Step 3: Organic Inbound Marketing
Spending thousands to advertise on Facebook sometimes seems like the best possible route, especially when you see every other business doing it. For small business though, paying a ton to divert traffic to your Facebook homepage can be a colossal waste.
Platforms like Facebook have an enormous amount of data on their users, and your job as an advertiser is to leverage that data to boost your marketing efforts. Instead of casting a wide net hoping to catch any and all the fish that you can; approach Facebook marketing with a sniper-like focus and precision.
Your goal is to capture the attention of those individuals that are already subconsciously either looking for or already interested in what you have to offer. This method is where you truly start to see results.
What is Organic Inbound Marketing?
Hubspot’s definition is, “attracting customers through relevant and helpful content and adding value at every stage of your customer’s buying journey. With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media.” Inbound marketing tends to have a higher than average ROI than outbound (traditional) advertising methods. Why? Because it’s 100 percent customer oriented!
This strategy is all about offering value upfront and giving users what they truly desire, which is relevant, informative, and fun-to-consume content. The inbound customer-centric approach is the very reason it yields such surprising results. If you want to see results while using the inbound approach, you’re going to need gobs of quality content, along with a strategic method of distributing that content.
Why is inbound marketing so powerful?
The end goal of inbound marketing is the same as any other marketing strategy, to get someone to buy something! The approach is unlike any other strategy out there. Inbound marketing aims to get the one thing that most people are cautious about giving away, trust.
Establishing trust in this day and age means offering quality content to people who are already interested in your product or service. Without confidence, a purchasing decision doesn’t even come into play in a person’s mind. For the most part, people are already skeptical about advertising in general because they assume that advertisers will say and do anything to get a sale. The beauty of organic inbound marketing is that it works against those common stereotypes about advertising by presenting highly valuable content to the users. Over time this builds trust, and users will naturally be more likely to buy from you once they trust you.
When you establish trust, users tend to interact with your content a lot more often. When users leave comments and share your posts, it has a more significant effect than merely having your ad pop up. Content engagement is what every marketer strives for, and the only way for users to engage with content is for the material to be engaging itself. Simply put, users won’t engage with non-engaging content.
The people viewing your content need to be mentally stimulated or taught something new for them to interact with your content. Writing bland content isn’t going to cut it when using the inbound marketing strategy because the core principle of inbound content is for it to be customer-centric, highly engaging, and easily consumed. With each article make it your mission to put your best foot forward.
The Objective: Trust and Authority
To build trust and authority, you need to offer users quality content. Distribute your quality content using a variety of methods. Some of the most popular pages on the internet include:
● Informative articles
● How-to videos
● Free guides
● Checklists
● Ebooks
Each piece of material needs to contain lots of value! This systematic approach offers several avenues for content consumption.
One user might remember your name from a blog post they read the other day; another user could’ve found you through a basic Google search, and another might’ve seen your offers on social media. The funnel is a lot wider with this marketing strategy, and as long as you have some means of conversion, you’ll have multiple avenues of leads coming in!
Inbound Compared To Outbound
Comparing inbound and outbound strategies is similar to comparing PPC and SEO. Both are crucial for survival in the digital age, but one takes a lot longer to see results with than the other.
That’s precisely the case with inbound, it’ll take several months to see any substantial results, but when you do, those results are excellent! The first few months of producing quality content by posting on social media and optimizing your website may not yield more than a few hundred visitors, but the more you invest in your content, and your strategy, the faster the results will come.
You’ll accumulate loyal readers, gain more social media followers, grow your domain authority, and before you know it, every new post you make will offer more value than any one of your original posts! Users will see the change in your content and will start engaging with your new content accordingly. Once users understand the inherent value in your content, they’ll engage with it over and over again, as long as you keep the engaging content coming. It’s important to remain consistent with your content and to try and make each post better than the last.
How To Get Started With Inbound! (With Examples)
The real question is, how do you create gobs of quality content that is specific to each and their position within your sales funnel?
Naturally, you must create content based on which landing pages they land on, or the posts that they interact with. If you’ve done everything up until this point, i.e., ran highly targeted traffic, set up a Facebook pixel to track user activity, then you shouldn’t have any problem getting ideas for your content. Why? All you have to do is figure out which posts received the most interaction from users, or which landing pages held user’s attention the longest, and create additional content around those areas.
For example: say you, and I ran Facebook ads to two different service pages. One for carpet cleaning, and one for upholstery cleaning. Keep in mind that we need a controlled variable so we’d be running these ads to the same audience. We would determine which ad is outperforming the other by measuring the differences in cost-per-click, bounce rate, and conversion rate. Say that our carpet cleaning and is blowing the upholstery ad out of the water based on all three of our KPI’s (key performance indicators). Now, we need to generate EVEN MORE interest in our carpet cleaning services by retargeting those users with content based on carpet cleaning. The content you create will play a crucial role in your success or failure with this strategy. To provide the content users are looking for, think about what’s exciting or original about your carpet business. You may want to post photos of successful jobs (quality counts in photos! High-resolution images, with good lighting, that get edited get the best reaction), upcoming news and events, useful blog posts, and anything else along those lines. Think about what you’d want to see as a customer.
Example II: We recently sent out an email blast about marketing on Google AdWords to several hundred business owners in the restoration industry. In our email, we asked for the recipients to reply with a pain point about Google AdWords, and an area they’d like to see improvement. A good majority of the responses were about the astronomically high-cost per click for this industry (we have clients that bid $95 to be in the first position). These responses sparked an idea. Along with advertising for our clients on Google AdWords, KiLLit Online also advertises on Bing and Yahoo!. So what did we do? We took this pain point of theirs, and we provided them with a highly relevant solution. The following week we sent an email linking to this article.
Fast forward a couple of days, and we have new several new PPC clients.
What we did in this series of emails encompasses what inbound is all about. We identified a pain point, solved that particular problem, and showed them content that they were subconsciously on the lookout for anyway. Now our job is to rinse and repeat. Providing content that your potential customers need is the best way to build real trust that results in sales for you!
Bottom Line on Inbound Marketing
Even though inbound marketing tends to have a higher than average ROI, that doesn’t mean you should ignore all the other forms of advertising. Traditional, and native advertising methods can still be profitable and very beneficial for your brand (though it will aid some brands more than others).
It’s usually not a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, but in the world of marketing, it’s a deathwish. Advertising is about testing to see what works and what doesn’t. Constant examination of different variables is not an option; it’s an obligation when it comes to proper campaign management or content creation. Inbound marketing is an effective long-term strategy and can yield excellent results if done right.