One of the biggest misconceptions that interested prospects have in our initial consultation calls is how broad the scope of inbound marketing can be. Inbound marketing isn’t a single channel or strategy.
Many different channels and strategies work together to create a consistent stream of prospects and customers that view your company as an authority and valuable source of information.
At RiseFuel, as an inbound marketing company, we always recommend inbound marketing as a go-to strategy for companies that are looking to expand their digital presence. Inbound marketing is the best option for laying a broad foundation that grows your digital presence and helps you to attract more customers in the long term.
By tying your social media, blog, and email list together, you position yourself as an expert in your industry and can continue to build rapport and credibility with your audience over time.
Because inbound marketing is a multi-channel approach, the foundation that it creates covers all of the most important aspects of your digital presence. You meet your customers where they are — on Google, in their inbox, and on their social media platforms — instead of expecting them to find you through attention-interrupting advertisements.
Let’s look at the different ways a complete inbound marketing company and strategy can help you lay the foundation for your digital marketing future.
Define Your Ideal Customers and Better Understand Their Needs
You can run an effective inbound marketing strategy without first understanding who you are marketing to. Most company owners would tell you that they know their customers well.
They might have been working with them for years. But if you don’t have a well-defined set of customer personas, it’s hard to ensure that you are injecting your knowledge of their needs, worries, and concerns into your marketing collateral.
All new engagements that we enter at RiseFuel inbound marketing company begin with the creation of customer personas, which outline the different types of customers your company typically works with.
By defining and outlining these customer types, you can inject information that would be relevant to them into the marketing materials that they will interact with. Using buyer personas to inform email campaigns has been shown to more than double open rates and 5x click-through rates.
Create Content that Supplements Marketing and Sales Initiatives
Most companies that engage in content marketing view it too narrowly. They might see it as a means to ranking for specific keywords in Google, collateral to help them nurture prospects into customers or effective tools for their sales teams. Rarely do they see it as all three — which is exactly what a great content strategy should entail.
It’s important that you are able to arm your sales teams with content that helps them to provide insight to prospects and engage with their audience. According to a Demand Gen report, 95% of buyers choose a solution provider than connects them with ample content throughout the sales engagement process.
At RiseFuel, we don’t just create content for one purpose. The content that you create should be used to bolster both your marketing and sales initiatives. In speaking to your customer’s biggest concerns, content can be used to attract them to your company and help walk them through the sales process.
Grow an Email List That You Can Market To For Years to Come
When it comes to expanding your digital presence, there are few marketing assets that will be more useful to you than your email list.
A well-maintained and populated email list gives you a cache of interested prospects and customers to continually market to for the foreseeable future.
An email list is an invaluable asset. When your company is in the midst of a downturn, an email list can be the tool you need to bolster sales and continue growth.
Additionally, it gives you the ability to continually grow relationships with prospects that are not yet ready to buy your products. Email marketing provides the highest returns of all digital marketing strategies, with an average return of $38 for every dollar spent.
Inbound marketing strategies place a lot of focus on growing your email list over time. All content initiatives are backed with related lead magnets that entice your visitors to sign up for your email list and learn more about your company, industry, or products.
Source: Mailigen
Develop Stronger Relationships with Customers
At its heart, inbound marketing is all about developing strong relationships with your customers.
By publishing high-value content that speaks to their biggest concerns and questions, you position yourself as a source of information in your industry.
Later, when those customers have more questions that they would like to learn about, they can come to your brand for more information. Over time, you can introduce them to topics and concepts they would otherwise not know to ask about.
Grow a Social Following That Views you As An Authority
A well-developed social media presence plays a big role in any inbound strategy that we put together for clients. Depending on your industry, not every social media platform is necessarily the right choice for your business.
We help our customers identify the platforms that their customers are using and develop a strategy for distributing content and engaging with their audience on the right social media platforms.
A social following doesn’t come together overnight. Like inbound marketing as a broader strategy, growing a social following comes from identifying what it is that your customers want to see from you and using that as a guide in your marketing efforts.
When we put together a social media strategy for our clients, we narrowly define how each platform will be used in the promotional process and help companies unite automation and hand-crafted social media engagement to grow their following over time.
Develop Your Custom Multi-Channel Approach
The reason why inbound marketing can be such a benefit to companies in any industry is that it provides a truly well-rounded approach to digital marketing.
Instead of focusing on a single channel like SEO or PPC, inbound marketing pushes companies to embrace multiple channels and tie them together. While it may not provide the immediate results that a focus on PPC might, it does provide a solid foundation that you can rely on for years to come.
Inbound marketing emphasizes an understanding of your customers. Every new engagement begins by creating customer personas and determining what is important to each customer persona that typically buys your products.
In doing this, you give yourself the ammunition that you need to arm your marketing campaigns on any channel and speak to your customer’s concerns while educating them on your product or industry.
Source: Episerver
Inbound Marketing Provides a Reliable Long-Term Approach
We encourage our clients to stop chasing the latest trends and quick-money schemes and instead invest in their business's future.
Inbound marketing provides companies with a reliable long-term approach to growing their digital presence across the channels that matter in their industry.
If you’d like to learn more, Contact Us today to schedule your risk-free consultation.
