Critical Components of Effective Inbound Marketing

Is your inbound marketing approach working? If you’re not certain whether the answer is yes, it may be time to take an objective look at your current strategy and try out some new ideas. After all, having a well-considered and effective approach to inbound marketing is a must if you want to keep expanding your business’ audience and increasing your conversions.

In order to improve your marketing methods, though, you need to make sure that you understand the nature of effective marketing. It isn’t enough to just plunge ahead into the day-to-day details of content creation and distribution—if you want to have the advantage and stand out in your field, you need to have a strong grasp of the big picture.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Before delving into the various ingredients that make up a good marketing campaign, you should know the difference between inbound marketing and traditional marketing. Inbound marketing revolves around the concept of promoting the best qualities of your business. While traditional marketing approaches tended to be interruptive and intrusive—think of unsolicited phone calls and unwanted emails—inbound marketing takes precisely the opposite approach. Instead of seeking out customers, the inbound marketing approach gets customers to come to you, using the incentive of high-quality content. This means that the better the content you’re creating and sharing with your audience, the larger that audience is likely to become.

What Goes into a Successful Inbound Marketing Campaign?

One of the most useful ways to analyze your online strategy is to break it down into its various components. While there are countless different ways to promote your business online, all successful promotional campaigns tend to come down to a few basic elements. When you’re sketching out your campaign, keep these basic components in mind:

• Content planning – When it comes to online content, smart planning is everything. The more time you spend planning out what kind of content you’re going to distribute, the more effective that content is likely to be. From creating blog topics to laying out editorial calendars, effective content planning will help you plan special content for holidays, be ready to promote limited-time offers, and ensure a balanced approach to your content. Use buyer personas to more accurately target your audience and get a better idea of what kind of content you should be prioritizing.
• Content creation – The creation of fresh, unique, and dynamic content is the most important step in the marketing process. This is the point where you get to generate the copy that will attract visitors and drive sales. There are numerous types of online content you can take advantage of for your promotional campaign, including blogs, emails, eGuides, social media posts, and animated videos. Don’t forget to use metrics to measure the success of your content and determine what is most essential to your campaign.
• Content promotion – The final step in the campaign process is getting your content in front of the eyes of your customers. Through tactics such as including calls to action (CTAs) in your work, adding links to individual landing pages on your website, and promoting your content on social media, you can help to ensure that your audience keeps up with all of your latest content. If you find that the content you’re distributing isn’t getting much of a response, take a look at your promotion techniques. In many cases, it’s not the content you’re publishing that needs a change—it’s the way you’re sharing it with your customers.

What Else Does a Good Online Marketing Campaign Require?

• An active social media presence – To ensure that the audience for your content is as wide as possible, your business should set up accounts on every appropriate social media platform, from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram.
• A responsive website – With more consumers than ever using their mobile devices to access the internet, it’s essential that you keep your website fast and easy to view on any screen.
• An SEO-optimized content strategy – Making your content attractive to search engines doesn’t mean stuffing it with keywords—it means taking a subtle approach that is in touch with the most effective and up-to-date optimization techniques.
• A commitment to quality – It’s easy enough to resolve to publish only high-quality content—the challenge comes when you try to fulfill that commitment. Seeking out the services of outside content creators can help you ensure that the work you distribute meets your standards.

Your road to great online content begins with your first message to Pennington Creative. Our seasoned team of content specialists can produce the high-quality work you need, including blog posts, social media updates, email newsletters, dazzling infographics, press releases, and much more. When you contact us, we’ll put together a customized package of our services to help you achieve your goals for your online presence. To get started, send us a message today!