Growing your brand in the inbound marketing revolution

Aug 27th, 2014

Effective modern marketing is all about connecting with customers and prospects across the devices and platforms they prefer


It’s about integrating quality content and relevant context to create a rich, personalised experience for our target audiences. It’s about swapping pushy outbound marketing tactics for customer-centric strategies that encourage our prospects to approach us. It’s all about inbound marketing.

Inbound isn’t a technology, a tactic or a tangible tool: it’s a philosophy. It focuses on creating a buzz around your brand to drive customers to you and adopting this effective marketing mindset has the potential to grow your traffic – and ultimately, your ROI – exponentially. What’s more, a Hubspot study has revealed that inbound costs around 61% less per lead than traditional outbound techniques. Below, I’ve outlined four key areas – content, analysis, technology and integration – that work in harmony to form a successful inbound marketing strategy…

1. A customer-centric editorial calendar

Content forms the backbone of a strong inbound marketing campaign. In order to attract your target audience to your site, you need to engage them with irresistible content that inspires them, educates them, and provides answers to their questions. Market research plays a key role in this process. Conduct a target market analysis, create personas of your ideal customers and take advantage of analytics platforms to identify the style of content that your visitors find most engaging. This will assist you in creating a strong editorial calendar that focuses on publishing the right content, on the right platforms, at the right time. Whether you create infographics, eBooks or whitepapers, the key to success is ensuring that each piece of content you craft provides valuable information that is centred around the needs of your audience and tailored to their position in the buying cycle.


Ensure each piece of content you craft provides valuable information that is centred around the needs of your audience and tailored to their position in the buying cycle


2.  Analysing statistics

To achieve first-rate inbound marketing results, it is essential to analyse your website statistics. This will take the guesswork out of enhancing your ROI and allows you to ascertain exactly where your digital marketing spend should be distributed for maximum impact. Below are some common areas of your website to analyse, which will help to inform your future planning.

  • New and repeat website visitors
  • Traffic channels
  • Keywords
  • Site content performance
  • Referring URLs
  • Bounce rate
  • Landing page conversion rates

3. Take advantage of technology

As  mentioned above, analysing your website’s statistics will allow you to determine the weakest and strongest areas of your marketing strategy and tweak it accordingly. However, your customers are flitting between various devices and platforms, so monitoring the data from each traffic source can get tricky. This is where technology comes in, as utilising a data analysis tool will help to streamline the process. Here at Click, we utilise marketing automation platform, Act-On to do the following:

  • Collate and analyse data about our website visitors and leads
  • Score and manage individual leads based upon how they interact with our brand
  • Create automated lead nurturing campaigns
  • Segment our data into separate lists, enabling us to deliver bespoke content to our prospects at the relevant stages of the buying cycle

Technology allows you to fine-tune your inbound marketing efforts efficiently, by managing your leads and making adjustments to your strategy based upon detailed analytics, rather than uninformed guesses.

4. Integration of departments, systems and strategies

A successful inbound marketing strategy will be applied to all elements within your business plan – not just one single channel. From your CRM tool to your marketing automation platform, everything within your business should work in unison to achieve one defined main objective.  Strategically aligning each inbound activity you execute will allow you to track the progress of your campaigns efficiently, while accurately measuring your return on investment.

Adopting the inbound ethos will help your brand to survive the competition from other key players within your industry and thrive within the inbound marketing revolution.

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