4 Inbound Marketing Tricks That Work Every Time

by Brianna Pyne, Guest Contributor

Be it to generate demand and awareness towards your company or to secure leads to keep your sales pipeline healthy, you know that an effective inbound marketing strategy is key.

You’re probably aware of the basics, i.e., incorporate search terms into your content and publish regularly, but there’s more at play than just that. In this post, we look at 4 key inbound marketing tricks that will make a positive difference in helping you achieve your business goals.

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1. Know Your Target Prospect
This isn’t as much of a trick as it is -- or rather, should be -- a key component of your inbound marketing strategy: buyer personas.

These are semi-fictional representations of each of your target readers. You build them using real-world data and insights about each type of target reader.

Let’s say you’re targeting consultants. In your buyer persona, you will outline their personal and professional goals, where they get their information, who they trust, and other details. In a lot of cases, you will have multiple personas, each targeting different segments of your target market.

The goal behind buyer personas is to ensure that your content aligns with the interests, goals, concerns, and other motivational triggers of your target reader. If you’re not touching on those triggers, then you’re not speaking to the needs of your reader.

It’s obvious, but according to a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 45% of B2B marketers aren’t using any buyer personas to drive their campaigns.

2. Target Long-Tail Keywords
You’re probably aware of why search engine optimization (SEO) is important in terms of getting organic traffic through Google. Simply, the idea of SEO is to target your readers’ search terms in order to secure a top (or at least first page) ranking on Google.

The benefit of an SEO strategy is that it helps you generate targeted traffic without the need for spending on search advertising. However, strong SEO results are not easy to pull off, especially when it comes to difficult, highly-competitive search terms.

One trick is to also target less competitive keywords, i.e., ‘long-tail keywords’. What are ‘long-tail keywords?’ The term ‘long-tail’ is a statistical concept.

The basic idea is that though each ‘long-tail’ keyword (represented in purple in the graph below) has less search traffic than its ‘short-tail’ counterparts (shown in red, orange, green and blue in the graph below), most online searches are from long-tail keywords.
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Image Source

Because they don’t generate as much individual traffic, long-tail keywords are less competitive and, in turn, easier to rank for.

These terms offer a quicker opportunity to rank and build domain authority (DA) than short-tail terms (and by supporting your DA, may help you rank for short-tail terms too).

The key is finding long-tail searches made by your target reader, which is why buyer personas containing information about your readers’ fears, interests, and online behavior are critical.

3. Deliver with Compelling Content
Be it organic, paid, or social media, there’s little point in bringing readers to your website if you lack the content to deliver on their expectations.

This is especially true when you’re ranking for long-tail keywords, which could contain very specific questions (though not necessarily all the time). If you fall short of providing credible answers to your readers’ questions, your readers will leave your website.

The question of what content you should make depends on your focus (B2B vs. B2C) and your specific industry, vertical, niche, and market realities.

For example, in inbound B2B scenarios, you should invest in written content such as blogs and white papers because decision-makers are more likely to share those with colleagues and other decision-makers (source: Demand Gen Report, 2018).

On the other hand, with the growing pervasiveness of voice search and personal assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant in both B2B and B2C, you should invest in voice search friendly content. Seeing how 50% of all searches are forecasted to be by voice by 2020, this would enable you to rank today and futureproof your content.

4. Use Retargeting to Stay Top of Sight (& Mind)
Hopefully, especially with all of those efforts above, your reader will have become a lead. But if they didn’t and left your website, you can still engage them, but through retargeting ads.

Your website uses cookies to track the reader’s activity. When they leave your website, you can send that reader targeted ads (based on what they had read on your website and other metrics) while they’re browsing other websites.

With the right execution, your website readers will be 70% likelier to convert on your website when served with retargeting ads.

(Bonus: If you do have leads as well as the email addresses of potential leads, you can serve ads to them on Facebook as well by uploading those addresses on the social media platform.)

So, there you have it, 4 inbound marketing tricks that work every time. Of course, you might call us out on the obviousness of each one, but that’s the nature of inbound marketing. Many times, it’s really mastering the fundamentals that count, not hacks or shortcuts.
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Author Bio: 

Brianna Pyne is a thought leader in the Digital Marketing Industry, one of Brianna's passions is writing & speaking at conferences. She is currently working with JumpFactor and helps produce content related to content marketing & SEO for B2B businesses.

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