want to reach collaborating with your company
• How do they discover things such as new businesses, blogs, social media accounts, etc.?
• What content do they consume and share?
• How can your business help your buyer persona resolve their issues?

Find Out What Goals You Can Achieve

Specific and realistic goals will enable you to evaluate the performance of your inbound marketing strategy. Every goal you want to achieve should be precise so that you can estimate results and optimize your efforts for more efficiency.

Here at Digitalce, we prefer to use the SMART approach to goal setting:

• Specific

Without specific goals, it’s challenging to know whether you achieved them or not. Instead of a vague objective like “Enhance sales”, opt for a more clear alternative “Increase relevant leads by 15% by the end of Q2 2022 through sequential lead magnet offers”. Thus, every team member will have a clear objective to work toward and a strategy to bring it to life.

• Measurable

Divide your ambitious goal into smaller objectives and set milestones to understand how your progress is matching up to your plans. From Facebook shares and blog views to email open rates and social media followers, make sure every goal has a benchmark to track, so you can see whether your inbound marketing ideas are effective enough.

• Attainable

At Digitalce, we prefer to dream big and believe it is a vital quality to achieve significant goals. But still, if your objective is unrealistic, you are at risk of frustrating your team members. When people don’t understand why they are doing a particular job, they don’t have enough motivation for pursuing these goals actively. This is why, if your click-through rate is 5% now, setting your next objective to 15% is more attainable and realistic than aiming for 70%.

• Relevant

Remember that your objectives should align with your overall business plan. If your biggest issue right now is attracting top-quality leads, then you should spend your resources to overcome this challenge. You might be tempted to concentrate on gaining more followers or developing an outstanding email marketing strategy, but it wouldn’t be an effective solution to your major issue.

• Timely

Deadlines are crucial to work toward your ambitious objectives more effectively and engage your team. Think about the following:

1. When do I need to reach these goals?
2. What deadlines does my team need to meet?
3. When can we notice the first results?

Building Effective Inbound Marketing Campaigns

To make your strategy as effective as possible and generate enough relevant leads, it’s crucial to align your content with three stages of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness Stage

At this stage, a lead realizes their issue and starts doing their research. They are not interested in your brand at all for now, so there’s no need to promote it. Instead, you have to help a lead figure out what kind of problem they have to deal with. This type of content includes eBooks, infographics, how-to videos, educational articles, and checklists.

• Consideration Stage

Once leads identify their concern, it’s time to look for the most appropriate product or service to solve it. At this stage, they are still hardly interested in your company and just require a relevant and valid solution to their issue. Here you can nurture your lead with webinars, technical articles, case studies, podcasts, and surveys.

• Conversion Stage

Now your lead is aware of their issue and has a solution to it. You have nurtured them with educational and meaningful content throughout the previous stages, so now they are more likely to trust you and cooperate with your organization. Finally, you can tell more about your business processes thanks to consultations, price guides, free trials, and testimonials.

Develop Your Winning Inbound Marketing Strategy with Digitalce!

A strong inbound marketing solution will let you reach new audiences and attract relevant leads. Digitalce will help you analyze your niche, set smart objectives aligned with your values, and create influential content to retain your customers.

Reach out to our agency to build a compelling strategy that yields measurable results.