Today’s guest post is from Rebecca Corliss of Hubspot. Part of her job is managing their Inbound Marketing University. I asked Rebecca to write this piece because I’m both a graduate and a fan of IMU. If you are interested in Internet marketing and Social Media, I encourage you to sign up for this free on-line webinar series. I can’t even begin to tell you how useful it has been as I seek to understand this rapidly changing field, and work with clients on a daily basis. So here’s Rebecca to educate us on Inbound Marketing:
Inbound Marketing is an online marketing strategy that helps businesses get found by their best customers online. It developed as a solution for the decreasing effectiveness of “traditional” outbound marketing techniques that have historically pushed marketing messages out at consumers.
And you know what? This inbound marketing stuff makes sense! When’s the last time you fast-forwarded through a commercial using your DVR? (Yesterday evening.) When’s the last time you did a Google Search to find information about a product or service you needed? (How about 10 minutes ago.)
Adoption of this strategy is growing quickly, and businesses are seeing results. According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing Report, companies that use inbound marketing as their primary marketing strategy experience a 61% lower cost-per-lead than outbound marketing-dominated organizations.
Here are five steps from HubSpot and the folks at Inbound Marketing University to successfully use inbound marketing to grow your business:
1) Create content. Are you blogging? Are you somehow contributing helpful information to the web that your target audience would appreciate? Consumers search for informational articles, not static websites. And each blog article you write is another page on the internet that increases your chances of getting found! Think about creating a blog if you haven’t already.
2) Optimize your content for search engines. The title of your blog content is key for readers *and* search engines. Are you including keywords in your content that your best customer would search for online? With some keyword optimization and some hard work to get links back to your site, you’ll start ranking in Google.
3) Build your social media network and promote your content. In order to spread and share your content, you need to create a network where you can promote it. Make sure you’re on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and you’re interacting with folks to increase your reach. Remember! Don’t ONLY promote your content. Promote others’ too!
4) Create targeted landing pages on your website to convert your traffic. Now that you’re starting to get an increase in traffic, make sure you have a specific offer on your website to give people a reason to give you their contact information through a form. For example, do you have a free trial or a free consultation? Maybe you can offer an ebook download. Give your anonymous visitors a way to “raise their hands” and tell you who they are.
5) Track, analyze and repeat! It is absolutely crucial that you check back to see which channels are giving you your best leads and sales. How else will you know where you should focus your efforts?
Good luck applying these steps to your marketing. And of course, feel free to keep learning!
Rebecca Corliss is an inbound marketing manager at HubSpot, an internet marketing software company in Cambridge, MA. At HubSpot, she specializes in social media marketing and creative video content. She is also the executive producer for video podcast HubSpot TV and manages HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing University certification program. In her free time, she sings with her a cappella group Common Sound. Be sure to follow her on Twitter as @repcor.
[...] And if you listen closely, you’ll hear our friend Rebecca Corliss as the voice of the police dispatcher. She wrote a guest post for us awhile back on 5 Steps for Using Inbound Marketing to Grow Your Business. [...]
[...] Guest Post: 5 Steps for Using Inbound Marketing to Grow Your Business [...]