So, what actually is B2B inbound marketing?

To really define the concept of B2B inbound marketing, we have to first take a look at the concept of traditional marketing which we now understand as ‘outbound’ marketing.

Traditional marketing efforts like advertising, the billboard we see on the side of the road, below the line activation, and so on, are about reaching as many people as possible with our promotional messages. In short, we push our messages ‘outwards’.

However, in this digital age of social media, there is a significant problem with traditional marketing: people now have more choices and are now more resistant to advertising. Not to mention, ad blockers are now everywhere, and various platforms even offer their users an ability to eliminate ads via premium membership or other means.

Traditional marketing also interrupts what the user is doing—whether watching a show/movie, browsing a website, or others—, so it can create a negative perception for the user and might hurt the chance of conversions.

This is where B2B inbound marketing comes in.

The main idea of B2B inbound marketing strategy, as opposed to traditional, ‘outbound’ marketing, is to pull and attract our audience inward. This is mainly done by publishing our content out there and making it available via SEO.

In such cases, the audience is the one proactively searching for the content, whether looking for information or a solution for a specific answer. So, inbound marketing won’t interrupt what the audience is doing and won’t hurt their overall experience. This audience will consume your content and is now aware of your brand and/or product/service. We can then build and nurture a relationship with this audience until they are ready to buy.

B2B inbound marketing can be divided into three core steps:

• Attracting the audience inwards: inbound marketing is about attracting highly-qualified leads and potential customers with valuable, relevant content, and social media conversation. We are establishing our position as a credible source and that we can be a potential solution for their problem.
• Engage the audience: We start building a relationship that we can provide solutions and insights to achieve their objective. We nurture them as leads until they are finally ready for purchase.
• Post-purchase treatment: Another key difference between outbound and inbound marketing is how inbound marketing should also be around after the purchase, to retain them as loyal customers, and convert them into advocates. Content and B2B inbound marketing should serve to provide support and help and to ensure they can achieve their objective with the purchase.

B2C VS B2B Inbound Marketing

Although the main principle of inbound marketing is relatively the same for both B2B and B2C businesses, we have to remember that B2B audiences are significantly different than their B2C counterparts.

Since inbound marketing is driven by the audience, then it would only make sense that there are also several key differences to consider between B2B and B2C inbound marketing approaches:

1. Purchase Motivation

B2C consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on their emotions, and this is why B2C marketing is mainly focused on driving emotional triggers. B2C customers mainly purchase a product or service based to improve their lives in one way or another: whether about fulfilling their satisfaction or solving a life problem.

On the other hand, in a B2C environment, we are purchasing something to improve the business’s or organization’s performance. That’s not saying B2B consumers can’t be driven by emotions, but it’s more likely that the B2B purchase is driven by the value provided by the product or service.

So, in B2B inbound marketing, we should focus on publishing content that can establish our credibility as a thought expert in the niche, and that our product or service can provide immediate value and/or provide a viable solution for the consumer. B2Bc content should include things like proven statistics to testimonials/success stories to further establish trust.

2. Purchase Decision Maker

This is one of the most essential differences between B2C and B2B marketing. In a B2C environment, there’s typically only one decision-maker in a purchase, and even if there’s more than one, they are typically closely-related (child and parent, asking spouse for agreement, etc.)

In a B2B environment, we are targeting companies/organizations instead of individuals, and there can be more than one decision-maker with each purchase. In fact, according to Gartner, there are now, on average, six to ten stakeholders involved in a B2B purchase.

These six to ten decision-makers can have different roles, interests, and priorities and so we’d have to approach them differently. In inbound marketing, this would translate to the need for publishing different content for each of these roles.

In B2B inbound marketing, we might have to create different buyer personas and take into account each persona’s needs, pain points, and priorities.

3. Conversion Timeline

This is, at the surface, a subtle difference, but the impact can be very deep. B2C consumers are more likely to purchase quickly after they consume content or even see an interesting ad. However, B2B customers typically involve a deeper research and comparison process, and so the purchase process can be much longer.

Meaning, in developing our B2B inbound marketing campaign, we should take this relatively long sales cycle into consideration. We might need to publish more content pieces to cater to the lead nurturing stage like educational content and content pieces that are designed to convince conversion.

Also, help your target audience with their research process. Don’t be afraid to publish a content comparing your product with your competitors’. You can feature all the proven statistics, infographics, and other data-driven content to help them with their research and convince them that your product is indeed their best option.

The key takeaway is that B2B inbound marketing should be about communicating your product’s unique value proposition (UVP) and establishing our credibility as the expert in our niche.

Developing B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy

1. Defining B2BInbound Marketing Objectives

The first step you should take is to define clear objectives for your B2B inbound marketing campaigns. Unlike traditional marketing activities like advertising, the ROI for your inbound marketing campaign can be quite difficult to measure. So, it’s very important to have clear objectives and KPIs before you begin your inbound campaign for B2B.

Depending on your business model, it’s probably best to start from your revenue goals to determine your marketing objectives. For example, if you are targeting a 20% annual increase in revenue, it could probably translate to an objective of a 40% increase in lead generation. From this, we can further define marketing responsibilities and what campaigns to prioritize.

Make sure your inbound marketing objectives are:

• Clear: easy to understand and won’t create confusion within your team. Be as specific as possible.
• Realistic: having an attainable goal is important to maintain your team’s morale. It’s okay to have a big, visionary goal, but it’s better to break it down into smaller, more realistic milestones.
• Measurable: figure out a system and assign metrics to each objective so you can properly measure your performance for the specific objective.

Since the cores of B2B inbound marketing are content marketing and SEO, it’s very important to consider that both will take time to build. So, keep that in mind when building your objectives so you can have the right expectation about your timeline.

Make sure you give enough time for the inbound marketing campaign to flourish, and consider long-term objectives. Although inbound marketing will indeed take time, the payoff can be big and sustainable.

2. Develop Your Buyer Personas

Above, we have discussed how one of the key challenges in B2B inbound marketing is the fact that there can be several different stakeholders affecting the purchase decision. So, we will need to create different buyer personas for each of these stakeholders, each of them can have different roles.

These different roles would have different needs and expectations, and 72% of B2B buyers nowadays expect vendors to provide personalized engagement according to their needs. So, it’s is very important that we truly understood our B2B buyers well.

Before anything else, we should make a list of the basic facts of our potential buyers:

Job details

Don’t underestimate the power of LinkedIn in researching potential B2B buyers. Find out their poles, skills, professional backgrounds, job titles, and other relevant information. You can also check people reporting to them as well as who they report to. By researching these for several target companies/organizations, you can have a clearer picture of which roles you should target, and what kinds of buyer personas you should develop.

Demographic data

Pretty self-explanatory, you should find out about gender, age groups, and other demographics information of your target audience. The more information you can gather, the better you can develop your buyer persona for this specific role.

Organizational information

This one is specific for developing a B2B buyer persona. You’ll need to research at least the basic details about your organizations. Find out the industries they belong to, the size of the organization, the product/service they provide, and other information. The idea here is to figure out how your product/service can help their business.

You might also want to research the clients/customers these businesses cater to, and study their needs and pain points. If your product can help this business in providing value to their customers, you can create a more personalized B2B inbound marketing and also your overall unique value proposition (UVP).

Needs/Pain Points

Identify the stakeholders that are involved in the B2B purchase, and try to understand their needs and problems they are currently facing. Again, figure out how your product or service can help solve these pain points.

Remember that different stakeholders might face different pain points and might have different needs, and your product might offer different values for each of these stakeholders. Identify the needs and challenges faced by each stakeholder and communicate your key values accordingly.

Now that you’ve gathered enough information, you can use the information to develop your buyer personas. Try to answer the following questions:

1. Where each persona fits in the sales cycle and what are their roles in the purchase decision
2. What are the key pain points of each stakeholder
3. What are their objectives and what are the organization’s objectives
4. Where each stakeholder spend their time online so you can focus your content

3. Content Creation

As we have discussed, the core of the inbound marketing strategy for B2B is content.

Based on your buyer persona, now you should have a better idea about what type of content you should develop for each stakeholder. Remember that content nowadays can come in many different forms from traditional blog posts to YouTube videos to podcasts, and although the goal of B2B inbound marketing is to bring people to our website and capture them as leads, we have to use all the different mediums to succeed in today’s diverse content marketing.

However, in B2B content creation, textual content, and especially blogs are still an important foundation in any B2B marketing strategy. Other mediums, like videos and podcasts, can support your blog by, for example, driving traffic to your blog post, and vice versa.

As discussed above, the objective of your content marketing is to provide content that is going to be informative and valuable for your target audience, while at the same time should establish your business’s credibility as a viable solution for your target audience’s pain points.

Here are some important content marketing tactics you can use in B2B inbound marketing:

Communicate your product’s value instead of the product itself

Remember that people, especially in the B2B environment, are not actually buying your product or service, but rather they purchase the value or benefit they get from your product. In B2B, your target businesses are only going to spend their money on yours if you can help them make more money somehow, either directly or indirectly.

Your product/service might save them some money or make them some money, and you should focus on communicating this on your content. However, communicating value alone simply isn’t enough. A 200-page datasheet is obviously a way to communicate value. Bullet points listing your product’s key features are also a way to communicate value. However, they aren’t enough.

For your content to be successful in B2B inbound marketing, your content should be both valuable and engaging, and it is a very common mistake, especially in B2B content, to forget about the latter.

So, how can we develop engaging content in a consistent way? The general principle is to tell a great story. Stories are what engaged people: it’s much more interesting to read a success story from someone who used your product or service than simply listing your product’s benefits. Tell your audience a story about how your product can help them generate value, share testimonials, and so on.

Make your content about how your brand can be a solution for your audience. You don’t really have to mention your product at all: give them practical, actionable tips, share industry news, and so on. Engage them first, and then you can worry about introducing your content.

Combining various mediums

Above, we have discussed the fact that there are various content marketing mediums we can focus on nowadays, and we have also discussed how we should focus on creating engaging content.

Creating multi-layered content utilizing various mediums can be a great way to improve engagement. We can combine, text, images, video, and audio in a single piece of content to ensure engagement throughout the whole content.

You can, for example, embed your YouTube video in the middle of your blog post. We can obviously insert images and infographics, and even podcast. Another common technique is to create an audio version of your blog post so people have more ways to consume your content.

Again, focus on improving engagement. If the blog post is already engaging enough with just some images, then don’t force adding videos.

Don’t forget technical optimization

No matter how good your content is, people won’t enjoy it if your website is not properly functioning, or even when the layout is not properly optimized. Again, your content’s objective is to produce as much engagement as possible. The longer you can engage people with your content, the more chances you’ll have to convince them to purchase your product or service.

So, make sure your website is properly optimized so it loads fast enough and mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive. If you include videos and images, make sure they are at least decent in quality (although, you should always aim to be great.)

Create a seamless user experience to boost engagement. Be holistic and thorough, make sure your audience is having the best possible experience in every interaction with your brand from your blog post to your videos to your product and customer service.

4. Content Promotion

Just because your content is good and engaging, doesn’t mean your audience will automatically find them. Remember that B2B inbound marketing is about pulling (attracting) your target audience to find your content.

So, how exactly are we going to achieve that?

SEO

The key to making our content available for our audience is SEO: making sure our content ranks high on Google’s (and other search engines’) SERP so your target audience can find it when they search for your target keywords.

While SEO is a pretty broad subject on its own, and you might want to check out our previous guide on B2B SEO strategy. However, here are some key tips to focus on:

Content quality

The most important factor in SEO success is your content quality, period. If your content is good, sooner or later you’ll get those valuable backlinks, and we all know that backlinks are the most important ranking factor in SEO.

On the other hand, no amount of SEO techniques and strategies will help boost a weak, low-quality content. So, go back to the content creation section above, and again, focus on developing high-quality, engaging content that is valuable for your target audience. You can also decide to work with a B2B SEO agency or services if you want professionals to work on your campaign.

Guest posting and collaboration

Don’t underestimate the power of guest posting or collaboration (in videos, podcasts, etc. ). Collaborate with other businesses and influencers in your industry, and even your competitors when it’s appropriate.
Build relationships with other businesses, authoritative sites, and influencers in your niche, join their social media conversations and establish your position that you are also a thought leader in this niche and you can provide value for their audience (or their business).

Also, don’t forget that it works bost ways. You should also host other’s content on your platform, which can actually provide a lot of benefits. For instance, you are posting high-quality content and can attract the writer’s/content creator’s audience to your site without having to create the content yourself. Your own audience can also see that you have a relationship with other industry leaders which can be a showcase that you have a clear understanding of what’s valuable in your niche.

Don’t forget that in these guest posting opportunities, you can also generate backlinks, which in turn will help your SEO.

Social media

Social media is obviously where our audience is nowadays, even in the B2B environment. In fact, 75% of B2B buyers are influenced by social media in their purchase decision.

It’s important to note that social signals like the number of likes and shares when we post our content on social media won’t help with our content’s SEO. However, the more our content is shared on social media, the more people will notice it, which will translate to a higher chance of us getting those valuable backlinks. So, social media performance will indirectly help your SEO.

Sharing your content on social media just when they are being published will also help Google and the other search engines to notice them, and so the content will get indexed quickly.

Remember that your B2B inbound marketing should serve the whole purchase cycle from when the audience first learns about your brand to when they make a repeat purchase or subscription renewal (hopefully). Creating content can be difficult and time/resource-consuming, so by doing this you can leverage maximum value from each publishing effort.

On the other hand, remember to develop content for each member of your target audience from qualified leads, semi-qualified leads (cold prospects), lost prospects, newly acquired customers, repeat clients, and so on. If you can develop content with a broad scope, the better it can help in encouraging conversion at the bottom of the funnel. So, diversify between specific, highly-targeted content and broader content pieces to encourage conversions.

5. Optimize Your Lead Magnets and CTAs

Now that you’ve successfully attracted people to your content, now what?

Your content by itself won’t really bring value unless the readers/audiences are convinced to buy your product/service and convert them into actual customers. Again, in a B2B environment, this can be much more complicated since the content consumer might not be the only one that has a say in the purchase decision.

We should devise a system to capture our content consumers into prospects, which starts by us capturing their contact information so we can follow-up with our lead nurturing efforts (i.e. email marketing).

We can do it by including CTAs and lead magnets in our content to encourage our readers to convert. A lead magnet is an offer that should be perceived as valuable by our target audience but is offered for free in exchange for their contact information.

So, what should we offer?

The key here is that our offer should be perceived as valuable by your potential customers. It’s them who dictate what’s valuable, not you. So, go back to the very first point above and review your target audience’s needs and pain points. Figure out what’s going to be valuable for them, but at the same time remember that you are going to offer this for free, so make sure the cost of this ‘gift’ is justified.

Here are some common lead magnets we can offer in B2B inbound marketing:

Product demo/free-trial:

A very effective approach in the B2B lead magnet is to offer your time-limited product demo or free trial. This is how your potential buyers can try your product or service, so you can convince them that your solution is indeed the best for their business.

Ebook/whitepaper

A classic approach is to offer an ebook or whitepaper that offers a more in-depth discussion of the content the audience is consuming. For example, if the blog post is about SEO strategy, you can offer an ebook about advanced SEO strategies and techniques.

While this approach can still be effective, keep in mind that it’s already saturated. So, unless your ebook is perceived as really interesting or valuable, it might not attract them.

Webinar

An invitation to a webinar can be a very effective lead magnet if the topic of the webinar is interesting. You can also invite famous guest speakers and influencers in your niche to boost the attractiveness of the webinar.

Also, the benefit of a webinar as a lead magnet is two-fold, as the webinar by itself can create a very personal, lasting engagement and relationship with your target audience.

Educational videos

An engaging, valuable video can be a very powerful lead magnet format. You can, for example, show a few minutes of your video offer before you give them the opt-in form. This can be a very effective lead magnet if your preview video is attractive.

You can create tutorial videos on how to use your product to solve a specific problem (which they might be interested in), or actionable tips and tricks related to your niche.

6. Measure and Evaluate Your Progress

As you can see from the previous steps, inbound marketing for many B2B companies is a long-term game and although the payoff can be big and sustainable, you might need to invest months before you see any significant results from your campaign.

So, having an appropriate system in place to keep track of your progress and evaluate the key metrics of your B2B inbound marketing campaigns is very important. During this long-term game, you might need to make adjustments here and there, upgrade and update your content, find new ways to promote your content, and so on.

Remember that consistency is very important in your B2B inbound marketing: trust is very hard and can take a very long time to build, and yet a single mistake can easily ruin all your efforts.

If necessary, invest in a marketing solution like HubSpot or Pardot where you can analyze all your key metrics for the various channels in a single dashboard (which will make the whole evaluation process much easier to manage).

Keep track of all the data-driven insights you can gather, analyze your content performance, and adjust your strategy when it’s necessary.

End Words

Since B2B inbound marketing is a long-term game while at the same time content is always evolving, it’s very important to always maintain between speed and quality control. It’s important to pay attention to every detail about your content especially to maximize your SEO.

As you can see from the above, the key to a successful B2B inbound marketing campaign is whether you can consistently publish engaging, valuable content for your audience. However, how you promote the content is also important.

While SEO remains the most effective way to promote your content and should be the core aspect of your B2B inbound marketing strategy, we need other channels from social media, email marketing, and other promotional channels to drive traffic and get more backlinks to each of your content.

The post The Ultimate B2B Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Instead of pushing our message to the customer like in traditional marketing (or outbound marketing), inbound marketing focuses on attracting our target audience to come to us. The idea is, since your audience is already attracted to what you are offering, the conversion rate would be higher.

Sounds interesting?

In this guide, we will discuss how we can implement an inbound marketing strategy for your startup, but so that we are on the same page, let us first discuss the concept of inbound marketing.

What Actually Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing was a marketing jargon first coined by HubSpot back in 2006. However, it didn’t really gain popularity until around 2012. Since then, however, inbound marketing has become one of the most important buzzwords in the last decade’s digital marketing.

So, what actually is inbound marketing?

We have briefly discussed that the main idea of inbound marketing is about attracting our target customers inwards. So, what exactly are we going to use to attract these customers?

As you might have guessed, the answer is content. Inbound marketing is essentially about putting valuable, relevant content out there so our target audience can find it.

The most common case in inbound marketing is when the target audience is looking for information or solution for a specific problem on Google and then click on a search result to consume the content. Now, this particular audience is aware that a certain brand/blog has information they are currently seeking and at the same time might learn about the product it is selling, the brand, and so on.

According to HubSpot’s initial concept of inbound marketing, we can generally divide the strategy into four different stages:

• Attract: attracting strangers to visit your website or platform. As discussed, this is mainly done through content marketing and SEO, but we can also use other channels like social media, influencer marketing, and so on.
• Convert: converting strangers into prospects/leads, mainly by offering something in exchange for their contact information.
• Close: nurturing prospects/leads until they are ready to purchase your product or service. This is mainly done via email marketing/newsletter, but also via other channels like social media marketing and even content marketing
• Delight: reminding existing customers about your business and maintaining healthy relationships so they become loyal customers and advocates for your business.

Why Inbound Marketing for Startups?

The thing about inbound marketing is that the output might be less tangible compared to a traditional advertising campaign. Content marketing can take a long time before you can see significant results. On the other hand, many startups tend to desire tangible, quick results to grow the business quickly.

Still, there are some key benefits of inbound marketing for startups, and so it’s best for startups to start investing in the inbound marketing efforts as early as possible.

They are:

• Cost-efficiency

One of the key challenges in any startups is limited capital, which often translates into a limited marketing budget. On the other hand, mass outbound marketing like advertising is not only expensive but has become highly ineffective in today’s digital marketing age.

This is where inbound marketing can be a cost-effective solution. As discussed, the cores of inbound marketing are content marketing and SEO, and both of them can be very affordable and even totally free if you do everything yourself.

By investing in inbound marketing, startups can quickly achieve growth with its limited marketing budget.

• Inbound marketing helps build the credibility of your brand

One of the biggest challenges of building a startup is that nobody knows you, and so it’s obviously harder for startups to attract new prospects and customers.

At the center of inbound marketing is the consistent publication of relevant, high-quality content, and content is now the best way for us to establish credibility as the thought leader/expert of the industry.

When done properly, inbound marketing can be a great way for startups to leverage social proof, convincing people to purchase from us.

• Sustainable results

The objective of inbound marketing is to build sustainable connections with your customers.

Once, for example, a blog post is ranked on the first page of Google’s SERP, it can generate organic traffic for months or even years even after you’ve stopped spending on it. Compare this to traditional advertising, where you won’t get any impact when you stop placing the ad.

Again, this will be related to the cost-efficiency and ROI of your marketing process. Once you can provide high-quality, relevant content for your potential audience, everything else becomes easier.

• High-quality traffic and prospects

While a core part of inbound marketing is about creating awareness, there is another important advantage of inbound marketing: it is designed to attract the right kind of traffic and prospects that are the right fit for your business.

The precise targeting is a key benefit of inbound marketing over the traditional marketing channels, and by ensuring you get highly-relevant, qualified leads, we can also improve the cost-efficiency and ROI of the inbound marketing campaigns.

• Two-way communications

In today’s world of social media, inbound marketing is not only about getting our content found by the audience. However, at the same time, we can listen to their conversations on social media.

As a result of this, we can use inbound marketing to gather insights about our target audience and improve our future marketing efforts using these insights. Inbound marketing can be a valuable source of data so we can improve our products and services in the future.

Comprehensive Inbound Marketing Strategy for Startups: Step-By-Step

Now that we’ve learned about the initial concept of inbound marketing and its benefits for startups, here we will discuss how we can develop an inbound marketing strategy for startups.

While there are a lot of different ways to execute your inbound marketing, having a clear strategy in place will significantly help, especially since inbound marketing is a long-term game.

As discussed above, there are four different stages of the inbound marketing strategy:

1. Attracting visitors to visit your content
2. Converting strangers into leads/prospects
3. Closing leads into paying customers
4. Delighting existing customers into advocates

Our step-by-step inbound marketing strategy below would also be based on these four different stages. So, let us begin with the first one.

Step 1: Defining Your Inbound Marketing Objective

The most basic and arguably the most important step in creating an inbound marketing strategy is defining your goal(s).

While in most cases, the obvious objective of inbound marketing is to attract visitors to our website/platform, it’s best to think ahead of what exactly are you expecting out of the inbound marketing campaign.

In general, your inbound marketing objective should mirror your overall business’s objective. For example, if your business goal is to grow your revenue by 20%, then this can translate to a 100% increase in lead generation from inbound marketing (with a rough estimation of a 20% conversion rate).

Your inbound marketing objectives should be SMART goals:

• Specific: it has to be clear and targeting only a specific area to improve
• Measurable:  we can assign KPIs and we should be able to measure the progress via metrics
• Assignable: we can specify who is responsible for achieving this goal
• Realistic: attainable. Having a realistic goal is very important in maintaining your team’s morale. If you have a big goal, you can divide it into smaller, more attainable milestones.
• Time-related: you can set a deadline for each objective and measure the progress

You should be able to measure the progress of your inbound marketing campaign based on this objective, and it’s important to frequently analyze the results of your inbound efforts through these KPIs.

Here are some examples of clear and measurable inbound marketing objectives:

• Generating 1,000 new leads within 3 months
• Improving conversion rate by 30% within a year
• Reducing churn by 20% within a year

Define your lead generation objectives as clearly as possible, and we’ll use them as the foundation for the following steps.

Step 2: Defining Your Target Audience

A very important part of your inbound marketing strategy is to define your target audience.

Step 3: Plan How To Attract Your Audience

This step is related to the first stage of inbound marketing: attract. This is about how we are going to attract potential prospects to our platforms (mainly website) and build awareness.

In general, there are three core channels to focus on in this strategy: content marketing, SEO, and social media, but in this step, we will mainly focus on planning how we will attract visitors with these three channels.

Keyword Research

Since SEO will be our main ways of how people can find our content, then all of our content creation should begin with proper keyword research. It’s very important to find out how your target audience is searching for content so we can properly target the right opportunities.

There are three key principles in finding our target keywords:

1. The target keyword should be relevant to our target audience. This is mainly measured via monthly search volume. We should target keywords with high enough search volume.
2. The target keywords should be relevant for your business. Not all keywords that are popular for your audience would be relevant for your business. For example, if you are targeting people between the age of 18 to 25, then keywords related to ‘Netflix’ might be popular, but they might not be relevant for your business.
3. Depending on your budget and timeline, the competition for these target keywords must be manageable. Even if the target keyword is very popular, you shouldn’t pursue it if the competition is too heavy for your current condition.

Make a list of your target keywords, and set your priorities depending on these three factors above.

Editorial Calendar

Based on the keyword research we’ve performed above, we can design an editorial calendar as a foundation of our content marketing plan.

The editorial calendar should include:

• What the content is: target keyword, topic idea, rough draft, etc.
• Where the content will be published: which platforms you are going to publish the content and with which type
• When the content will be published: the timeline when you’re going to publish the content

Also, in developing your content calendar, here are the important factors to consider:

• How frequently are you going to publish your content? Decide on how often you are going to publish your content: daily, once a week, three times a week, etc. Deciding on this factor would help in how you will design your content calendar.
• How many people will use this calendar? If you have more than one team member working on your content, then you should use a platform that allows multiple people to collaborate and brainstorm on the platform. This is especially important if some/all of your team members are working remotely.
• The types of content you are going to upload. Decide whether you are going to focus on only one type of content (i.e. a blog post) or on several different types of content (i.e. videos, podcasts, etc. )
• The process of content development.  Define the different stages your content goes through before it’s published, including required approval process within your startup. You should accommodate your calendar so it can differentiate between two similar projects that are in different process stages.

Last but not least, choose the right platform and/or format that you will use to create your calendar. You can use basic Excel (or Google Sheets) for this purpose, but you can also use content calendar tools and software like CrossCap or CoSchedule if you want collaboration features.

Planning Your SEO Implementation

Implementing SEO for startups would cover two different aspects:

• On-site SEO: SEO optimizations performed on your site, which can be further divided into two:

• • • Non-technical: keyword optimization and all other optimizations related to the content (layout, word count, etc.)
    • Technical: optimizing the technical factors of your site including but not limited to site speed, mobile responsiveness, META description, etc.

• Off-site SEO: especially about generating backlinks to the content but would also include maintaining social media presence, responding to reviews, etc.

SEO optimization can be a pretty deep subject and you can check with Mike Khorev if you are looking for startup SEO agency or services. However, here are some important things to consider when implementing SEO for inbound marketing:

1. 1. Content quality remains the most important factor of SEO success. If your content is high-quality and relevant, sooner or later you are going to get those valuable backlinks, and as a result, it will boost your SERP ranking. On the other hand, no amount of strategies can help low-quality content to rank higher.
   2. Backlinks remain the most important ranking factor in SEO. However, it’s important to note that the quality of the backlinks is now more important than quantity. Obviously, however, getting high-quality backlinks from famous, authoritative sites is easier said than done. However, while there can be countless link-building tactics we can use, in the end, they will boil down to just two:

• Link hook: essentially, giving them a reason to link your content. Include things like

1. 1. • • Unique data or information, for example, research report, user testimonials, etc. Information that only you possess.
        • Aesthetically pleasing content like photos or infographics
        • Interesting story
        • A collection of information (i.e. data roundup, reviews of various products, etc.)

• Relationship: obviously we are more likely to provide links to websites we know. Since we are a fairly new startup, building relationships is very important, since it’s unlikely that others will know us by reputation. Here are what you should do:

1. 1. • • Reach out to them. It can be as simple as sending them an email to introduce yourself
        • Join their social media conversation, ask valuable questions, provide valuable answers, etc.
        • Again, the best way to get yourself known is to consistently publish high-quality content

3. Optimize the technical SEO factors of your site, as discussed above. Especially focus on three things:

1. 1. • Site speed: According to Google’s research and other studies, people will bounce from your site if it loads in more than 3 seconds.

• Mobile responsiveness: It’s no secret that Google now prioritizes mobile-friendly sites to rank on its SERP. So, making sure that your website is mobile-responsive or mobile-friendly is very important.
• Indexable: Make sure your website can be properly indexed by Google (and the other search engines), and all the elements on your website are properly recognizable. Again, follow our technical SEO optimization checklist here.

4. Keep your content fresh and up-to-date. Google’s algorithm now prefers newer or at least updated content. So, make sure to set a schedule in your editorial content to update your older content once every year (or if possible, every 6 months). Update older content with newer information, fresh images/infographics, and additional content if necessary.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is simply where our audience is nowadays, so it would only make sense to use social media in our inbound marketing effort to attract our audience. Regardless of who your target audience is, it’s likely that they are spending time on one or more social media platforms.

We can generally divide social media marketing into three different types:

• Organic: that is, growing your own follower and share your message
• Paid: using various paid options offered by the social media platform, like Facebook ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Ad, etc.
• Influencer: although influencer marketing can be considered as a marketing channel on its own, it is actually a part of social media marketing.

Organic social media efforts are affordable (and can be 100% free), but it will take time before you can grow a substantial amount of followers and have sufficient organic reach. Paid efforts, on the other hand, can guarantee short-term results can be very expensive if you are not careful. Influencer marketing can be midway between the two (although if you work with famous influencers and celebrities, it can also be expensive).

Use social media effectively to promote your content and also to engage your audience.

Step 4: Convert Visitors Into Leads

Now that we’ve successfully attracted the target audience to our platform, the next step is to convert these strangers into prospects/leads.

First, a definition: we can say that a stranger has successfully been converted into a prospect when they’ve provided their contact information (mainly their email address), confirming their interest in our brand–or at least, what we are offering.

In encouraging conversions via inbound marketing, there are three key aspects to focus on:

• Lead magnet: something valuable (perceived as valuable by the user) that we offer for free in exchange for the audience’s contact information. A classic approach is to offer downloadable content (an ebook, white paper, etc.) that is related to your initial content.
• CTA: Call-to-Action, a link or button provided in your content offering the lead magnet. When a user clicks on this CTA, we can show an opt-in form or drive them to a landing page.
• Landing page: a specific page designed to convert users. The page will mainly include the description of your offer (the lead magnet), as attractive as possible, and a form where your potential prospect can submit their contact information.

Attractive Lead Magnet

The key to a successful lead magnet is the offer, or to be more specific, the value of your offer. For your lead magnet to be successful, your audience must perceive that your offer is valuable so they are willing to submit their contact information.

Another important factor to consider is whether the offer is a good fit for your brand. Think about it, if we offer $1,000 for anyone to submit their e-mail address, we can quickly attract a lot of people. Yet, most likely it won’t bring any value for your business.

So, finding the right balance between the value of your offer, the cost (if any), and the relevance to your business is very important. If what you offer isn’t very valuable in the eyes of your audience, then you won’t get too many leads. On the other hand, if what you offer is too valuable, you might attract people that are only interested to the offer itself and not your actual product/service.

You can be as creative as possible with your lead magnet offers, and this list can be a good source for inspiration.

CTA Design and Placement

What and where your CTA is can make or break the lead conversion rate.

The purpose of your CTA is very simple: tell your audience about your lead magnet or to direct them somewhere else (your landing page). It can be a hyperlink with an engaging copy or a designed button, but the purpose remains the same.

Here are some tips in creating a high-converting CTA:

• Make them as obvious as possible

You want your audience to notice your CTA, so make them as visible as possible without disrupting the user experience. Yes, everybody hates those pop-up, screen-blocking CTAs, but hiding your CTAs below the fold won’t help your conversion rate either.

Again, finding the right balance is very important: it should be higher on the page but not too high, and it should be stand out enough.

Also, make sure that the message of the CTA is clear. Be straight and to the point with an attractive message. If you are going to use a button, make sure it’s also well-placed and eye-catching.

• Easy to understand

Don’t use confusing or too technical jargon, and use languages that they can easily understand. A good approach is to target the problem your audience is trying to solve and communicate that you can provide a solution. For example, “are you ready to lose 20lbs in a week? Click here”. As usual, don’t forget that it should be as attractive as possible.

• Command the action

Remember that the CTAs are designed to gently push visitors towards the next action. So, gently command them to take this action whether it’s “click”, “buy”, “subscribe”, ”download”, and others. Use active verbs and an exclamation mark if you can.

• Be consistent

If you repeat your CTAs (you should, as many times as it’s appropriate), make sure to be consistent in your messages. Also, if you use a button, be consistent with your designs.

• Create a sense of urgency

A very effective approach is to leverage on your audience’s fear of missing out (FOMO). Use words like “for a limited time only” or use a counter showing that only a limited number of offers is left.

• Keep it short

As a general rule of thumb, your CTA shouldn’t be more than 120 characters in length (around 90 characters is ideal). Again, our goal is to be as clear as possible in this limited number of characters. Be straight and to the point, and be as attractive as possible.

Conversion-optimized Landing Page

Landing page optimization can be a very deep subject on its own, and the goal is to optimize every element on the landing page to improve conversion rate using data and evidence.

However, here are some best practices to follow:

• Make your offer clear

Use all the principles of optimizing a CTA above on your landing page. The goal is to communicate your offer as clear as possible and focus on how the customer can understand its benefits and experience positive emotions.

• Less is more

On a landing page, ensuring it is as simple as possible, and getting rid of as many visual clutters as possible is very important. Your audience should focus on your offer (the CTA), and the benefits they will get.

• Contrast

Use contrast effectively to emphasize your message. A common practice is to use a contrasting, attractive color for your CTA button so it stands out. Also, use negative space effectively between your elements and emphasize your logo and CTA.

• Make it as easy as possible

It’s already difficult enough to convince them to convert, so don’t add to the difficulty. Make the conversion process as easy as possible. If you use an opt-in form, include as few fields as possible. Also, make sure your landing page is mobile-responsive and loads quickly.

• Make it easy to find you

Provide contact information in various different ways (but don’t add to the clutter). You can include a link to the help center or put your email address on the landing page so they’ll know where to find you. This can help create a sense of trust, which can help with the conversion rate.

Step 5: Closing Leads Into Customers

This one is about how we can nurture the qualified leads until they are ready to purchase, and finally give them that little push so they convert into customers.

The most common (and effective approach) to launch a lead nurturing campaign via automated email marketing. We’ve successfully captured the audience’s contact information, and in this step, we are going to leverage it via a process we call drip marketing.

Identifying lead lifecycle stages

Creating lead lifecycle stages according to the prospect’s position in the funnel/buyer’s journey can significantly help us in preparing a lead nurturing campaign. While the stages might vary depending on your product’s sales cycle, here are the common lifecycle stages you can use as a template:

• Unknown lead: a website visitor that has visited your site more than once and has been tracked by your solution (i.e. cookies) but they haven’t provided their contact information
• Known lead: pretty self-explanatory, someone who has given their email address but hasn’t yet engaged much with your brand
• Marketing-qualified lead (MQL): a prospect who has engaged enough (i.e. consumed several pieces of content, browsed the product pages several times, etc. )
• Sales-qualified lead (SQL): a prospect who has been validated by your sales time and is determined as very likely to buy the prospect. Ready to be approached by your salesperson and discuss their options.
• Customer: a prospect who has been converted into a new customer

Drip Marketing

The idea of using drip marketing/automated email marketing to nurture leads is to send a continuous stream of email messages to the prospect based on their actions and/or their position in the buyer’s journey.

For example, when they just abandoned a cart, we can send an email about the product they’ve just abandoned to remind them and convince them to purchase.

The idea is, if we can send the right message, to the right people, at the right time, it can slowly but surely improve the chance of conversions.

So, there are two key aspects of an effective drip marketing in lead nurturing: personalization and automation.

• Personalization: not only about using the recipient’s first name in the subject line, but to actually send the right email address based on the actions they are doing
• Automation: using a marketing automation solution to schedule your emails automatically and/or to automatically send an email based on the triggered action

Sales-Marketing Alignment

A key consideration in this lead nurturing stage is to ensure your sales and marketing teams can work hand-in-hand with the same objective: converting sales-qualified leads into actual customers.

The basic principle is about information sharing: the marketing team (who has previously interacted with the prospect) should provide the information about the prospect to the sales team, so the sales team is now better equipped for the sales call.

A proper CRM software can significantly help in this aspect, so both marketing and sales can easily input and share data of different prospects/leads.

Step 6: Delighting and Retaining Customers

The last stage of the inbound marketing campaign is where we delight existing customers, turning them into advocates.

Converting customers into advocates that essentially promote your brand/product/service for free is the ultimate goal of inbound marketing, and the key here is relationships.

The best possible advocates of your product/service that will potentially generate a lot of referrals are those with actual experience and are happy with what you offer. In this stage, inbound marketing should focus on campaigns like implementing loyalty/referral programs, post-purchase support, further product education, and drip/email marketing that is focused on maximizing retention.

Content Marketing

Although we are already in the last stage of the inbound marketing process, content marketing is still the core strategy.

The idea here is to segment existing customers into their own list and then we can implement drip marketing to push content pieces that are focused on continued education. We can also pursue cross-sell and upsell opportunities, for example by offering additional products that might cover the needs they may have.

However, focus on education/information in how they should maximize the benefit of the purchased product/service. Treat this as an ongoing post-purchase customer service to delight this customer. Remember that you have two focus: maximizing retention and converting them into advocates.

Loyalty Programs

Drip Marketing

You should still send a segmented email newsletter to encourage repeat purchase, push upsell/cross-sell opportunities, or simply to provide information related to the product/service or your niche in general.

Maintain your position as the thought-leader of your niche, so you remain their first option if they need to make another purchase. Doing this effectively can also remind them every now and then to recommend your product/service to their peers, simply because they are happy with your content.

Loyalty Programs

A loyalty program can be a cost-effective campaign to minimize churn. Depending on your product or service, you can implement a referral program that rewards customers that refer your product to others.

The secret to a successful referral marketing is your incentive: offering something too valuable, and you might generate low-quality referrals that are not a good fit for your business. Offering too little of value, and you might not generate any interest. Finding the right balance is very important.

End Words:  Evaluation and Re-Optimization

Since inbound marketing is a long-term game, always monitoring your progress based on the inbound marketing objectives and KPIs is very important. You should especially focus on lowering lead acquisition and customer acquisition costs.

You can do this by monitoring the whole aspects of your website traffic thoroughly: keyword ranking, click-through rate, organic traffic, conversion rate, and other metrics while also considering your overall online presence (social media engagements, etc.)

Keep track of your inbound marketing objectives, and your startup business goals in general. While implementing an inbound marketing strategy can take a significant amount of time at first even if your work with a startup marketing consultant, it will also provide a long-term, sustainable result.

The post Inbound Marketing Strategy for Startups: Ultimate Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

So, in this guide, we will discuss the definition of the two, the key differences between the two marketing methods, and how you can develop a marketing strategy using the two concepts.

Let us begin by discussing the definitions.

Outbound Marketing: The Definition

Outbound Marketing is actually just another name for “traditional marketing”, which mainly consists of advertising. The term “outbound marketing” itself is actually quite new, coined to contrast the new and popular “inbound marketing”. So, activities like offline advertising (television, radio, magazine, newspaper, billboards etc), online advertising (display ads, PPC ads, social media ads), and activities like cold calling, direct mail, and so on.

In these marketing activities, the main concept is to use mass media to push our promotional messages outward, hence the name outbound. So, outbound marketing is all about exposure: the more impressions you produce, the higher the chance of response.

In the past, especially before the internet, these outbound marketing tactics are (extremely) effective. Today, however, besides the fact that these advertisements are highly saturated, the fact is that customers are getting smarter, and a lot of technologies are now available to help them avoid advertisements:

• TV simply don’t get as many viewers anymore, and a lot of people are now recording the TV shows enabling them to fast forward through advertisements
• Same with radio, more and more people are consuming audio content via podcasts, digital music streaming, and satellite radio
• Fewer and fewer people buy magazines and newspapers, so less exposure on print advertising
• There are now various ad blockers to block online advertisements. Besides, even without those ad blockers, people simply avoid seeing and clicking banners.

Obviously, another common problem with outbound marketing is that people that are not your target audience will also be exposed to your advertising. Considering the highly expensive cost of both offline and online advertising nowadays, it’s now very hard to maintain cost-efficiency.

However, the main issue with traditional, inbound marketing is its interruptive and disruptive nature: TV commercials interrupt the shows, cold calling and door-to-door salesman interrupt your present activity, online banners sometimes blocked the page’s content, interrupting and a lot of the times, annoying you.

The bottom line, these outbound marketing tactics have their days in the mass media age, but they are no longer the preferable medium nowadays. Is that saying they are now totally useless? Not necessarily, as we will discuss their uses further below. But first, let us briefly discuss the concept of inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing: The Definition

Contrary to outbound marketing, inbound marketing refers to marketing tactics that are pulling the prospects inwards, pulling visitors towards your brand.

Inbound marketing is mainly done by establishing brand authority and credibility by developing valuable, high-quality, and relevant content.

The thing is, it’s hard to convince someone to make a purchase of something when they don’t need or want it. Consider the fact that due to the internet and especially social media, we see thousands of products and services every single day. While showing a product over and over again can work in the mass-media age of TV commercials and billboards, it’s no longer very effective in this highly saturated, noisy digital world.

Inbound marketing simply addresses this fact: it is not targeting those without any intent or necessity to buy your product or service, but targeting those who are actually looking for it.

When we are looking for a product, a solution for their problem, or are looking for a new information, nowadays our first move is usually to turn to Google, or ask Google Assistant/Siri on our phones. This way, if you have a valuable, relevant content published that is targeting the right keyword/query, these people can find your brand.

Here are the common processes of a typical inbound marketing campaign:

1. Attracting prospects by publishing relevant, high-quality content pieces, and promoting them through various channels, especially through SEO and social media marketing
2. Providing forms, CTAs, and landing pages to encourage them to convert into leads. (lead capture)
3. Using various lead nurturing devices and methods to nurture these leads into purchasing customers. (email marketing, CRM, pushing more content, etc)
4. Even after they convert into customers, we can still use inbound marketing to maintain/improve retention, educating them further, and even turn them into advocates

Inbound Marketing VS Outbound Marketing: The Differences

The inbound-outbound marketing dichotomy is actually based on the age old tension between push marketing and pull marketing. So, essentially, inbound marketing uses pull marketing tactics, and outbound marketing uses push marketing tactics.

As mentioned, a major aspect of inbound marketing is developing and publishing high-quality content pieces to attract visitors. The goal of inbound marketing is to pull people towards your brand, attracting them to the business with valuable information.

On the other hand, the goal of outbound marketing is to push your promotional messages to as many people as possible. This is achieved mainly through advertising.

So, here are the main differences between inbound and outbound marketing:

• Inbound pulls those who need or want your product. Outbound pushes the messages to everybody, regardless of intent and necessity
• Inbound marketing is interactive, two-way communication, while outbound marketing is static and one-way
• Inbound marketing requires long-term commitment, outbound marketing can either succeed or fail fairly quickly
• Inbound marketing encourages content consumption, outbound marketing disrupts and interrupts content consumption
• Main channels for inbound marketing are search engines, blog, and social media platforms. Main channels for outbound marketing are advertising channels, telemarketing, and other push channels.

Inbound Marketing VS Outbound Marketing: Communication Difference

As mentioned, the key difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing is regarding communication. Outbound marketing relies in pushing the promotional messages through mass media, where communication is only one way: you post a message about your product, service, or brand, and that’s it. Your audience can’t interact with the promotional message. Imagine if people can leave a comment on TV commercials back in the 80s and 90s, probably most of them will be negative comments because the advertising is disrupting the show.

On the other hand, two-way communications is available, even encouraged in inbound marketing activities. People can contact the brand after consuming a content, leave a comment, share and talk about it on social media, and so on. While certainly there are a lot of benefits of this two way communication, people can now talk about, and to you on various channels, including negative ones.

So, transparency and engagement will be really important in this two-way communications of inbound marketing. You must always be honest when communicating your product and/or service, including when presenting value proposition and admitting mistakes. You also have to engage with your prospects and customers, even those who think negatively about you.

Direct connections with customers through this two-way communications is not only effective in maintaining customer loyalty, effectively educating your prospects, and improving retention, honest customer feedback is also extremely beneficial in the long run.

So, inbound marketing is not solely about producing amazing content, it’s also about effectively engaging your prospects and customers.

So, Which One Is More Effective?

By now the answer is fairly obvious. Inbound marketing is now the more popular, and more effective choice. Inbound marketing is also more affordable with higher ROI.

That’s not, however, saying outbound marketing is now totally useless.

When discussing the differences above, we have mentioned that the main problem about inbound marketing is time: you will need a long-term investment before your content starts ranking on the first page of Google search results. You will need time before people will recognize your consistency and perceive your brand as the thought leader, and so on.

In general, we will need 6 to 12 months of timeline before we see any significant results. So, what if we need that quick promotion to gain short-term sales boost? This is where outbound marketing can still be effective. Newer outbound marketing technologies like retargeting (link) have also addressed several issues like audience targeting and cost-efficiency.

So, in today’s marketing environment, the most effective marketing approach is to put emphasis on inbound marketing and combining it with outbound campaigns, especially retargeting, for short-term gains.

Inbound Marketing: Key Tactics and Activities

Now that we have discussed the importance of inbound marketing, let us discuss the important tactics and activities in an effective inbound marketing strategy:

• Content development

As mentioned several times above, content creation is the core of inbound marketing. In an inbound marketing strategy, your content is just as, if not even more important than your main product or service: you not only need to have a great product/service worth selling, you also need to establish yourself as the expert/thought leader of your industry.

Today, there are many different forms of content pieces from textual, written contents to video to podcasts. Also, you can combine free content with gated content pieces like white papers, webinars, and e-books that can be used to collect contact information. (i.e. offering downloadable,in-depth e-book in exchange of their email address).

• SEO

SEO is also a huge part of inbound marketing: no matter how good and valuable your content is, it will bring no value to your business and your customers if it’s not visible. The main way people find new content is through the search engines, and so the goal is to have our content ranked at least on the first page of Google search results for our target keywords.

SEO can be a pretty broad subject on its own, and so you might want to check our previous SEO guide here.

However, if your content is already high-quality and relevant, getting good SEO results is also only a matter of time, making SEO and content marketing a mutual symbiosis. A huge part of SEO is getting more inbound links or backlinks, and if your content is high-quality, more and more people would want to link to it. You can also work with SEO consultants if you need a custom SEO strategy.

So, develop great content, get more backlinks, and optimize the technical aspect.

• CTA and Lead Capture Form

Content is only useful when you can effectively capture the reader/viewer as prospect or lead, which in turn can convert into paying customers.

Commonly, the practice of capturing readers as prospects is done by giving offers in exchange of their contact information. These offers can be invitation to a free-trial, webinar, or downloadable contents like ebooks or white papers.

• Content Promotion

Besides SEO, we can use other marketing channels to promote our content, not only to gain more exposure, but to get more inbound links in the process. Social media marketing (both paid and organic), as well as influencer marketing are just a couple of effective content promotion channel examples.

• Lead Nurturing

Not every lead or prospect you gained from all the above process will be a customer. This is where the importance of proper lead nurturing tactics comes to play. Lead nurturing can be as simple as email follow up to complex, automated system.

Bottom Line: The Inbound-Outbound Marketing Strategy

There is no one surefire marketing strategy that is guaranteed to success. Different business models might need different approaches depending on various factors.

However, if you are currently developing a marketing strategy for your business, focusing on inbound strategy in combination with some outbound campaign -especially retargeting-will be your best bet.

This way, you are building a long-term credibility by consistently publishing valuable content, establishing yourself as the expert of your industry. Yet, the outbound campaign can help with short-term results.

The key here is to find that delicate balance between time and cost: to achieve results while maintaining cost-efficiency, and thus maximizing ROI.

The post Inbound VS Outbound Marketing: Which One Is More Effective appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

However, how can we actually implement the inbound marketing methodology to our SaaS business? While we can be all technical and answer it with complex techniques, SaaS inbound marketing is actually quite simple. Here, we will learn all about it.

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Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

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Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
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• Year over year growth: 100%

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Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
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Before we begin, however, let us discuss a bit about the inbound marketing concept so that we will start on the same page.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

There are two main ways to attract anyone: push or pull. You can “push” out information about your business, product, and/or service to as many people as you can, or, you can create something attractive and “pull” people towards you.

This idea of push-pull marketing is probably as old as the history of marketing itself, and in this modern digital era, we have new jargons that are technically replacing the term “push” and “pull”: outbound and inbound.

Inbound marketing, in its purest sense, is about creating attractive content to pull your audience inwards. While some might argue that inbound marketing is not exactly pull marketing, the basic idea remains the same, it’s about attracting your audience inbound.

Most of us are more familiar with traditional—pull or outbound— marketing: TV advertising, billboards, or even more recently, ads when we are watching YouTube. However, in this age of modern internet and social media, traditional marketing is now facing various challenges:

• The costs to place your advertising are continually increasing. Even if online ads are generally more affordable than, say, TV ads, they are getting more expensive.]
• On the other hand, people are getting more resistant to advertising. Even if they are not using Ad-blockers (which now comes built-in in some smartphones), there’s a thing we call banner-blindness, where users actively ignore advertising all the time.
• People trust their peers on social media more than advertising. Even when you spend billions on advertisement, when a major influencer spoke badly about your SaaS product, it’s going to be a tough battle.
• Influencer marketing, a relatively new outbound marketing tactic that was once thought to be the next holy grail, is also getting more expensive and the effectiveness reduces. People nowadays understood when an influencer is paid to promote, and thus resist the message.
• Nowadays, if you overspent on traditional advertising, it can be counterproductive. Ever stumbled upon an unskippable ad on YouTube over and over again? Did the brand annoy you? Would you buy from the brand? If the viewer is not already loyal to your brand in the first place, most likely the answer is no.

This is where inbound marketing fills in: since you are “pulling” customers with attractive things—and especially content—, there will be less resistance.

The focus of inbound marketing is to provide value with each interaction, establishing relationships and trusts, and in the end, converting the audience into actual customers.

There are four pillars of inbound marketing:

1. Your Website
2. Third-party platforms where you can publish your content: blogs, YouTube, Spotify for podcasts, etc.
3. Google and other search engines, which will be the main way to promote your content through SEO
4. Social media platforms

The Marketing Funnel

To truly understand how inbound marketing works, we must understand the concept of a marketing funnel.

The idea of the marketing or sales funnel is that the buyer’s journey the process every audience went through until they become your customers will resemble a funnel shape: there will be more people in the previous steps, and fewer people will actually buy the product/service.

Typically there are three, or four, major stages in a marketing funnel, especially for the SaaS industry.

• Awareness: the prospect becomes aware of a product/service, or becomes aware that they have a specific problem and in need of a solution.

• Research/consideration: the prospect considers the different options available on the market. The prospect might also research for possible solutions for their problems.

• Decision: self-explanatory, the prospect finally decides on a solution and purchase a product or service.

• Delight: technically, the purchase decisions happened in the third stage and the marketing funnel is done. However, there can be a fourth stage where the customer is delighted with your brand and is converted into an advocate.

Inbound marketing is based on this funnel, where the inbound marketing methodology is designed to attract customers at each stage.

Inbound Marketing Methodology for SaaS

One of the uniqueness of SaaS marketing is the relatively short sales cycle.  For SaaS products priced below $2,000 annually, the buyer’s journey from where they are aware of your SaaS product until they made the purchase typically lasts only 14 days.

This is why inbound marketing and SaaS are like a match made in heaven. With inbound methodology, we can effectively engage prospects during each stage of the funnel.

For example, let’s say we are a SaaS company selling productivity software. In this case, these are the inbound marketing efforts we can try for each stage of the customer’s journey:

• Awareness stage: we provide content about productivity, so when people realize that they have productivity issues, they might stumble upon your content. You can also offer content on how your service can help solve their productivity problems.

• Consideration stage: content like “what to consider when looking for SaaS productivity software”, content comparing your software with your competitors’, etc. The idea is to inform users of the unique benefits of your product.

• Decision stage: case studies, facts-rich content can help convince your prospects to make the purchase.

• Delight stage: how to use your software better, various tips on productivity, etc. The idea here is to offer continuous support and service excellence to encourage loyalty.

As you can see, implementing inbound marketing for SaaS doesn’t need to be complex with a simple basic idea: provide content pieces that are going to be valuable for your audience. Below, we will discuss how to effectively plan and execute an inbound marketing strategy for your SaaS business.

SaaS Inbound Marketing Strategy

SaaS inbound marketing can be very complex with all the technical jargon involved. However, it is actually relatively simple, and will only involve three key areas: content development, content promotion, and conversion rate optimization of your content. Below, we will discuss them one by one.

1. SaaS Content Creation

Content in SaaS inbound marketing must be customer-centric. Meaning, they are developed according to the customer’s—or prospect’s— needs, problems, and behaviors.

To do this, the first essential step is to understand your audience.

SaaS User Research

The most common—and effective approach— here is to develop a buyer persona(s). A buyer persona is a hypothetical model of your ideal audience, and there are two key questions to answer:

• Who do you think is your ideal audience?
• What are their problems that my SaaS product can solve?

For example, let’s use the example that you are a SaaS company selling a keyword research tool. Then:

• Who do you think is your ideal audience? SEO experts, digital marketers, marketing manager
• What are their problems that my SaaS product can solve? Keyword research, topic suggestions, SEO tactics, etc.

With only these two questions, you already have a basic buyer persona. Then, ask more questions, conduct more research using various tools, and confirm the validity of your buyer persona based on your existing customer database (whether your hypothesis is correct). You can use this guide by Search Engine Journal for more about this aspect.

Keyword Research

There are two main ways we might stumble upon a content: via Google (or other search engines) search, or when someone else shared the content via social media. Here, we will address the first.

To make sure our content is discoverable, we have to target the right keywords so people can find the content on the search engine.

We can use various tools to help with this aspect. There are free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or UberSuggest, or there are also paid, more advanced options like SEMRush (also check SEMRush alternatives) or Ahrefs.

There are only three key principles to a proper keyword research:

• Find keywords that are relevant and valuable for both your business and your audience.
• Find keywords with high enough monthly search volume, yet manageable competition (some keyword research tools might display this as “keyword difficulty”)
• Find keywords that you can expand into a topic, and thus an actual content.

Social Media Trends Research

By developing content according to topics that are trending in social media, you can improve its shareability. Tools like BuzzSumo (and BuzzSumo alternatives) can help with this aspect, and the basic principles remain similar to that of keyword research above:

• Find trending topics that are also relevant for your business. You can combine this with keyword research above. For example, you can check whether a target keyword has enough buzz on social media.
• Make sure you are able to develop relevant, valuable content out of the topic.
• Always check whether the competition is manageable. If it’s too saturated, it’s probably not worth pursuing

Developing High-Conversion Content

First, we have to make sure our content is discoverable by the audience, and the easiest way to answer this is to observe the market. That is, what’s currently ranking on the search engines.

Check how the content was developed: its structure, its content, keyword optimization, etc. This content is your competition, and there are two different approaches you can try:

1. Making a better content: bigger, more in-depth, updated with newer information, better user experience, and so on.
2. Taking a different angle and be unique: you can approach the keyword from a different angle, and be unique.

In most cases, being unique is the easier approach (but it’s not saying it’s easy). For example, if your target keyword is “digital marketing strategy” and you can provide a totally unique (and working) strategy that has not been covered anywhere else, you have a better chance to rank and get more readers.

Getting your content discovered is one thing, but your content must also be able to deliver value, engage the audience, and persuade them to convert. To do this, there are three different approaches:

1. Appeal to the audience’s logic

By providing solid facts and evidence, you can provide value for your audience and establish trust. The challenge with this approach is that your content might get boring, but when done right, can be very effective. This is especially useful for B2B SaaS companies where technical content is expected.

2. Appeal to the audience’s emotions

By relating to the audience’s problems, you can effectively persuade them to trust you. For example, if you are selling a productivity SaaS tool, you can address common productivity issues and provide actionable tips. Generally, more effective for B2C SaaS products, but not always.

3. Using our credibility

If we are already a trustworthy brand, it’s easier to engage and persuade our audience. However, even newer brands can use this approach, for example by using user testimonials and case studies.

You can combine all of the approaches above within one content, or focus on just one or two.

Utilizing Various Mediums

Content is not only limited to textual form, as there are also images, infographics, videos, and even podcasts.

There are two ways you can utilize various forms in approaching your content marketing game:

1. Combining various forms within one content: can be effective, depending on the type of content. For example, images like charts and infographics can help explain facts and data. Videos can also be effective for certain content.
2. Releasing various content forms in various channels. You can, for example, re-use textual content as a video. This approach can be effective to address various stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, a short video about your product might help in the awareness stage, while a more in-depth textual content about the topic can be more effective in the consideration stage.

2. Content Promotion

How you promote the content is just as important as the quality of the content. Remember that no matter how good—or unique— the content is, there’s no use if no one is actually reading it.

Above in the content creation section, we have briefly discussed the importance of SEO. Indeed, SaaS SEO services will be the primary content promotion method in inbound marketing.

SEO Optimizations

SEO by itself is a pretty broad subject, and you might want to check out the SaaS SEO guide.

However, there are several key areas to focus on when optimizing your content for SEO:

• Make sure the page is mobile-responsive and is fast enough to load (3 seconds on standard 4G connection is your upper limit)
• Use your keywords naturally, and combine semantically-related words. Don’t overthink this and focus on developing content that is natural to read for human audience.
• Make sure your content is well-structured and free of typos and grammatical errors.
• The key to SEO, however, is backlink. It’s important to note that nowadays, the quality of the inbound link is more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many backlinks at one time—even if they are authoritative—, can get you penalized. Aim to get 2 to 3 high-quality backlinks each month.

Aiming for more backlinks will be the core of your content promotion strategy. That is, with every other content promotion effort, you should aim to get high-quality backlinks.

Social Media Promotion

There are two different aspects of content promotion in social media: organic and paid. Organic, is when you grow your own social media followers—and thus, your organic reach—, so when you share your content in your social media profiles, you’ll reach a lot of people.

Paid, as the name suggests, is when you invest in social media advertising. For example, you can use Facebook’s Boost Post feature to promote content you’ve posted on Facebook.

This is the case of cost VS time: organic efforts are affordable—if not free—, but you will need to invest months or even years. On the other hand, paid options will guarantee quick results, but can be very expensive. The key is finding the balance.

Email Marketing

Sending your new content to your email and text blast subscribers can be very effective, especially in the consideration stage for lead nurturing content. How do we build a growing email list in the first place? Also via content, and we will discuss this further below.

Influencer Marketing

When an influencer—or a reputable site— recommends your content, you can reach their followers. The key here is finding the right influencer according to your SaaS niche, and find ways so you can get them to mention your content.

For example, you can mention (or even link) an influencer’s content within yours, and then reach out to the influencer that you’ve mentioned them. In some cases, they might be willing to share your content to their followers (assuming your content is high-quality).

Sometimes, however, an influencer outreach email is all it takes.

Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting is still a very effective way to promote your brand, your content, and get those valuable backlinks. Reach out to reputable sites and blogs in your SaaS niche, and pitch a guest post idea.

The key here is building your credibility (through your content), and build relationships. Sometimes, you will need to pay some money to get these opportunities, but it can be worth it in the long run.

Content Syndication and Content Community

Content syndication is essentially re-publishing your content on third-party sites. So. it’s quite similar to guest posting but you don’t have to create brand new content.

When content is syndicated to another site, it can be published as it is or slightly edited (usually to a shorter piece). But, wouldn’t syndication get us penalized due to duplicate content? You might want to check out this article by Neil Patel on the truth about duplicate content penalty.

There are also content community sites where you can share and promote your own content. For example, Hacker News is a community to share tech-related content. This can be a good place to share your content, but don’t be too self-promoting. Engage with other users, promote other’s content, and build relationships.

3. Optimizing Conversions For Your Content

Now that you’ve got a lot of readers/viewers to your content, how can they bring value to you? The answer is conversion.

Let’s go back to the marketing funnel discussed at the beginning of this guide:

• Attraction: here, our aim is to convert content readers into leads
• Consideration: we filter out marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), nurture them,  and convert them into prospects
• Decision: we convert prospects into customers
• Delight: we convert loyal customers into advocates

As you can see, it’s all about conversion.

However, your content readers won’t usually convert by themselves, and they will need a little push. More specifically, here are the common conversion steps in SaaS inbound marketing. Again, let’s use the example that you are a SaaS company selling productivity tools.

A user, Mr.X, realizes he had productivity issues, and went to Google to search for productivity tips. He stumbled upon your content “Top 10 Tips To Increase Productivity Without Willpower”. In the middle of the article, you offer him an ebook for more in-depth productivity tactics that he can download for free in exchange for his email address. He went on to download this ebook.

Let’s pause a bit. The ebook here is an offer we call a lead magnet, which essentially, something valuable that we give for free in exchange for their contact information. When they gave their contact info (mainly email address), we effectively converted them into a lead.

Now, we can follow-up with an email marketing campaign to nurture Mr.X as a lead. Email marketing is an important aspect of inbound marketing as a lead nurturing effort.

Let’s say that Mr.X continued to consume your content (which he became aware of via your email newsletter), and now he’s aware of your SaaS product. He researched for your product and stumbled upon your competitors’. After comparing his options, he decided to sign-up for your free trial. Here, we effectively converted Mr.X from a lead into a prospect.

During the free-trial period, we continued to send email newsletters, but now we sent tutorials about our product, tips on how to use our product, and other product educational content. We also offer customer service excellence during this period, as an attempt to turn him into a purchasing customer. Finally, he decided to purchase the product, and now he is effectively converted as a customer.

However, our job is not yet finished. We continued our inbound marketing efforts by sending more content and continue to provide great service. We do this to prevent customer churn, so that Mr.X won’t cancel his subscription, and also to turn him into an advocate. Turns out he is very happy with our product (and service, remember that service is an important aspect of SaaS), and he started recommending our product to his peers. Finally, he is converted into an advocate.

As you can see, your content should be optimized for conversion according to the various stages of the buyer’s journey. The most important factor, however, is having strong lead magnets to convert readers into leads. You might want to check out this huge list by OptinMonster listing 60+ lead magnet ideas.

End Words

Marketing for SaaS, software, IT and Tech companies relies on three key points: developing high-quality and relevant content, figuring out strategies to promote the content, and optimizing your content for conversions.

If you can do all three properly, you are set with your SaaS inbound marketing strategy, and start to build a long-lasting, sustainable source of leads. The key here is consistency in both quality and quantity.

The post Inbound Marketing for SaaS Companies: Your Ultimate Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

With that being said, this guide will discuss the necessary steps required to develop a B2B marketing plan: from figuring out the right channels to measuring their effectiveness.

Let us begin.

Defining Your Goals

Every plan is, in essence, made to accomplish a certain goal or goals. So, if your goal is not totally clear, not realistic, or worse, you don’t know your goal at all, your plan won’t be effective.

The first principle here is that your marketing goal(s) should properly align with the overall goals of your business: if you are aiming to increase revenue by 10%, it can translate to putting your marketing efforts to generate more leads by 30%, for example.

So, we should start this step by defining your business goals. Your goals should be based on the current state of your business, as well as the current market conditions. Then, we can define marketing goals to help achieve the business goals. Here are a few key areas to focus on:

• Understanding your audience

In the B2B space, we are targeting organizations where there can be several different decision makers You might need to develop different buyer personas for each of them.

• Communicating the benefits of your product/service

People aren’t essentially buying your product or service, but rather the benefits tied to them. Develop and communicate your value proposition properly.

• Competitive analysis

Understanding how your competitors are approaching their marketing strategies is essential. You can either learn something from their efforts, or imitate their successful tactics.

Develop Inbound and Outbound Tactics

This is the most crucial step, as there are many different tactics, channels, and campaigns to choose from. However, generally we can divide all the different marketing activities into two big groups:

Inbound

Inbound marketing, in essence, is the marketing efforts that are designed to pull your audience “inwards”. This is mainly done by publishing valuable content out there, so that the prospects that are looking for a specific information can find this content.

The main idea behind inbound marketing is to establish your position as the expert/thought leader of your niche, and so there are two main aspects of inbound marketing:

• Developing your content: the better you understand your audience, their needs, the specific keywords they are looking for, and so on, the better you can develop relevant content pieces for them.
• Promoting your content: your content, no matter how good, will only bring value when it’s consumed by your audience. Use various channels to promote your content, and aim to get more backlinks to improve your B2B SEO.

Outbound

Inbound activities are generally more effective nowadays, especially for B2B businesses. However, outbound, or traditional marketing activities do have their benefits over inbound marketing: inbound marketing is typically a long-term tactic, and you will need to invest a significant amount of time before you see results.

In most cases, we should expect to invest at least 6 to 12 months before we see significant results from inbound marketing. Yet, not all businesses will have that luxury of time.

This is where outbound marketing activities like advertising come in: with traditional outbound marketing, you are guaranteed to get short-term results, provided you have the money to spend. Here are some common outbound marketing activities for B2B businesses:

• Advertisement, offline and online, including social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Cold-calling
• Direct mail

The thing about outbound marketing is maintaining cost-efficiency, and so, maximizing ROI. So,the key here is to find a good balance between your inbound and outbound marketing strategies: the balance between cost and time. Inbound marketing is more cost-efficient and sustainable, and outbound marketing can generate short-term results.

Optimizing Your Website

Your website is an integral part of your marketing strategy, the equivalent of a storefront in this digital age.

An optimized, presentable, and professional-looking site can help establishing your credibility. Your site’s content can be effective in generating and nurturing prospects, while optimizing your site and landing page for conversions can ensure growth.

Here are some key areas to consider when developing and optimizing your site. The main thing to consider is your audience’s needs. Understand their intent, and optimize your website to address this intent.

There are three main stages of the marketing funnel where you should optimize your site:

• Lead generation: how your site can capture more prospects, mainly covered by inbound marketing (your blog, podcast, etc). Your site should have at least several lead magnets like offering valuable content in exchange for email address.
• Lead nurturing: nurturing prospects until they are ready to buy. This is mainly done through content and email marketing, as well as on-site tutorials, etc.
• Conversion: convincing prospects to actually purchase your product is a difficult process, so don’t make things even more difficult by not giving them a clear conversion path. Make sure your site is optimized for conversion.
• Make sure your site is mobile-responsive. All your buttons should be clickable on mobile devices. Also, if you are including forms, don’t use too many fields and make sure they are easily read.
• Set up the necessary analytics to track important metrics. You can use Google Analytics or paid options like KISSMetrics and Mixpanel.

Develop a Marketing Plan

We can’t have a proper marketing plan without a proper budget allocation. Develop a 12-month marketing plan, consider all the details and the smallest possible steps.

For example, if you are planning a content marketing campaign, figure out all the details from finding the right keywords, planning the topics, finding the right distribution channels, and how you will promote the content. Allocate a set budget for each of these steps.

Evaluate this plan regularly. You can look for new opportunities, optimize the performance of your campaigns, and eliminate the ineffective ones. Adjust your budget based on performance.

Monitoring Your Progress

An important part of your marketing plan is to continuously measure your performance, the effectiveness of each campaign, and optimizing them when necessary.

We should monitor the performance of each channel, tactic, and campaign based on goals and KPIs. For example, if your marketing goal is to increase revenue by X% and you have content marketing as a campaign to achieve this goal, your KPI is can be the number of traffic and conversion rate, among others.

Set up necessary tracking tools to measure these KPIs. We can use Google Analytics to track most of the important metrics such as the number of website traffic, the number of email newsletter subscription, and so on.

For a more detailed measurement, you can implement a marketing attribution model. In essence, marketing attribution is assigning credits to various marketing channels and campaigns based on their contribution to revenue.

For example, if a marketing channel is assigned with 10% credit, and your revenue is $100, then this channel is perceived to contribute $10 to your revenue. Marketing attribution is a pretty deep subject on its own, and you might want to check this guide to learn further.

End Words

While developing a B2B marketing plan and strategy might seem complicated at first, it is actually quite simple once you get the hang of it. The first step is to define your goals. Then, you should talk to B2B SaaS marketing consultant to define the necessary steps and tactics to achive these goals and monitor your performance.

The post Developing a B2B Marketing Plan: A Step-by-step Guide appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Back in the days, the term “marketing” usually refers to buying advertising space in magazines, newspapers, TV spots, or billboards, or buying email and phone number lists to broadcast our promotional messages. 

However, these  “traditional” marketing activities are no longer effective today, thanks to various reasons such as:

• Resistance to intrusive marketing, especially by younger people
• Various forms of ad blocker, even by Google itself,  rendering online advertising ineffective
• People care for social proofs like online reviews and peer recommendations more, no matter how good your advertising is
• Advertising cost is rapidly increasing, even when your advertising is effective, it’s hard to ensure a positive ROI

Those are just some examples of many other reasons. So, is marketing dead? Not exactly, but we can no longer rely on traditional marketing. This is where inbound marketing fills the gap, as we will learn together below.

So, What Actually Is Inbound Marketing?

The traditional marketing practices we have just discussed above is now often deemed “outbound” marketing practices, because they share one characteristic: you are sending your promotional messages “out” to your audience. So, you are pushing your messages outward, which is often, interruptive and intrusive.

On the other hand, inbound marketing focuses on pulling your ideal audience “in”, which is mainly achieved in three key concepts:

• Visible Content: publishing relevant and valuable content pieces which are visible and searchable, mainly by optimizing these content pieces for search engine rankings and social media presence.
• Consistency: trust is a very expensive asset, and yet very easy to lose. By consistently publishing high-quality content pieces, we can establish our position as the expert of our respective industries. 
• Personalization: each audience might need different content pieces according to their needs, their current stage on the buyer’s journey, and other factors. The idea is to deliver the right content for the right audience at exactly the right time to encourage them to move forward, closer to the actual purchase. 

To summarize, inbound marketing is simply understanding the needs and issues of your ideal audience, publishing a content so this audience can find it when looking for information, and educating this audience until they are convinced to buy your product/service.

How Inbound Marketing Works

Inbound marketing might seem like a complex idea at first glance, however, it is actually quite simple once you’ve got the hang of it. 

Here, we will discuss how to execute inbound marketing in a step-by-step approach, beginning with the first one.

Step 1: Setting Your Goals

The first step of a sound inbound marketing strategy is defining your goal(s). There are two main principles to consider here: first, is that your goals should be clear in a way that they are measurable through KPIs and measuring the right metrics. Second, they have to be realistic. 

Big goals can certainly have their advantages, but can backfire when you (and your team) feel like you can’t achieve anything. In this case, you might want to break down the big goals into smaller, realistic milestones. Here are some important considerations in this step:

• Evaluate your current state (i.e. your current website traffic, your current number of generated leads, and so on)
• Your inbound marketing  goal(s) must align with the overall business goal. For example, if your business goal is to increase revenue by 20%, this can translate to an inbound marketing goal of increasing prospects generation by 50%.
• Your goals must be measurable. Define important KPIs and set up the right tracking system to track these goals. We will discuss this further below. 
• Have a timeline. This way, your efforts will have a time-bound purpose, and you can continuously evaluate them 

Step 2: Understanding Your Audience

An integral part of inbound marketing is a thorough understanding of your audience: their behaviors, their needs, the problems they are facing, and so on. The idea is so that we can develop the right content that can provide value for this audience.

First, choose the ideal audience according to your goals defined on step 1. Here are some approaches you can try:

• If you are starting from scratch (i.e., it’s a brand new business or site), you can start by developing a reader persona. Developing a reader persona, however, can be beneficial for any business stages.
• Utilize your available data. For example, you can analyze the demographic data of your current social media followers and your website traffic. Use this data to find your most ideal audience
• Research your competitors, their inbound marketing approaches and especially their audience. You can either target this same audience or find opportunities and gaps based on this data.
• If you are a B2B company, remember that there can be several different purchase decision makers in your target company, that can comprise of several different roles. You will need to create different reader personas for each of these roles.

Step 3: Keyword Research

Based on your audience’s needs, we can find out how this audience is searching for content pieces by conducting a keyword research. There are four important factors to consider in this step:

1. Figure out your audience’s search intent

When we are searching on the internet, there is always a deeper search intent behind it. The thing is, our keyword and thus our content should accommodate this specific intent to provide value. Let’s use an example to illustrate this. Assume we are a B2B company selling a marketing automation tool, and here are some common intents for this company’s audience:

• Navigational: the audience heard about your brand from a colleague, online reviews, or other sources, and so are directly searching for your brand name. For this intent, you should optimize for branded keywords. 

• Informational: the audience is searching for information related to their needs or problems. For example, an audience might be searching for an answer to their marketing productivity issue. In this case, you can target keywords like “marketing productivity”, “marketing automation productivity”, and so on.

• Product research: here, the audience is already interested in buying a marketing automation tool, and is currently comparing different products including yours. Here, you can target keywords like “your competitor’s name VS your brand name”.

Understanding your audience’s intent will also help in the content development process, and so this is a very beneficial approach for any inbound marketing strategy.

2. Utilizing Available Tools

Fortunately, there are many available tools that can help us in this process. Some of them are:

• Google Adwords’ Keyword Planner Tool
• SEMRush
• Ahrefs

You can also use tools like Ubersuggest and BuzzSumo to suggest keywords and topics, among others. There are two important metrics to focus on when using these tools:

1. Search Volume

Refers to how many times people actually search for this keyword, usually on a monthly basis. No matter how relevant you perceive a keyword for your business, there’s no value in focusing on this keyword if no one is actually searching for it. 

The “proper” search volume will be largely dependent on your industry, but generally, a search volume of above 500/month is considered decent.

2. Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty (KD) is closely related to the number of competitors you will face for a specific keyword: the more competition, the more “difficult” to optimize for the keyword. Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs can show KD as a percentage, based on their algorithms. You might also want to check out this guide by Ahrefs to further help with the subject.

In general, the higher the search volume is (hence, the more popular the keyword), the tougher the keyword difficulty. The key here is finding the right keywords with the right balance of a decent search volume and manageable competition. 

3. Manual Approach

The thing is, we can’t always rely on digital tools when researching keywords and topics. Sometimes, we have to rely on our human creativity. 

For example, if you are targeting the boxing niche, most keyword research and suggestion tools won’t be able to come up with keywords like “southpaw”, which can be relevant. Similarly, if your main niche is basketball, most tools won’t come up with the “slam dunk” keyword.

Based on the other approaches we have discussed above, use your own creativity to fill in the gaps. You can then validate your keyword by using the keyword research tools above.

Step 4: Content Development

Now that you’ve decided on your target keywords, it’s time to develop your content. Here are the key considerations for this step:

1. Developing a Content Calendar

You can expand each target keyword into several (in fact, many different topics). So, it is wise to plan all these topics ahead and develop a comprehensive content calendar. 

A proper content calendar should list at least: 

• When and where (the channel) you will distribute the content. The channel will also often dictate the form of the content 
• The tentative title of the content (optimized for the target keywords)
• Target keywords
• Meta description, meta tags, and categories
• CTA (Call-to-Action) plan
• Development progress
• How you will promote the content

Ideally, you should prepare a 12-month editorial calendar.

2. Developing Your Content

While content development is a very broad subject on its own, and we won’t give it much justice here, here are some key principles to follow:

1. SEO Optimization VS Value

Working with SEo experts on optimizing for SEO is a very important aspect of inbound marketing. However, make sure to focus on providing value and uniqueness for your human audience. Include your keywords naturally and don’t overstuff your content with keywords.

2. Content Length

The longer your content is always the better, especially for SEO purposes. However, it will be harder to maintain quality and engagement, the longer your content goes. The key here is finding the right balance, and according to studies, the average length for top-ranking textual content pieces is 1,890 words. What about podcasts and videos? This guide can be a good place to start. 

3. Media Diversification

Even if you are posting a textual content, you should use images and videos to enhance it. On the other hand, you can use textual blog posts to support videos and podcasts. For example, you can publish relatively short and engaging videos and podcasts, and then provide a link to a more in-depth textual content.

4. Use Various Forms

There are many different content forms available:

• Educational and informational content
• Behind-the-scenes content
• Images, infographics, and photos
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Premium downloadable content like a report, white paper, or an ebook

The idea is to go back to your audience’s intent, and publish a content form that will provide better value for that specific intent. This way, we can encourage the audience to move forward in their buyer’s journey.

Step 5: Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value unless someone is actually consuming it. So, content promotion is just as important as the development process, if not even more important. 

There are various channels you can use here:

• SEO: As we have mentioned, SEO is an integral part of inbound marketing. You might want to check out this guide to further learn about SEO optimization.

• Social Media Marketing: With so many people using social media, obviously social media marketing, both organic and paid, can be effective.

• Influencer Marketing: There are two core benefits in using influencers to promote your marketing. First, you can effectively reach their audience. Second, you might get valuable backlinks for SEO purposes.

Obviously, there are many other tactics you can use, and you might want to check out this guide by Moz about content promotion.

The idea is, treat your content as a landing page: optimize for the right keywords, build backlinks, and use all the possible tactics to promote each content.

End Words 

While inbound marketing is certainly a pretty deep subject, the tactics and principles we have shared above can be an excellent foundation for any inbound marketing strategy.

 Remember, however, that the key here is consistency: you will need to consistently publish high-quality, relevant content to continuously generate inbound leads in the long run. 

The post Why Inbound Marketing is the ONLY Marketing appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide, we will discuss four of the most effective marketing tactics for the e-commerce environment. These tactics can be very effective to increase the revenue of your business, encouraging growth, and maximizing profitability.

Without further ado, let us begin.

Have an Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing—even amidst all the newer platforms and technologies today— is still one of, if not the most most effective tactics available, especially for nurturing your prospects until they are ready for the purchase.

Since in an e-commerce business, we lack of any physical engagements with our customers, your email marketing campaign will be your main, and most effective way to maintain engagement.

When implementing email marketing for e-commerce, here are some key considerations:

• Proper audience segmentation and personalization are very important factors to success nowadays. You will need to understand the needs of each specific audience, and deliver the right message properly. (link drip marketing)
• An engaging subject line will be the key to optimizing open rate. Make sure it’s to-the point and can communicate the benefit of opening the message. You will also need to optimize preview texts with a similar approach.
• Have an optimized landing page for each email sent. This is the key to maximizing conversion rate.
• The quality of your content, as well as visual design will be the most important factor in determining click-through rate (CTR).

To learn further about email marketing for e-commerce, you might want to check this guide by BigCommerce.

Implementing Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the popular term now used to describe the activity of regularly publishing relevant, valuable audience to attract prospects. This can be an active blog, podcast, or even a YouTube channel.

The main idea of inbound marketing—as the name suggests— is to pull our audience “inward”, and it is particularly effective for e-commerce because:

• Your business is mainly online-based where you don’t have physical engagement. By regularly publishing content, you can maintain and optimize engagement with prospects and customers.
• A proper inbound marketing will improve your site’s ranking in search results. Remember that people mainly find e-commerce sites through a Google search, and this can be a very effective strategy to improve visibility.

When implementing inbound marketing in an e-commerce setting, here are some key considerations:

• Your inbound marketing efforts should not focus solely on promoting your products or services, but rather to provide relevant information about your niche.
• The key is a proper understanding of your audience: their needs, problems, and behaviors in general. If you can answer a specific issue with your content that is relevant for your ideal audience, you can drive a lot of traffic.
• Although we shouldn’t mainly focus on selling products, you should aim to convert readers into prospects—or even better—customers. You can include CTAs to capture your audience’s email address to follow them up with email marketing. This is mainly done by offering a downloadable content (ebook, white paper, etc.), free-trial, or even free stuffs.
• Developing the content is just half the job done. No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value unless there’s an audience. Promote your content through various marketing tactics, and aim to get as many backlinks during the process. Working with SEO experts will also improve your SEO results.

Make an Easier Checkout Process

While there are many different factors that can determine conversion rate, it is actually a common occurrence that the cause for a low conversion rate is simply because the checkout process is not optimized.

In the specific case of the e-commerce niche, we can avoid cart abandonment with an easy, optimized checkout process:

• The whole checkout process should be seamless, easy enough for anyone, and trustworthy. Include as little number of steps as possible.
• Make sure the whole checkout page is mobile-responsive and optimized. More and more people are purchasing from their phones, and you shouldn’t neglect this opportunity. Make sure all your buttons are easily clickable from a mobile device.
• Capture their contact information (email address) as early as you can in the checkout process. You can actually do this before showing any checkout forms. This way, if they abandon the cart, you can follow up with email marketing.
• You should provide a reliable real-time support that is easy to access during the whole checkout process. You can either provide a live chat feature here, or even implement chatbots. You might also add a live chat function in your app using an in-app chat API solution for Android or iOS.
• Don’t offer false promises, inform clear delivery times, stock levels, shipping costs, and other necessary information. You might also want to offer free shipping.
• Offer incentives and communicate them clearly within the review page(s). This is done to avoid cart abandonment.

Optimizing your checkout page is a pretty deep subject on its own, and there are still various ways to further enhance your checkout process. You might want to check out this guide to learn further.

Leveraging Social Proofs Effectively

People are now avoiding advertising all the time, and studies have suggested that people are more likely to purchase a product or service after reading a positive review, or after a recommendation from their peers.

This is often referred to as “social proof”, a psychological phenomenon when we follow the action of others, assuming this specific action is the correct one.

There are at least six main types of social proof in the marketing environment:

• From existing customers: positive reviews, testimonials, case studies, etc.
• From big masses: using large crowds as social proof, for example, “100,000 customers have bought our product, are you ready to join?”
• From experts: reviews from experts and thought leaders of the industry, including the specific content discussing your product
• From influencers: celebrities that have bought your product/used your service, influencer mentions, etc.
• From colleagues: recommendation from your friends or using social media data (i.e. “100 of your friends have used our product”)
• Awards/certifications: credible awards and certifications can be a huge social proof

So, how can we leverage these social proofs to improve conversion rate? Here are some key principles:

• 63% of customers are more likely to purchase something online when the site displays reviews and ratings.
• You can use real-time stats as powerful social proofs. For example, showing how many people are currently on your site, how many people are currently making a purchase, and so on.
• If you are a B2B ecommerce site, displaying client logos can be very effective. Make sure, however, that it is well designed.
• Encourage existing customer to leave positive reviews and/or ratings. You can offer incentives from discounts to freebies to other special offers.

The main idea here is winning the trust of your audience, so avoid using exaggerated social proofs.

End Words

The key to marketing success for e-commerce is understanding your customer base: their behaviors, their needs, and the problems you/your product can address.

You should also talk to a digital marketing consultant and adapt marketing tactics according to the length of your sales cycle. If your sales cycle is long, for example, you should focus more on the lead nurturing process.

The post 4 Effective Ecommerce Marketing Tactics appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

In this guide to inbound marketing strategy, we will divide our discussion into three big parts. By the end, you can develop a sound inbound marketing strategy and start implementing it.

Let us begin with the first one.

Targeting The Right Audience

Knowing who to target and understanding their needs are very important factors for the success of your inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is ultimately about delivering valuable content to your target audience. Without knowing their needs, you simply can’t deliver value.

The market is also rapidly changing, as do the behaviors and needs of your audience. Focusing on the target audience that matters will also help you in dealing with this changes. So, how can we effectively determine the right audience? Below, we will share some of our methods:

1. Social media insights

If your business already have performing social media profiles with several hundreds followers for each, you can analyze their demographic data to figure out your existing customer base.

Most major social media platforms offer features to analyze the demographic data of your followers, especially their gender, age, and location. For example, if you have a Facebook Page, there’s the “Insights” tab on the top of the page for this purpose.

This is also why social media should be one of your main ways of publishing and promoting content.The more followers and fans you have, the more data you’ll have, and the better you can understand your audience.

2. Conducting Online Surveys

Conducting surveys can be very effective to know your target prospects, and you can easily do this if you already have a growing email database. Also, there are many different tools that can assist you in this process.

The main goal here is to find out your target audience’s needs and problems, so you can ask a question like “what is your current biggest issue related to X (your niche/industry)”. By figuring out their problems, you can then develop content pieces providing solutions to these issues.

3. Conducting Interviews

While broadcasting surveys can be an effective way to figure out the general picture of your target market, it is fairly difficult to capture an in-depth data with it. This is where phone or even in-person interviews can fill in the gap.

Select a few of your existing customers (it’s better to conduct interviews with existing customers compared to prospects, since generally they are more willing), and ask them if it’s okay to conduct short phone calls or video chats (a maximum of 10 minutes). Again, your main goal here is to find out their current problems: ask their current struggles, the solutions they’ve tried in the past, and what are they looking in a solution.

You can then use this data to develop your content.

4. Content Development

Content quality is obviously the core of any inbound marketing strategy. In fact, in theory, if your content quality is excellent, you won’t need any strategy at all.

On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content pieces. Even when a low-quality content somehow rank on the top of search engine results, it won’t bring any business, period.

The value of your content is directly tied to your audience’s needs: a good inbound marketer should always adapt their content according to the current needs of their audience. Yet, it’s not the only thing you should consider when developing your content.

Here are a few areas you should focus on:

Content types

First, understand that textual content, especially blog posts, is still the most effective content form in generating new leads.

However, more and more businesses are shifting towards podcasts and videos, and not without its reasons:you can’t consume textual content while driving or while working out in the gym. Podcasts and videos tackled that issue.

Yet, when researching for services and products, people trust textual content more, especially due to its ability to cover in-depth information.

So, a majority of your content should be textual, while podcasts, videos, and webinars can assist these textual content pieces. For example, you can create a podcast covering an outline for a topic, and offer a link to a more in-depth blog posts covering the same topic. If necessary, you can offer e-books or white papers for even more in-depth information.

Content length

This is the main principle you should understand: the longer is always the better, as long as you can maintain engagement throughout the whole content. Yet, we all know that maintaining quality will be more difficult with longer content pieces. The key is finding that balance.

For textual content pieces, the average word count to maintain this balance looks like to be 1,890 words. For videos? This research by Minimatters might help.

Optimizing titles

Titles, or headlines, if you will, are the first thing people read when they stumbled upon your content, and so they are the ones determining your click-through rate (CTR).

Optimized titles are also important for SEO purposes. You should include your target keyword in the title while making sure the title is also appealing to human readers. Putting the target keyword at the front of the title will also help. For example, if your focus keyword is “Local SEO”, you can make a title like “Local SEO: Top 10 Tactics for Higher Google Maps Results”.

You might want to check this guide by QuickSprout on optimizing headlines.

Optimizing snippet

Similar to titles, your snippet (META description) is very important not only to improve CTR, but for SEO purposes. Include your target keywords, but make sure the description is comprehensive and engaging for human readers.

You might want to check this guide by Neil Patel on how to optimize META description.

Diversify your media

Even if you should focus on primarily textual content pieces, you should utilize other media like images, infographics, audio, and even videos to enrich your content.

Remember that these additional media should support your core content, do not use them just for the sake of it. You can also optimize these images and videos for SEO benefits.

Tell a compelling story

Every human being is attracted to great story: we either spend our lives consuming exciting stories (through books, movies and so on) or writing our own (literally, or by living a successful life).

So, even if your content is technical and data-driven, doesn’t mean it can’t be interesting and fun. Use storytelling techniques to enhance your content, use a conversational approach to engage your audience, and aim to create an interactive story.

Content Promotion

No matter how good your content is, it won’t bring value if no one consumes it. This is why content development is just half of the process, and you shouldn’t neglect content promotion as the core part of your inbound marketing strategy.

There are various ways to promote your content, and below, we will list some of the most popular (and effective) ones:

1. Social Media Marketing

Quite obvious, with so many people using social media nowadays, it is one of the most effective platforms to promote anything.

The thing is, organic reach on major social media platforms have declined rapidly in recent years. So, you will need to consider paid promotional options. Your main goal here is to have more people sharing your content, which can bring exponential benefits both for short-term and long-term basis.

2. Guest Posting

When done right, guest posting can be very effective inbound marketing strategy. Why? Because you get many different benefits with one action: you get backlinks (probably not immediately, but very possible), you get awareness and authority, and you develop relationships with influencers and high-quality sites.

There are several key principles to a proper guest posting campaign:

• Consistency is key, find as many sites accepting guest posting,and approach all of them
• Take notes on sites with high engagement rates, these are your priorities
• Build relationships before you pitch them with your blog post: engage in their conversations, comment on their previous posts, and so on
• Don’t focus on getting backlinks at first, aim to get authority

3. Influencer Marketing

Utilizing influencers not only can effectively promote your content pieces, but you will also get the benefit of getting backlinks from their authority sites.

Again, here are some key principles for a successful influencer marketing campaign:

• The most important step is finding the right influencers for you. There are many tools that can assist you in this process, for example, Buzzsumo.
• Gradually build a relationship with these influencers. Engage them on their social media profiles, join their conversations, and only after gaining their trust, you can propose them for a content promotion opportunity
• Don’t solely focus on major influencers and celebrities, micro-influencers can also provide values

4. Host a Webinar

You can utilize webinars to promote your brand or your personality, while also indirectly promote your content. Host a free webinar session in exchange for their email address, which can be an effective lead generation device.

If you can provide value, people who attended your webinar might also be interested in future content, as you establish your position as the thought leader of your niche.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective tactic not only to promote your content, but also to encourage those who have consumed your content to convert.

Here are some important principles for a successful email marketing campaign:

• Be consistent and think long-term, regularly provide excellent content through email marketing. Don’t focus on hard-selling your products, but focus on providing value
• Understand the behavior and needs of your email subscribers (back to section I). You simply need to provide them with proper values, a reason to stay subscribed
• Personalize your email marketing by using first names. Many email marketing tools can help with this
• Use an interesting, engaging subject line.
• Keep your email messages to-the-point and engaging, you can use animated gifs, images, and even videos, but make sure they have decent loading speed
• Make sure all email messages are mobile-responsive

6. SEO

SEO is obviously an inseparable aspect of inbound marketing, and the primary way you can increase your content’s visibility.

To maximize your SEO results, there are four main areas to focus on:

• Make sure your content is targeting a proper keyword with enough search volume. Check the top-ranking content pieces of this keyword, and aim to develop a better content
• Optimize these keywords on your content, but don’t overstuff the keywords. Include keyword variants and make sure they occur naturally
• Use various content promotion techniques discussed above to generate more backlinks
• Work with SEO expert and consultant to streamline your traffic improvements and avoid search engine penalties

Remember, however, that SEO is a long-term game. Be consistent with your SEO optimizations, and expect at least 6 to 12 months before you see your content on the first page of search results.

Utilizing Your Content to Achieve Results

Inbound marketing won’t bring any value on its own, unless it can generate traffic (leads), educate customers (lead nurturing) or encourage conversions.

Below, we will discuss how to optimize inbound marketing in those three different areas.

1. Lead Generation

The most common practice in this aspect is to offer free but valuable content to acquire leads. You can offer well-researched reports, white papers, e-books, or even in-depth videos and webinar sessions in exchange of their email address.

The key here is obviously the value of your content: the more valuable it is, the more leads you can capture. Check out some of the best examples of this practice, as compiled by Contently.

There are other tactics you can try, for example, offering your readers to subscribe to your email newsletter within your blog post.

2. Lead Nurturing

This is the stage where most inbound marketing practices shine the brightest. Your content will be a powerful weapon to nurture your prospects until they are finally ready to purchase. There are two main goals here:

• Establish trust and credibility. The thing is, people only want to purchase from brands they can trust. This is the most important purpose of inbound marketing.
• Educating your audience about your product or service, especially your unique value proposition. Only when people realize your unique values, they will purchase your product and not your competitor’s.

In this stage, inbound marketing will be even more effective when combined with other lead nurturing campaigns like email marketing and social media marketing among others.

The key here is to refer to the two main goals discussed above when planning and developing your content pieces.

3. Conversion

There are two different conversions to discuss here: converting visitors to prospects/leads, and converting leads into actual customers.

Inbound marketing is very effective in driving blog visitors into leads, as we have discussed on the lead generation section above. However, inbound marketing is less effective at converting leads into actual customers, although it’s not impossible.

Here are some key tactics you can implement to optimize conversions:

• Optimize your site and landing pages

Make sure all your pages, including your email content is mobile-responsive and have fast loading speeds.

If you include links, make sure it is easy enough to click on mobile device.Similarly, make sure all forms are easy to fill on phone screens, and don’t use too many fields (4-5 is the maximum).

• Optimize CTA placements

You can include CTA buttons within your content. Yet, make sure the placement doesn’t disrupt the user in consuming the content. You might want to check this guide by Crazy Egg (written by Neil Patel) on optimizing CTA buttons.

• Monitor and Refine

Monitor the performance of your content, and aim to refine future content pieces according to this data. You can also re-optimize or even leverage existing content pieces.

End Words

As you can see, although inbound marketing seemed like a simple strategy at first, there are many different tactics and optimizations you can implement to maximize your results.

Inbound marketing is a very effective way especially to generate and nurture leads. The key here is to understand your audience, especially their needs and behaviors, and provide values and solutions according to their needs and problems.

If you work with a professional digital marketing consultant to implement inbound marketing properly, you will see sustainable growth in your business.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.