4 Inbound Marketing Techniques You Can Use Right Now (For Free!)
If you’re considering a refresh for your company’s marketing, you’re on the right track. The days of billboards and radio ads are long gone. That’s just not how people shop anymore.
Want to try your hand at some inbound marketing techniques? You can!
You don’t need a million-dollar marketing budget or 15 in-house marketing nerds to do it all for you. Even if you’re the smallest startup in the world, you can use these four inbound marketing techniques to get started today.
So how can you use these? Read on to find out.
Gate Some Content
What do marketing and fishing have in common? The secret to success is in the bait. You might have the coolest gear, the best fishing pole and the best spot, but that all won’t mean a lick if you don’t have the right bait to get the fish to bite.
If you’re doing inbound marketing, you need to have the best bait in order to get people to click. And the best bait is always an answer—the answer to that burning question they wanted to know about, likely the one that drew them there in the first place.
When you make that content—an ebook, a white paper, a video or something else—and put it behind a “gate,” you’ll gain email addresses. It’s also a great way to judge who’s interested in your content and site.
Optimize Keywords
Keyword optimization, simply put, is the act of researching, analyzing and selecting the right words and phrases to target to drive qualified traffic from search engines to your website. Google uses complex algorithms to figure out what your page has and how to rank it. Keywords are a huuuuuuge part of this.
What keywords or keyphrases do you want to rank for? What things are your customers searching for online when they find you? Using a tool like KeywordTool.io, choose one or two words or phrases you want to rank for and pepper them throughout your website.
Put these words not only in your body copy, but in <h1> tags, meta descriptions, URLs and elsewhere. This tactic helped us get to the top of Google—and you can do it too.
Ask and Answer
Social media is a great place to look at pictures of dogs in hats. It’s also a great place to communicate with your audience, ask open ended questions and start awesome conversations. (But really, it’s mostly about dogs in hats.)
Inbound marketing takes advantage of social media by inviting people to respond. You can then take the information you’ve gathered and convert it to a blog post, gated content piece or something else.
Start a Blog
Why should you start a blog? Will it really do anything for your site? Here are a few reasons why blogging is good for your site.
- 46% of people read blogs more than once a day. (HubSpot Science of Blogging, 2010)
- Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI. (HubSpot State of Inbound, 2014)
- 79% of companies that have a blog report a positive ROI for inbound marketing in 2013. (HubSpot State of Inbound, 2013)
Blogging is an incredibly popular tactic, and is a big facet of inbound marketing. It’s a great way to boost traffic to your site, help your customers and promote yourself as an expert in your field.
…But There’s a Downside
By now, you should be clapping your hands, dancing around a little and calling your mom to tell her the good news: you’re pushing your company’s marketing into the future by using inbound marketing. Whoa—hold up a minute.
While all these inbound marketing tactics are awesome and effective, they’re only worth doing if you’ve got a singular focus and a strategy to back it up. That last sentence is so important, I’m going to put it in a block quote because you probably glossed right over it:
While all these inbound marketing tactics are awesome and effective, they’re only worth doing if you’ve got a singular focus and a strategy to back it up.
And, in order to make a strategy, you’re going to need a team to get your inbound marketing goals aligned. Inbound marketing is more than just a tactic, it’s a strategy. And trying to do it all without a razor-sharp team of strategists, copywriters and designers is disastrous.