Increasing Leads with Inbound Marketing

Effectively Reach Your Goals with Inbound Marketing

We've shared before what exactly inbound marketing is and how it can help your business; rather than the traditional sales funnel, inbound marketing asks you to consider a flywheel consisting of attracting, converting, and delighting your potential customers. Your goal is to provide relevant and valuable content to your potential customers throughout any stage. Essentially, you are optimizing your leads by qualifying them earlier, providing them knowledge throughout the process, and building trust throughout the process.

Building trust is vital before you convince your audience to buy anything for you, and one of the most effective ways of doing this is to create content that can benefit them. You have to skip the plethora of advertising messages and put your audience first. The truth is - consumers are less trusting of advertisements today and it’s getting harder to pull off.

This is why it’s incredibly important to build trust with your audience before getting them to buy. Building trust is the lifeline of your business. If you can’t build trust, don’t expect to grow. Inbound tactics are vital and will give you more of an ROI than just pushing out advertising messages.

Inbound marketing is a form of tactics that will bring customers to your website through education, knowledge, search, and community. With social media being a big hit these days, inbound marketing isn’t as hard as you may think. Combine social media with search engine optimization, building an email list, and blogging - you will have all you need.

Anyone can use inbound marketing. This in-depth guide will discuss how you can use inbound tactics yourself to bring in more leads that you can later convert to customers.

Fundamentals of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is an effective technique used to engage potential customers to services and products via branding, search engine optimization, social media marketing, and content marketing. HubSpot is the company behind this term. They suggest that it’s ideally a full-funnel experience, meaning you nurture and engage your customers at any point during the sales process and even after the process. 

So, where do you start?

The first thing you need to consider is your target audience and bringing them to your website. When it comes to how to do this, it will depend on the type of your business. When you’re thinking of a channel like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. - first think to yourself, “Is my target audience using this platform?” For example, LinkedIn is mainly used for B2B so unless you have a B2B product or service, your audience won’t be there. Facebook is ideal for B2C and depending on what you offer, Instagram and Pinterest may be perfect for you. At a quick glance, it can seem like a lot is involved - SEO, content, social media, different types of marketing, etc. - you have every right to feel overwhelmed. However, there are ways of breaking it down so it’s easier to digest and take action. 

One way to break this all down is to come up with topic clusters.

What is a Topic Cluster?

SEO used to be only about keywords. A company would be a keyword with a high search volume they want to rank for like “dental services Florida” and create a 500-word article with that exact keyword added in a few times.

But, that method doesn’t quite work anymore for various reasons. Part of ranking means showing Google that you have topical authority, which means you have domain expertise of what you’re talking about.

To form this while ranking for certain search queries you want, a topic cluster will help. It looks like this:

• Pillar Content
• Cluster Content
• Hyperlinks

Your pillar content is the big topic that you are aiming to rank for.

Cluster content is the supporting content that relates to your big topic.

Hyperlinks are the links you will use to show Google the pages are related.

How to Use Topic Clusters

Let’s break this down with an example -- Let’s say your big topic is dentistry. For this, you could create a pillar page called “The Ultimate Guide to Keeping Tooth Decay at Bay.” The idea is to put a lot of research and time into this guide to make sure it’s the best guide on the internet for this topic.

The next step would be to create various cluster content blog posts that would work to support the pillar page. The topics could be something like:

• 5 Dentistry Tips You Need to Know
• 3 Foods That Are the Worst For Your Teeth
• Gum Disease Prevention 101

… and other relatable topics.

When you’re doing this style of keyword research, begin by working backwards. Think of a term your customers would be typing in on Google. Play around with different ideas and check out the search volume. Using a tool like Ahref can give you the info you need. When you find a piece of pillar content that you feel is worth creating, you can is it to expand your search.  All you have to do is type it into Ahrefs and you will find a section called “Keyword Suggestions.” Next, you will see several different ideas that you could create with that topic. Always double-check the search volume, though.

Another piece to inbound marketing is capturing leads when they visit your website. If you have done everything right with your topic cluster strategy, you should notice some traffic on your website. Now is the best time to convert that traffic into leads or email subscriptions.

A lead magnet is the ultimate way to do that. Lead magnets are pieces of content that you offer in exchange for someone’s email. You could offer a free consultation, webinar, or ebook. However, it needs to be valuable to your target audience and must be relevant to the content on your website and your product and/or service.

Tools to Streamline Your Inbound Marketing

There are plenty of tools for blogging and marketing. Which ones should you try to get started?

Lead Capture Software

• OptiMonk
• HubSpot Forms
• Gravity Forms
• Sumo

Blogging Software

We'd recommend blogging right on your own website to reap the benefits of SEO. Using a system with a content management system will make it much easier for you to frequently update your blog. 

Email Marketing Tools

You will need an email marketing tool and CRM so you can keep track of your contacts and message them. Some great options are:

• Mailchimp
• HubSpot Free CRM
• Active Campaign

While the majority of the tools have analytics capabilities already built-in, it helps to have a web analytics solution for your data. Google Analytics is a good option. However, you could also check out Matomo or Woopra.

Inbound marketing is a sustainable and intelligent way of growing your business. This is a genius way for small businesses to make it out on top of the big guys with big ad budgets. With inbound marketing, you're investing your time into a process of truly engaging and educating your customers, which will reap benefits for you and them for a long time.

Interested in Inbound Marketing for Your Business? 

Are you looking to increase your trust with your customers and increase your revenue? Learn more about how you can create a specific inbound marketing strategy for your business with efelle creative. Fill out our contact form and learn how you can grow your business.