When setting up your business, the best way to increase your brand awareness and generate traffic to your site is to take advantage of the inbound marketing channels at your disposal. The success of this marketing strategy comes in not just creating a large amount of content for people to look at, but creating content that is interesting and will encourage people to engage with yourselves and share your content between their own social circles.
So if you are looking to start a strong inbound marketing campaign for your business, what areas should you focus on?
Blogs – Take Your Business To The Next Level
There are a number of advantages to developing a blog for your business. Not only will it allow you to develop content that relates to what your business provides, but it will also allow you to improve the ranking of your web pages and bring traffic from the blog through to your website.
What topics you write about are completely up to you just as long as you can relate it to what your business does in some way. It could be about your business subject as a whole, specific products you sell or something topical that you can relate to your business. Whatever you write you just need to make sure that it is entertaining for people to read.
A blog is a great way to attract an audience that you may not have been able to reach through other marketing channels. Once you have engaged with them, you can then look to turn them from avid readers into purchasing customers.
Newsletters – Take Your Business To The Next Level
Newsletters allow you to engage with your past customers on a regular basis and help turn a one-time buyer into a repeat customer. How often you send your newsletter out should be based on the amount of content you have to put in them. Some businesses do weekly, some do monthly and some even do quarterly. What you don’t want to do is just send out newsletters for the sake of it with no real content that is going to appeal to an audience. All this is going to do is annoy them and have the opposite affect to what you originally intended.
Generally, newsletters should be entirely focused on your business and should contain a mix of product information, news, offers and anything else that you believe a customer will be interested in.
You should also place a newsletter sign up form for users to sign up to on your website. This will not only allow you to increase the number of recipients receiving your newsletter, but also provides you with user details which you can then use for other marketing campaigns such as outbound marketing.
Search engine optimisation – Take Your Business To The Next Level
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most important inbound marketing strategies as it will help make up a large part of the natural traffic your site generates. SEO is mainly made up of on-page and off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO is made up of primarily the blog posting I mentioned earlier and social media. Within this content you need to include links back to the pages on your website that relate to the content you are creating. The links within your blog should be hyperlinked random keywords that relate to your business. This will help increase traffic the blog post will generate, while also increasing the standing of the linked pages in search engine queries of specific keywords.
On-page SEO is the keywords and meta data that you have on all of your website’s pages. Just like the keywords you link in your blog, all of the keywords you include on your website must be related to what the pages contain. These keywords need to go in your meta title, meta tags and the bulk text on each of your pages. Once you have entered the relevant keywords for each of your pages, you need to constantly monitor and alter the keywords to ensure that your pages are as optimised as possible.
Videos – Take Your Business To The Next Level
Videos are a fantastic way for you to not only provide interested parties with a large amount of information regarding your business in a short space of time, they also allow you to greatly increase your overall engagement and brand awareness.
For many businesses, you may want to use these videos are a way to provide customers with an insight into how you carry out certain services by either playing them across YouTube, Vimeo and other video platforms.
However, rather than being focussed on providing information, you may just want to make a video that is memorable, helping to promote your brand and generate shares. These videos are some of the most difficult to do as making a video that becomes viral relies on the ability to create something unique and get a lot of luck along the way. It needs to be entertaining and make the user feel like it’s something they have to share with other people.
The few ideas I’ve suggested gives you an idea of the variety in terms of video content you can create your business and the real benefits it can provide.
Social Media – Take Your Business To The Next Level
Social media encompasses all different types of content into one social platform which you can use to get followers and engage with your customer base. You need to try and build your business into an authority on the various social media pages, providing information, assistance and support to everyone who interacts with you on a daily basis.
The more content you post and the more you engage with your customers, the greater brand awareness you are going to create and the more trust you are going to build up in the eyes of your customers. All of these will help increase the traffic your website received and most importantly, bring in more sales.
Podcasts – Take Your Business To The Next Level
Podcasts are a more unusual form of inbound marketing and one that won’t be for all businesses. A podcast is essentially a radio show where you produce a range of audio content. Just like all other forms of inbound marketing, the podcast should relate to your business providing information, but also being entertaining, compelling people to listen. You may want to have interviews with staff and happy clients on there, a run through the products and promotions you currently offer and anything else you think the listeners would find entertaining.
The problem with podcasts in the past has been having the facilities and equipment to be able to record them. However, with the advancement in recording devices, you can now pick up something fairly cheap that will give you a professional result.
