knowLedgeFive Easy Inbound Marketing Fixes

Competing for attention in an increasingly busy world is a serious challenge for most businesses. To overcome this obstacle, there are a number of steps companies can take. Here we discuss five easy fixes that will improve your inbound marketing efforts.

Develop Buyer Personas

If your dream customer walked through the door, what would their demographics look like? Developing generalized representations of these ideal customers - known as buyer personas – can help you better reach an intended audience. So, how do you create them?

Start by taking a look at existing customer demographics and market research. Put yourself in your customers shoes and consider their professional and personal roles, goals, and challenges, as well as what motivates them. Developing these semi-fictional personas will provide a greater understanding of who it is you want to find, and ultimately by from, your business.

Help Them Find You

Now that you know whom it is you want to attract, you next have to think about how to generate that attraction. It is highly unlikely that your next customer is going to type your company or your product’s brand name into Google, especially if they have never heard of you before.

What are your buyer personas’ pain points? Spend some time searching Google or Bing for what you think your customers might search for when looking for a product like yours. You might find your competitors’ websites rank higher than your own, or you might find something altogether unexpected. Keep track of the keywords and keyword phrases that best describe your business, and implement them into your own website.

Add Forms To Improve Conversions

Once a visitor finds your site, invite them to introduce themselves. In the age on online information, prospects are typically halfway through the decision to buy before they request a quote or a product demonstration. Engaging when the prospect has reached this stage is not nearly as effective as staying in touch during their research process.

Don’t hide your website’s only form on its contact page. Add forms to the home page sidebar, your about page, and/or your products page.

Offering visitors informational content in exchange for their information is also recommended. Ask them to share their email address to gain access to a white paper or in exchange for a product sample.

Nurture with Email

Now that you have a lead’s contact information, it’s time to do something with it. Spamming them with emails about your products and services is not the correct something. Letting recipients know why you are communicating with them and that you want to help them with what brought them to your website is. Thinking in terms of education is a good place to start.

For example, you may tell the recipient that you are communicating with them since they downloaded your eBook, then offer them links to additional, related content they might also find helpful. You might also thank new visitors for submitting their contact information and invite them to engage with the company via links to various social media channels. When done right, nurturing a new relationship with email can lead to an ongoing partnership.

Cross Link Web Pages

A great deal of time and effort goes into creating quality content for a website. Implementing a practice of internal cross linking is an effective way to prevent that content from being published and then never seen again. More importantly, cross linking internal webpages can decrease bounce rate and improve SEO.

Bounce rate is a metric Google uses to measure visit quality, and a high bounce rate typically indicates a website’s pages are not relevant to the visitors who land on them. A visitor “bounces” when he or she exits a website from the same page he or she entered the site from. Linking content to other, relevant internal pages is a way for businesses to invite their web visitors to stay awhile.

Another big benefit to cross linking pages is the SEO boost it creates. Incorporating links to existing content is the easiest way to get keyword-rich links to the best page in your SEO strategy. Try to focus on links deep within the site structure rather than linking to the homepage or pages easily accessed via a navigation bar.

At its core, what makes a cross linking strategy successful is the same thing that provides an inbound marketing strategy successful: first provide value to the visitor. Keeping value in mind and focusing your inbound marketing efforts on these five fixes is a great way to start not only gaining, but also keeping, prospects’ attention.