Cooking Up New Traffic: How Inbound Marketing Can Bring New Visitors
Inbound marketing is all about creating and sharing content with the world – digitally. Since 2006, inbound marketing has been the most effective marketing method for e-commerce businesses. When you create tailored content designed to appeal to your dream customers, you attract qualified leads for your business and keep them coming back for more. Learn about the three main stages of inbound marketing and how you can make them work for your online business.
1. Attracting Visitors
Blogging: An inbound marketing staple, blogging is one of the best ways to attract new visitors. Create interesting, educational content that speaks to your desired prospects and answers their questions.
Website Optimization: Optimize your website so that it appeals and speaks to your target audience. Your website should be a hub of helpful content to attract the right visitors to your pages. Choose keywords that are the most relevant to your business so searchers can find your website.
Social Media: Check out The Evolution of Social Media to learn how to best leverage the most popular social sites to interact and engage with your existing and potential customer base.
Paid Search: See those first few results at the top and on the right side of your Google search results page? Those are pay-per-click (PPC) ads, and they allow you to target your ads to the customers you want to attract using relevant keywords. It’s one of the quickest ways to place your business in front of prospective customers.
2. Converting Visitors Into Leads
Marketing Offers: To get something, you have to give something. Want visitors’ email addresses (hint: yes, you do – contact info is the most valuable online currency for marketers)? You need to offer something – think quality content in the form of e-books, tutorials, or anything that might be of value.
Landing Pages: When someone clicks on your paid ad or a link on your website, they should be sent to a relevant landing page. If I click on your ad for a red scarf and am sent to a landing page for blue scarves, you likely just lost me as a customer.
Calls to Action (CTAs): Calls to action are links or buttons that encourage visitors to, well, take action! Good examples: “Sign Up!” or “Call Today!” Make sure your CTAs are enticing enough to generate leads.
Thank You Pages: Let your customers know that you appreciate their business by creating thank you pages any time a user completes a call-to-action.
3. Closing Leads Into Customers
Lead Nurturing: Once you’ve attracted leads, it’s critical to build relationships and trust. You can use software to keep track of your leads and be sure to follow through on any promises or offers in a timely manner.
Email Marketing: Emails are a great way to keep your company top-of-mind with prospects, particularly when they’ve completed a call to action but have yet to buy. Focus a series of emails on useful and relevant content to these potential customers to help them become more prepared to purchase.
Lead Intelligence: Make every effort to learn as much as you can about your customers, prospects and their behavior. There are many free analytics programs that provide information about why and when someone visits your site, leaves your site, opens your email and a slew of other valuable metrics that will help you improve your online marketing efforts.
Analyze & Test: Using the aforementioned metrics to draw conclusions about your customers will help you more effectively target and attract prospects. Tweak and test your marketing methods regularly to maximize your chances of securing more customers.
Use these inbound marketing tips and your online business is guaranteed to grow; but don’t forget the basics – there’s no quicker way to lose a potential customer than if your website crashes frequently, pages take a long time to load, shopping carts are broken, or you have any other detrimental e-commerce issue. Contact Applied Innovations today for the most reliable dedicated hosting, cloud hosting and shared hosting solutions. With round-the-clock support and a dedicated team of experienced and knowledgeable professionals, the Applied Innovations team is committed to maintaining the stability of your website.
