‘Pull’ Marketing can be so much more effective than ‘Push’.
Inbound Marketing Plan in 5 Simple Steps
Hello %%First Name%%
With our online businesses we have 2 options for building our potential & current client database.
Outbound Marketing: Where you are trying to push your message out to your market… cold calling, traditional advertising, media buying and so on.
But people are inundated and saturated with marketing/advertising messages every day from everywhere. And as we all know, when you ‘push’, what do people do?... Push back or move away.
Instead, all your marketing/advertising today should be geared toward drawing people to you via your website and focused on creating prospects, not customers. (Remember this with your SMM also. Do not use Faceb ook, Twitter, etc., to try ‘sell’. Use them to drive people to your website.) You need to educate and build a certain rapport before you can sell. Your market needs to learn how you provide value in a way that makes them want to buy/use/enquire about your services or products. Your marketing must get viewers to want to ask for more information. Then you can start to put special offers, discounts, and promotions to them to start the Selling process. (eNews 22/08/12)
Inbound Marketing: This is where your potential market ‘comes’ to you. You build & disseminate valuable, worthwhile and desirable content for your potential clients to find out about your business, and you are perceived as not being directly involved and importantly, not pushing.
There are heaps of Inbound marketing methods/tools… You Tube videos, Must Have Reports, Polls/Surveys, Give-aways, VIP memberships, Social media posts, blog posts and more. Clients can discover you and your brand through their own means.
But Inbound Marketing should not be done with a shotgun effect. It should be a planned, targeted and structured process following some simple steps.
Inbound Marketing Plan in 5 Simple Steps
1. Identify your target market:
The purpose of Inbound Marketing is of course to draw traffic to your website. So to attract your potential market you firstly need to identify who that is? It might sound like such a marketing basic, but so many business owners skip this step and wonder why their marketing isn’t effective! And of course without knowing who your target market is, how can you develop the content of ‘what they are interested in, find attractive or want’?!
The more precise and specific you can narrow down who your target market is, the more effective your marketing will be! Trying to be all things to all people and hope you attract the right client, is weakening your impact and narrowing your results.
One of the easiest ways is to analyse your existing clients and learn how you attracted them. Even better to ask them yourself. See what your clients share in common and use this valuable data to attract more of the same kind.
 2. Call To Action:
Yes, we can’t forget with our marketing to have the all important call to action. If not, what is the purpose, unless you are a huge company like Coke Cola and it's just branding exercise ?! We need results from our efforts and so we need to encourage our market to ‘do something’…
From your analysis in step 1 you should have a better idea of what your market will find attractive. The purpose then may be to give you their details to Win something, or to access a valuable, helpful white paper, learn how to save money or even make money.
Now don’t forget, with any call to action you must create a Time Limit to give the perception of take action now or you will miss out. Try create a feeling of urgency or scarcity. If they feel they can do this/get this at any time, the urgency is gone and they’ll probably put it off and you miss out all together.
Also don’t forget to include and promote ‘tell a friend’! If you have a great incentive, encourage them to tell others and get the brownie points.
3. Content Pieces That Can Go Viral.
Try and create different content with different media/methods. The aim is still the same but you can use text content differently to video or audio. Your inbound marketing campaigns should include text-based articles that can be shared via social networking profiles. Also different mediums appeal to different people, so although above we have been quite specific, still people will have individual preferences.
The type of content also need to relate to how your target market behaves online. If they are ardent bloggers or Face Book users, then of course more focus should be on text content, or video if they are You Tube users. Recent studies have shown that videos can have greater effect than articles. So keep this in mind.
You can create these content pieces yourself, or if you don’t have the time/creativity you can ask us at Redback Studios or a similar company, to create them for you, and even run the campaign on your behalf. And don’t forget your call to action.
4. Build It and They Will Come?:
Just making and posting these enticing marketing tools and expecting you will suddenly have thousands of people giving you their details or purchasing your product/services, is as likely as building a baseball field in a corn farm and thousands turn up to watch. You need to make your content easy to find/access and get the word out.
You need to get your message out on the main highway. Leverage sites like blogger.com and Face Book, You Tube and other high profile sites that have massive traffic. Plus you should have also learnt in step 1, where your target market goes for information.  These may be lesser profile sites, but you need to be where your market is to be more effective.
Try become an active authority online on the social or networking sites where your market is. Your posts will then start to hold even more value and credibility. As you become more active on these sites, your market will feel more familiar and comfortable with you and interact with you more.
Request power users to comment and share your campaign content as well as other industry authority figures to share or even just comment on your campaign content. People will always place more weight on what others say about you than what you try say about yourself.
5. You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure.
Have clear goals in mind so you know what you are aiming for and not just ‘hoping for the best’. This alone can change the success of your campaigns. So you need to make sure you can measure the success of your campaign so you know what is or isn’t working for you.
I think Google Analytics would have to be one of the best tools for managing and measuring your success and with its features such as Goals, Visitor Flow, Conversions and so on, you can monitor and use this comprehensive information to tweak and edit your campaigns for greater success.
Hope you found these tips helpful and will also take advantage of this fantastic 50% of Website Packages AND our OnPage SEO Service as a Free Bonus with any Silver or Gold Package!
If you have any topics you would like me to address in these newsletters, or have further questions on this topic or anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact us on support@redbackstudios.com.au or Reply to this mailing.
Warm regards
Laurence
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