10 Easy Steps to Use Inbound Marketing Effectively

Inbound marketing has proven itself to be the most effective way for our clients to gain leads and make sales. The problem is that Inbound Marketing is time consuming. In fact, 43% of SMBs spend at least 6 hours a week on marketing, and 7% spend more than 21 hours marketing.

While an effective Inbound Marketing strategy takes time, you can use these ten quick steps to boost your campaign's effectiveness:

1. Boost Your Blog Posting

   Small businesses that blog get 55% more traffic than those that don't. As a matter of fact, the more you blog, the better, so why not add another blog post to your content rotation? You will give your followers more valuable content while boosting your search engine rankings.

2. Start a Conversation

   Have you ever been in a one-sided conversation where one person is just talking at you and you are forced to just stare blankly at the wall? The same goes for blogging. Ask a compelling question to start a conversation. You will receive input from your customers and build brand trust.

3. Build More Landing Pages

   One of the easiest and quickest ways to get more leads is to have more landing pages. Add more finely tuned landing pages for each of your buyer personas to cast out as large a net as possible.

4. Reach Out with Guest Posts

   Guest posting is a fantastic way to gain exposure while reaching a new audience, all the while boosting your search engine ranking. Include guest post pitches to your content calendar to build relationships.

5. Revise Existing Offers

   A part of Inbound Marketing is offering free valuable content to your visitors. And while being able to write a 50 page eBook every week would be nice, it is simply not cost-effective. Luckily, you can repurpose your blog into a new offer, or break down a current white paper to make the most of your existing offers.

6. Stratify Your Email List

   No one likes spam, and the fastest way to turn off a potential customer is to invade their inbox with irrelevant information. Pinpoint your messages to target specific buyer personas to maximize your email marketing. You should also scrub your email lists and delete abandoned email addresses.

7. Write Buyer Persona Profiles

   The best way to target customers is to create personal profiles based their demographics. You can find these stats easily with Google Analytics to target specific niche customers.

8. Make content that caters to your persona profiles to boost conversions.

   Create Evergreen Blog Content Blog posts stay on the internet indefinitely, which gives them an opportunity to bring in traffic for a long, long time. Make sure that your blog posts are optimized and targeted to keywords to reap the benefits of evergreen content.

9. Create a Visual Aid

   Humans are visual creatures, making an infographic or flowchart is a highly effective tool to break down concepts and thoughts. Visual aids are a great way to disseminate information to a customer base which has an increasingly short attention span.

10. Create a Schedule for Social Media Posting

    Social Media posting is made easy with TweetDeck, HootSuite, or one of the other scheduling tools. And although these are helpful tools, the best inbound marketers schedule content in advance so they can drive engagement, quickly newsjack, and respond to comments and queries.