Strategy

How To Build a Solid Foundation For Brand Visibility: Inbound Marketing Guide

We all have heard the adage, what's in a name? But in this modern tech-reliant world, everything has to do with brand recognition and visibility.     

In addition to driving traffic to the business and boosting revenue exponentially, brand visibility has the power to convert qualified sales into lifelong, loyal customers. Having a brand allows the target audience to recognize a company, a product, or a person with logos, values, slogans, and other identifiable marks.

For example, very few people know that Xerox is an American company that manufactures photocopier machines. Due to the high brand value, Xerox has become another name for making copies of documents.

Another example is “Uber”, again an American company that has developed such a vast network worldwide and high brand visibility that it is now a second name for booking taxis worldwide.

What is brand visibility? How is it connected with inbound marketing?

The identifiable marks of brands, or we can say elements of a brand, are the unified content and graphics that stick in the minds of consumers. When they see them again at the right time, delivering the message and information they require, with the same consistency. Whether the consumer is surfing Google, using social media, reading any blog post or article online, or even being offline, visiting a restaurant or public place. But How to make this happen? Where to start? Which strategy should I follow? And how should I approach it?

Let us start with the basics.

What is the inbound technique of marketing?- psychology behind inbound marketing

Building trust in a brand starts with building genuine, long-lasting, and mutually benefitting relationships with your consumers and prospects. This tried-and-true customer-centric method is called “the inbound marketing technique.” This technique is far more forward in terms of being unobtrusive than traditional marketing, which involves shouting your message loud and clear.

 According to the inbound method, if you want your business to flourish, you must help your customers and prospects succeed (depending upon the consumer journey), and guide them to take necessary action until they convert. The inbound technique goes through the flywheel approach, which has three stages.

1.   Attract stage: Begin forming relationships with prospects by providing useful content and solutions in meaningful dialogues to solve their problems.
2.   Engage stage: This is when you share insights and solutions that solve your audience’s problem concerns. And guide them to take planned action to form a lead.
3.   Delight stage: After your prospects have become paying clients, you will reach this level. This is where you keep satisfying them by guaranteeing that they can succeed with your product or service, pushing your brand slowly and steadily to the new height of visibility and success.

What is inbound marketing? How is it different from traditional and outbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is defined as marketing that attracts, engages, and satisfies consumers by providing them with valuable content in the form of useful or amusing materials and experiences tailored to their specific needs. Contrary to outbound marketing and traditional marketing, inbound marketing does not interrupt your audience’s lives with advertisements or other forms of unwanted communication because consumers today are smart enough to block ads, filter emails, and disable spam. They are smart enough to surf and look at what they want. Instead, the process of inbound marketing is designed to position your company as a solution for potential clients who are experiencing the same problems you are.

There is a reason behind all the scrolling down to organic results rather than clicking the paid ad results on search engines.

Even though statistics have shown that outbound techniques are effective in many cases for short-term marketing, for the long-term hold of brand visibility, inbound techniques are bound to perform.

..More than 80% of marketers say they use content marketing regularly. Marketers are spending on content marketing more than ever before, having recognized the value of inbound marketing. According to Hub Spot’s annual State of Inbound Marketing report, marketers who moved their attention from traditional advertising or sales efforts to inbound approaches increased by 12%. (Hub spot).

So, what distinguishes inbound marketing from traditional marketing?

• Outbound marketing sells to a certain set of people, but inbound marketing draws consumers who are likely to be interested.
• Outbound marketing disrupts the features of products or services to communicate the marketing message, whereas inbound marketing interacts with consumer pain areas by offering value.
• Outbound marketing comprises TV advertisements, print ads, display and banner ads, social media ads, PPC ads, and search engine results, whereas inbound marketing includes blogs, articles, guides, eBooks, infographics, and social media content.

Marketing solutions provided by inbound marketing techniques that are not provided by outbound marketing include:

Improving brand visibility and generating low cost leads: By delivering valuable content like a reliable expert in the specialized field of business, inbound helps in improving brand visibility. Whenever your audience faces a problem that your brand or service can solve, your brand image will appear in front of your potential customers. Although inbound marketing techniques take time to perform upfront, ROI is achieved through optimized content creation with reduced cost, thus generating low-cost leads.

A five-step inbound marketing guide can help you enjoy these benefits and guide the consumer toward the sale funnel:

1. Define the goal of the inbound marketing strategy.

The first step of the inbound marketing strategy is goal setting. The majority of inbound marketing goals are conversion-oriented, such as gaining more customers or attempting to convince more customers to upgrade to a more expensive plan (upsell). There are two characteristics of an inbound marketing aim that must be considered:

• Attainability: Are the objectives put forth in your marketing mix strategy attainable
• Relevance: Do the marketing goals make sense and are they in line with the broader business? plan?

You need to ask the above-mentioned question to set your inbound marketing goal. Having specific goals will allow you to track your progress and determine whether or not you need to change your strategy.

2. Determine your audience for inbound marketing.

As inbound marketing is a customer-centric marketing method, it is very important to understand what your target audience wants and what their pain points are. It includes an in-depth understanding of behavior, demographics (age, gender, monthly income, marital status, and location), history, job descriptions, and shopping preferences.

This information will help you determine the appropriate channel for marketing and the tone of the message that your content will resonate with the audience.

As a result, you will also delight your customers by giving them the experience or knowledge they need to solve their problems related to your business’s solutions, services, or products.

Tips:

•  If your audience range is small, you can use the social media insight information to plan your audience targeting strategy for inbound marketing.
• If your customer base is large enough to know more about their opinions and behavior, you can run polls and send out a survey form to their email list.
• If you are retargeting your audience, you can conduct online interviews to identify their requirements. Questions can include their feedback, explaining pain points for your product and services, and why they would continue with your service.
• If your business is new, you can follow future competitors’ audience insights to learn about their traits and further make some assumptions to proceed. In some real-time, customer data is acquired by your analytics software.

3. Plan content creation and understand inbound marketing tools.

Every effective inbound marketing effort starts with great content. That means whatever the marketing style, the content will always be king.

 With your goals and your audiences’ pain points in mind, you can start creating content tailored to their needs and preferences. However, simply understanding these two things is not enough to accurately create the right content. You need to plan the publishing and distribution of your content and optimize your content for the changing requirements and consumer journey. For this, we will have to dive a little deeper into the inbound marketing flywheel technique and tools that attract, engage, and delight the customer.

1. a)   Tools to Attract-

This is the point at which your prospect recognizes that they have a difficulty and begins to explore the issue in the hope of finding an answer. This is why it’s also known as the “awareness” stage.

• Blogging and guest posting: Leveraging your blogging platform or guest posting for others is one of the most effective strategies for attracting new users and prospective prospects. Make sure your content answers the types of inquiries you expect your buyer persona to ask to be found by them and Google crawlers. You can position yourself as a subject matter expert on and improve internal links.
• Videos:You can make product explanation videos, how-to videos, and thought leadership films. To attract people back to your website, use CTAs in your videos. Social Publishing – Once you’ve created your very precise content, you have to make sure it gets distributed so these users can find valuable information. Social publishing is more than just a means of sharing contact information, though – it allows you to personalize your brand and engage with prospects face-to-face.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Like Social Publishing, it is a way of getting your message out to prospects and is critical for getting your material discovered on the internet. Conduct keyword research, choose the most appropriate keywords, and then optimize your content, pages, and links accordingly. SEO guarantees that your material ranks higher on the page than other businesses and that your persona’s queries are answered first.
• Websites: Providing visitors with valuable information and content is the goal of a website, so they take something away or will get back to learn more.

1. b)   Tools to engage:

This is the point at which your prospect has completed basic research and selected several viable options. They’re analyzing their alternatives, performing a cost-benefit analysis, and determining which product best meets their needs at this point. Your objective should be to portray your product or service as the most effective solution to their problems.

• Pop-up and standard forms, which appear on the landing page, are crucial instruments in the lead generation and conversion process. Your standard forms must be thoroughly optimized to make this procedure as simple as possible so that the contact may be reliably documented. The purpose of these forms is to convert your visitor into contact, as well as to offer them relevant information or resources that will assist and educate them.
• Lead Management –In your marketing database, you keep track of all your interactions with each contact (emails, landing pages, and so on) so you can improve them in the future. Mentioned below are the methods of lead management
• Email marketing: using emails to interact and connect with your contacts will be just as crucial. Make sure your emails are very personal and relevant to the recipient.
• Marketing Automation-a natural extension of your email marketing and lead management, marketing automation is your key to success. By providing the relevant material to your contacts at the right time, your workflows may help you automate your email marketing activities and aid in relationship development.
• Interactive Marketing: Use live chat and catboats on your website to start a discussion or maintain an existing one. Both need communication, and chat functions provide you with the means to do so.

1. c)   Tools of Delight

Your leads should have turned into paying clients by now. Inbound marketing’s most challenging task begins here: satisfying consumers. This is challenging since your consumers are already expecting whatever fantastic things you have to give with your product or service. Delivering these incredible advantages is a given, but your consumers will not be overjoyed just because you delivered all that was promised before they purchased. You must go above and above to genuinely please your consumers.

Using tools such as surveys, social feedback, conversation inboxes, and attribute reporting can help you get a glimpse of your performance, check the relevance of your content, and identify the points you may have missed in the previous content creation model. Additionally, this will help optimize marketing tactics and channels to increase sales and service.

You can also create loyalty and referral programs, success stories, and birthday and anniversary wishes to stay connected, capture positive experiences, and delight newly engaged consumers.

Let us see how to proceed.

4. Optimize your content and formulate a content strategy.

 As you may have realized by now, your inbound marketing campaign is heavily dependent on content for its success. Thus, to analyze and develop strategies, the content is necessary.

Naturally, this means that if you want your inbound efforts to make a difference, you must be ready to produce a lot of content paired with consistency and enhanced SEO visibility to increase brand visibility. There are two things to consider to optimize the content plan to funnel lead generation at the end.

1. a)   Researching keywords for intent

Consider yourself a prospect at the attract stage of inbound marketing, just half aware of the issue. You go to your preferred search engine and enter a problem-related question. What exactly is your goal here? So, what exactly are you looking for? Most prospects at the attract stage are searching for information, thus keywords with an informational aim are used.

Informational, transactional, and navigational intentions are the three sorts of keyword and intents that can be found behind various search phrases. Understanding intent will enable you to create content that your target audience wants to consume at various phases of the buying process.

Transactional keywords have a buying intention behind them. Whereas navigational keywords are brand or product names. When a consumer is already attracted and engaged, navigational keywords are utilized to increase brand visibility.

1. b)   Understanding topic clusters and pillar pages

Another way of planning content creation is creating pillar pages (in-depth guides) and subject clusters (content bits). There are two benefits to creating pillar pages and focusing on subject clusters.

In Google’s view (and other search engines), it will be simpler for you to position yourself as an authority on important topics.

It will make creating a realistic content creation strategy for your website much easier.

This is critical since the success of your inbound strategy rests on your ability to attract targeted prospects to your website, and search engines are one of the finest sources of such tailored traffic.

If you wish to focus on several themes, you may prioritize them and construct pillar pages and topic clusters for each one individually.

5. Create a Content Publishing Plan to increase brand visibility.

If it takes a few weeks, if not months, to see results from your inbound approach, you’ll need a long-term content strategy to back it up.

When you’re not getting any results, writing material regularly might be difficult. Being consistent, on the other hand, is simpler when you have a strategy to follow. Not to mention, having clear goals can keep you on track while also providing you with the extra boost you need to keep going.

It may appear that creating a content strategy is a time-consuming effort, but it is fairly simple. Furthermore, the time-consuming part of this activity is generally only needed once. It’s a three-step process.

Step1: Analyze the content.

A content analysis identifies all of your existing content assets as well as any gaps in your publication strategy. Plan content categories and themes that are relevant to your company’s objectives. At the same time, it will assist you in ensuring that you do not cover any themes that have previously been discussed.

Step 2: Examine the coming events.

The goal of an event analysis is to find all forthcoming events that are important to your company. Of course, this will involve workplace events. However, it might also include events that top management will be attending or just exceptional days in general, like Christmas or other popular days.

For example, a company that sells women’s beauty products, and Mother’s Day is around the corner, the content strategist can utilize this opportunity to create useful and attractive content. The goal is to become aware of all scheduled events shortly and to ensure that you create and distribute the appropriate information to support those events.

Step3: Create a publication calendar using the knowledge gained in the previous phases.

You can simply develop a content calendar that covers your business’s continuing content demands if you’re aware of all your existing content assets and future events.us steps to create a publishing calendar.

Conclusion:

Brands must be visible to be recognized, recognition must be earned for people to trust brands, and trust must be developed to convert leads into sales. And with inbound marketing, this trust can be nurtured and flourished. Inbound marketing is the process of funneling sales and leads through genuine content creation and relationship building by triggering and solving consumers’ pain points without interrupting them with noisy ads.

This inbound marketing guide explains the ins and outs of inbound marketing, as well as the psychology behind the strategy for attracting, engaging, and satisfying customers.

It includes a five-step inbound marketing guide for driving the lead funnel, which includes establishing goals, selecting a target audience, content production plan, content optimization and analysis, and content publication plan to align the inbound marketing strategy with the holistic business needs.

To get your content publication going on Social Media, start using the Social Publisher for free. Schedule your social media promotions ahead and save up to 6 hours a week.

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