Recently Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot, and Byron White, CEO of ideaLaunch.com and Lifetips.com, shared their thoughts on content and inbound marketing during a webcast sponsored by PRWeb. With consumers becoming more and more savvy at blocking marketing messages, traditional marketing is struggling to show the same ROI as in past years. The market is shifting and consumers are turning to various social media channels and search engines to find product information and reviews/recommendations. Content and inbound marketing provides an excellent opportunity for marketers to pull in new prospects through the creation and promotion of relevant and valuable content. Below is a recap of the presentation.
What is Inbound Marketing? It includes the utilizing the following online tactics to pull in potential customers:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM or PPC)
- Blogging
- Social Media
- RSS Feeds
- Free Tools / Trials
- Viral Videos
Below are the 6 Steps for Getting with Inbound Marketing:
- Create great content such as blogs, podcasts, videos, webinars, presentations, eBooks, news releases and applications.
- Optimize article titles for both SEO and your audience.
- Share your content throughout all of the various social media channels.
- Give people a reason to submit their contact information via your lead form.
- Nurture your leads by creating a system where you continually provide them with valuable information via email or social media.
- Analyze your website traffic, leads and conversions by channel and content.
What is Content Marketing? It involves the following:
- It is the art of listening to your customers’ wants and needs.
- The science of delivering content in a compelling way.
- It also requires the ability to measure readers’ engagement.
- Constantly testing campaigns.
- Catching the reader’s attention at the right time and place.
- Developing a content pipeline to educate, earn trust and drive sales.
- Analyzing and scoring content engagement to determine which readers are likely to convert.
Below are 10 Tips for Creating a Successful Content Marketing Campaign:
- Create a content marketing plan that includes a SEO plan, Content Plan and Performance Plan.
- Research using free tools such as Compete and WordVision.
- Use competitive intelligence to pinpoint opportunity.
- Drive search engine success through your SEO plan.
- Prioritize keywords to drive your SEO goals. Tip: target a combination of 1/3 keywords that you rank in the top 50 of the search listings, 1/3 keywords that you rank 51 – 100 and 1/3 keywords that you rank 100+.
- Create category maps that include the topic, primary keywords and secondary keywords to make SEO writing easier for your staff.
- Expand your content asset portfolio.
- Listen to the conversation happening on the various social media channels.
- Track your SEO rankings. Tip: you can also measure success by evaluating your website traffic, repeat visitors, time on site, conversion rates, content lead generation and content lead conversions.
- Tag your content publishing dates.
Please share your thoughts on content and inbound marketing below. Have you recently begun shifting budget from traditional marketing tactics to support content creation? If you are interested in learning more about inbound marketing be sure to check out the free course provided by the Inbound Marketing University.
Author: Brian Rice
Great article. There is definately a shift taking place in that potential customers no longer need to be barraged with opportunities. They can go out and find any product or service they want.
I found this article written from a salesmans perspective about how his role is business development needs to change – what do you think? http://ezinearticles.com/?Inbound-Vs-Outbound-Marketing—What-Does-the-Future-Hold?&id=4543147
Hi Laura,
Thanks for your comment and sharing the link – it is certainly interesting to hear things from an outbound salesperson’s perspective.
This is a great article. I think that I define Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing differently but I can understand your definitions as well. I will probably end up mashing mine and yours together.
You bring up some ideas that I hadn’t approached before including a research tool that I will be looking at today. I think this would combine well with a Webinar I saw from White Horse called Content Management Approach to Content Marketing: Three Ways to Ready Your Site for Success.
From what I can tell it may appear to be more of a guide to Inbound Marketing by your definition. Otherwise it has some good Best Practices for both sides.
Feel free to download it here: http://bit.ly/9nl6R8
I should say that I work for White Horse but I thought you might be interested in the Webinar.
Hi Courtney,
Thanks for your feedback. I will definitely take a look at the webinar recording – thanks for sharing.
Brian;
This is a great article – thanks for sharing. You have provided some really good things to think about when planning your Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation system. If I may, I’d like to add a little.
To begin with, it really does pay to design a comprehensive marketing strategy. May seem “old fashioned” when thinking about Inbound, but unless you know what you are selling, to who, and how and when and where, and something about your competitors and a fair amount about your ideal prospects, your chances of success are not high.
Next it’s a good idea to design a formal Process by which you will do your Inbound Marketing Automation (what I call the combination of Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation). A formal process spec is written around the idea of Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat, the concept behind Continuous Process Improvements – meaning if you do this, you will get better and better at Inbound Marketing Automation as you go along. And when designing this process, it helps to think of it as consisting of 4 sub-processes:
1) Attract more visitors to the website through Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and Pay Per Click advertising.
2) Engage those visitors’ attention with industry leading content (website copy, white papers, videos, podcasts). Match the content to the prospect’s buying cycle to ensure you can nurture them around the cycle (see below).
3) Qualify these visitors by grading their profiles and using their digital footprints to rack up a score and hence “know” their quality. And then, nurture them from cold leads to hot prospects with multi-touch drip email campaigns. emails which send just the “right” piece of information to the prospect to help move him or her to the next stage of their buying cycle.
4) Automatically feed these hot sales ready prospects directly into your CRM and automatically notify the assigned sales rep (based on product or territory or whatever…).
Our website contains a Resource Library of white papers, tools, videos and an extensive glossary, covering the above in more detail.
http://www.inbound-marketing-automation.ca
I certainly agree that creating great content is the first step in content marketing. But just as important is promoting it because otherwise nobody will know about the great content that you have.