5 Key Elements for Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy

For the last several years, inbound marketing has become more and more popular in the marketing and advertising world. While traditional outbound strategies consist of cold calling and persuading an unknown audience with a sales pitch, the main focus of inbound marketing is providing users with value. And after a series of prompts, the users will be drawn toward that business when their needs arise.

Typically, inbound marketing strategies are more cost effective and will generate a higher rate of return in the long term. These strategies include attracting qualified prospects, offering a more targeted approach and using helpful, relevant interactions and content to generate leads.

A successful inbound marketing strategy is multi-faceted. It is strategically developed to increase awareness and build trust and credibility among customers, both potential and existing.

While the key to success varies depending on your product, service, and industry, a few common threads have the ability to unite us all.

Do you have a strong inbound marketing strategy in place? If you don’t, or want to improve an existing one, this article will detail the 5 important elements that your strategy must have to help your business get your bearings in a crowded marketplace.

1.  Well-Defined Buyer Personas

Having strong research-based representations of your ideal customers will make your life easier. Concise buyer personas make it easy for you to position yourself like a prospect. Before you can develop a plan for how you will target your specific personas, you have to understand how they tick. What are their pain points? What factors motivate their purchasing decisions?

Well-defined buyer personas provide you with insight into what channels are best suited for carrying out social interactions. Rather than spreading yourself thin across a variety of social platforms, use the information from your buyer personas to determine which platforms they’re hanging out on and focus your efforts there. It’s not about where you want to post, it’s about where they want to interact.

The better your buyer personas are, the more authentic your efforts and interactions will appear. After all, they’re just as human as you or me, so start treating them like it.

In refining your brand to revolve around potential customers solving real problems, we at Global vision Technology lies a foundation for attracting qualified leads who would actually benefit from your products and services.

We at Global Vision Technology, create a detailed Game Plan that covers your current position, goals, target audience, marketing engine and marketing campaigns. We deliver insight into your persona’s buying decisions and align your teams to enable their journey.

We offer a comprehensive set of services to ensure that every sales and marketing interaction leads your prospective customers closer to the realization that you have the ideal solution for their needs.

2.  A Clear Conversion Path

While conversion paths may vary depending on your industry, the average inbound conversion path is designed to convert visitors into leads, while promoting your business’ content. It serves as a probable, step-by-step route to take your visitors from point A to point B. A strong conversion path will include the following elements:

• CTAs

  A CTA commonly serves as the “bait” to guide your visitors onto a landing page. CTAs employ highly specific language and sharp, contrasting design in an attempt to entice visitors to click. ‘Contact us’, ‘Buy now’, ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’, ‘Download this e-book’. These are examples of CTAs on various websites, that prompt visitors to undertake specific actions. CTAs have the power to convert a potential lead into a buying customer, so you want to pay attention to everything about it. Words matter, so begin by using strong words like ‘buy’ and ‘order’ instead of generic terms like ‘read more’.

  Moreover, don’t forget to look into the shape and size of your CTA, the color you are using, and the position it occupies on your website. Global Vision Technology offers the best call to action examples and strategies for your business, providing unique call to action marketing solutions. We create a sense of urgency can trigger a call to action to buy.

• Landing page

  Your landing page should have one purpose, which is to convey the value of the product or service being offered. Any and all of the content on the page should work to convey one succinct message.

  We encourage you to simplify your written content by utilizing bullet points to highlight key takeaways, and use bold and italicized text to ease readability. We prioritize your landing page tests around what is most likely to succeed with qualitative and quantitative info. We create effective landing page that contains: a compelling headline, a few sentences that summarize the offer, 3-5 bullet points, an interesting visual, a form, a contrasting CTA, and your social share buttons.

• Forms
  Create online forms and publish them. Get an email for each response. Collect data. While we understand that you want to collect as much information as possible, you want to avoid asking too much, as it might have a reverse effect. Our specialized services for mission-driven organizations help reach new leads and awareness, and resonate with the values of your audience. We design professional looking forms, customize with advanced styling options to match your branding. Speed up and simplify your daily work by automating complex tasks with GVT’s industry leading features.

3.  A Unique Brand Story

Every business has a story. I’m not talking about the run of the mill “we were founded in 1974…” story, but something more. A story with substance. Your unique roots, the hurdles you’ve overcome, the faces behind your products, the stripped-down version of your business.

We help brands tell their stories in meaningful ways that enrich customer experience. To do this, we take an insight-based approach because we understand that the underlying motivations that drive people’s actions can inspire new ideas and new stories.

We use authentic and meaningful storytelling to make stronger connections with consumers, playing to the psychological drivers and personal values that guide their daily decisions. We believe that great brand stories have the power to engage, move and motivate people.

The fact of the matter is, your audience wants to know your story. From an emotional standpoint, people love to build connections with businesses that remove their censor, and tell the truth. Your unique brand story will serve as the glue that bonds your business to each of your customers, or potential customers.

Your ability to communicate your message through a compelling story will increase the likelihood that your audience will listen, and in turn, share it. Stories take people through journeys. Stories build relationships for a lifetime.

4.  Easy to Share Information

• Include Social Share Buttons
  Websites that make use of social sharing buttons generate 7x more mentions than those who don’t. Social sharing buttons make it easy for our visitors to pass your content on to their extended audiences on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. We advise you to include these buttons on almost all of your valuable content, including: blog articles, your website, your landing pages, etc.
  
• Utilize Hashtags
  Peppering a couple of hashtags into your content will help to increase its visibility. This will make it easier for people to find your content, as the hashtag will earn you a spot in the searchable hashtag stream. It’s likely that people who are searching and interacting with the hashtag are interested in the subject matter, therefore the likelihood that they will share your content is increased.

• Include Interesting Visuals
  According to HubSpot, photos on Facebook Pages received 53% more Likes than the average post, and photo posts attracted 104% more comments than the average post. Considering that platforms like Twitter have mad an honest effort to increase their photo-friendly capabilities, (instead of clicking to open up an image, now all videos and photos appear directly in your feed) your business must learn to adapt to the environment.

5.  Interactive Content

Interactive content provides users with a two-way, personalized experience. Unlike one dimensional content that simply exists, interactive content opens up the floor for a dialogue between you and your potential or existing customers.

Perhaps the strongest characteristics of interactive content is that is able to hold the attention of your visitor. Rather than coming face to face with a piece of content that is self-serving for your business, interactive content gives you a chance to learn something new about your visitors, while they learn from you. The more information you can indirectly pull from your visitors the better, as it will provide you with insight when it comes time to develop a plan for lead nurturing.

At Global vision Technology, we design and create interactive content for each stage in the consumer journey across multiple platforms, whether it is interactive content for mobile using gaming as a platform for discovery and engagement or active-interactive content which improves quality of leads via your website. By its very nature, interactive content engages participants in an activity: answering questions, making choices, exploring scenarios. It’s a great way to capture attention. Consumers have to think and respond; they can’t just snooze through it.

Make the Most of Your Business’s Inbound Marketing Strategy

There are tons of ways to get there, and the more you learn about inbound marketing, the more you’ll see that there are strategies within strategies. Hopefully, the big takeaway from this article is this: inbound marketing is important to your business’s success. If you find that your business needs professional services to develop and implement a stellar inbound marketing strategy, let’s talk. If you want to learn more first, you can start by checking out our digital and inbound marketing services or by setting up a planning session here.

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