4 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Implement Today

You don’t have to be a marketing professional to run a successful business. You should have a marketing strategy in place, however.

There are plenty of marketing strategies to choose from, all of which have their pros and cons. One such strategy to consider is inbound marketing.

So whether you’re new to business or you’ve been in business for years but want to build new momentum, this post is for you.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that attracts your target audience to your website. The overall goal of inbound marketing is to attract, engage, and retain customers with the use of value propositions.

This is the opposite of outbound marketing which takes a broader approach to marketing. Instead of bringing customers to them, outbound marketing uses advertisements, cold calling, and other traditional marketing techniques to put themselves in front of consumers.

4 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Implement Today

While it takes time and effort to implement an effective inbound marketing plan, the below strategies will get you well on your way.

1. Create a Free Guide for Your Audience

Perhaps the best thing you can do for your inbound marketing strategy is to create a free guide (or a few!) that speaks to your target audience. The guide should provide relevance and value to your customer so they feel as if they’re getting inside information for free.

The great thing about these free guides is how easy it is to “niche” them down. This means you can target multiple different audiences with just a few tweaks to the main content of the guide.

For example, if you’re a financial advisor who serves people of all ages, you may create free guides to investing for those at different life stages. You create the backbone of the guide which is the “meat” of the information, and then just tweak the individual guides to serve the population you’re targeting.

This free guide will also serve as a benefit when performing other techniques outlined below, such as call-outs when guest blogging or as a way to build backlinks.

2. Guest Blog Within Your Niche

Guest blogging is another way to offer value and information to your target audience. The great thing about guest blogging, though, is the ability to utilize other people’s audiences.

Other benefits? The ability to create high-quality backlinks to your site (more on that later) and increase natural engagement on other platforms such as social media.

3. Start a Backlink Building Campaign

Backlinks are direct links to your site from sites other than your own. These include links on social media, in blog or forum comments, in news articles, and in guest blog posts.

Not all backlinks are created equal, though. In fact, Google has cracked down on excessive backlinks and those they deem to be spammy or from low-quality domains.

So how do you build a high-quality backlink profile? A few options to consider are:

• Publish “ultimate guides” to niche content
• Build authoritative resource pages
• Write weeky roundup posts featuring industry leaders
• Capture unlinked brand mentions
• Have a social sharing strategy

Remember that quantity is more important than quality. The greater the domain authority the website that’s linking to you has, the better. So be picky while also casting a wide net.

4. Get Active on Social Media

Brand presence is an important part of any inbound marketing strategy. One way to boost your presence and engage with your customers is on social media.

Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provide natural opportunities to communicate with your audience. You can use these platforms to showcase your expertise, answers questions, and just generally engage in a friendly manner with your audience.

A social media following is also a good way to highlight new product launches or share new and free content.

Conclusion

The goal of inbound marketing is to attract customers to your website through elevated content. Once they’re there you can then offer value propositions so as to engage and retain that audience.

While I don’t recommend you solely use inbound marketing, it should play a large role in your overall strategy. The tips above will help you to get started.

Which of the above strategies are you most excited to implement for your business?