Part 1: Inbound Marketing Tips
Sarah and I recently received our Inbound Marketing certifications, meaning we spent hours (more like months) training in person and online and then passed a 90-minute exam. The idea behind Inbound Marketing is to attract ideal customers through targeted online marketing. No more "fingers crossed" for a prospective client to call after you blast out an email. No more cold calls and blindly chasing potential customers. Instead, there is a very specific methodology behind Inbound Marketing that turns visitors into leads, leads into clients, and clients into promoters of your business. Sounds good, right?
Two Key Takeaways
How can our Inbound Marketing training help our clients, you ask? Through our certification, we've gained access to endless marketing tools and resources, which we can use for our clients. There is too much information to cover in one blog post, so we'll be doing a series on this topic. But, we'd like to start with two helpful takeaways. These are just samples of what we will do for clients before every major campaign.
1. Create buyer personas, which are semi-fictional representations of our clients' ideal customers. What's a day in the life like for these customers? What problems do they have that our clients can solve? What are their shopping habits? What might they be searching for online? How do they get their news? By answering these questions (and many more), we're able to zone in on those ideal customers and target them easier.
2. Search for specific keywords relating to our clients' businesses. Through the software that we've invested in, we are able to see what words, terms and/or phrases are most searched for in industries; determine the difficulty of getting clients ranked at the top of the search engines; and then choose the most appropriate key terms to use throughout blogs, social sites, web sites, etc. to help convert strangers into leads.
From this screenshot, we can see that "Virginia Wineries" is searched for 3,600 times per month, but it has a difficulty of 85 out of 100. If our client was a winery in Virginia, depending on their ranking (these numbers are based on the Hive website ranking), we'd most likely suggest they use a term that is searched for more than 100 times, but has a difficulty of less than 50. If our client was a brewery in Virginia, we'd definitely suggest using "Virginia Breweries" as a key term throughout their online marketing efforts, since it is searched for 1,000 times per month and only has a difficulty of 42.
If you're interested in learning more about Inbound Marketing and how it can work for your business, feel free to give us a call!
Stay tuned for episode 2 of this blog series: Creating Content for Your Ideal Customer
