Inbound marketing started as a concept of marketing strategy and now is a common approach to developing business online. The key concept is to drive traffic directly to your website with content. Interesting and informative content attracts new readers, helps building engagement and lastly – it’s creating more awareness around the brand.
The process of attracting new visitors stars with content creation. It’s the element where complete strangers, unfamiliar with your service, but with a specific need, will meet with your brand for the first time. That’s the reason for crafting top grade content. Such materials should be published on the blog, under the same domain, which is in terms of inbound marketing strategy, your visitor’s starting point in the conversion funnel.
1. Concentrate on a specific topic
Creating content could be enjoyable and a rewarding task, but it’s also a demanding process. Like in every campaign, you should specify the target you wish your content would be found by. That’s also the point of concentrating on a specific aspect of the topic.
SEO is a very broad term. By writing about it, you can focus on:
- technical aspects – adjusting your website to be accessible by search engines or optimizing content with keywords
- marketing aspects – strategy development and content creation
- analytical aspects – landing pages and traffic analysis
You could write about SEO in a bigger picture, but you probably wouldn’t win your reader’s hearts. Create content for people that are interested in precise subjects. It’s like targeting an audience with a specific need.
2. Create content that is easy to be found
Every project, brand or business has to start somewhere. Creating content about the specific topic is the first point, but even the best content, the one that simply stands out of the crowd, can be unnoticed, because lack of proper optimization. The other issue is your competitors. Your content will also have to break through the information noise they make.
If creating content and publishing it on the blog is the first step, keyword optimization is the next step to make. Quality content is most likely to be shared and will score a viral effect. It’s a good idea to combine it with keywords relevant to your business in order to make it be findable in the search engines as well:
- do the keyword research
- analyze trends and topics – be up-to-date with market’s demand
A good habit is to avoid creating SEO focused content. Cheesy content with poor quality is very easy to spot and even if it brings traffic, it won’t engage any users. Try to create SEO optimized content, but with a steady readership purpose instead.
3. Know your audience
The last aspect of a content campaign is content distribution. The natural choice for content distribution are the various social media channels. Facebook, Twitter or other specified social media platforms can help you make your content go viral. The sharing option is a major advantage, but the benefits like building your audience and opportunity to communicate with people is even bigger. Talking with your readers and not to your readers will eventually score you their loyalty which is the best value you can get.
You will also have a chance to see what your audience is interested in. If they are entrepreneurs, they may want to improve their online campaign. Those who are looking for step-by-step how to’s or if they have a more technical attitude, may be looking for specific solutions or case studies on advanced-level issues.
4. Analyze the numbers
Don’t ever forget about the data analysis. Inbound marketing is about the content, but the decisions you make about your strategy, should always be data-driven. Analyze if you’re delivering your readers the content they look for.
Analyze your content from engage metrics perspective. Try to spot if you’re making improvements in:
- attracting more traffic
- reducing bounce rate
- prolonging time spent on site
You should analyze your traffic too. Look if:
- you’re earning your readers loyalty – analyze if the returning visitors rate is growing
- your content is engaging – set goals and try to see how many of your readers went deeper into reading your blog or how many of them decided to use the product or service you’re offering
- your content has a viral potential– track how many tweets, shares or pluses it receives
