Content optimization is the process in which you improve your tags, meta description, keywords, and meta tags of your content. It also includes fixing broken links and including backlinks (as well as driving backlinks to your content). All these help search engines like Google or Bing to index your content page and move up your content to the first page.
Marketers optimize their content time and again to ensure that they are getting found by their target audience on search engines against relevant keywords. These keywords include short and long term keywords as well as semantically related keywords/phrases. The optimization is not restricted to contents of any one marketing stage, because every marketing stage NEEDS quality and optimized content. Even your most loyal customer wants to engage through quality content.
Inbound marketing promises to increase your organic traffic, and trigger more conversions. But conditions applied. You have to do it right to save it from dying.
Your Inbound Marketing Strategy will give results only when you have a proper strategy in place. Click To TweetDo the reverse, and your Inbound marketing results will take a sharp U-turn and go downhill. When we started implementing inbound marketing practices, we continued to see dips in our results. Perplexed at what is going wrong, we stopped. We stopped everything we were doing and turned on our Sherlock-mode to see what was keeping us from succeeding with our strategy. And that was probably the best idea. We ended up identifying 9 major flaws in our strategy that held us back. These are not some uncommon or unheard mistakes. Infact, they were so in-the-flow type errors, it took us about 5 months to understand we were on the wrong track.
Fast-forward to the present date, we now know how fruitful our digging-into-details was. So, in this article, I will tell you about those top 3 reasons or errors that we made (and I’m sure you will relate to many of these if your strategy is also showing negligible returns).
3 Reasons why your inbound marketing strategy (like ours) is failing
The ultimate motive of inbound marketing is to get found on search engines and pull in potential buyers and bring new business for the company while attracting new customers to the industry. Sometimes an inbound methodology becomes the ultimate solution for maximizing conversions, but only when you are not doing the following nine things.
1. Your inbound marketing strategy is not goal-oriented
You are doing everything an inbound marketing expert told you to do. Awesome. You have contents in place, you have some traffic, you are pretty motivated too.
Yet the traffic does not improve, and neither do the conversion bells ring. We’ve all been there. You see, an inbound marketing strategy will show results only when you know what you want to achieve with it. What is your goal? You want to build a digital footprint or you want to strike gold or you want to stay afloat in the market? You will have to figure out what you want to achieve with your inbound marketing strategy. If you don’t know what is your end-goal, your inbound marketing efforts will simply fall flat.
Experts recommend following the S.M.A.R.T. method which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.
These five principles can help you build a goal-driven strategy.
# Specific- What are the exact goals that you wish to achieve? The more specific your description, the more are the chances that you will achieve exactly those goals.
# Measurable– Measurable goals mean all those measurable elements which you will hear when you get to achieve your goals. This is because you need to have an exact idea of where you stand in terms of your achieved goals.
# Attainable– You should try to identify if the goal that you wish to achieve is actually attainable or not. Taking in the options of time, efforts and costs will always give you an idea of the potential of your goals.
# Relevant– Your goal needs to be very relevant in the present scenario. There is a need for identification of your capabilities and also the skills of the team with which you will be trying to get to your goal.
# Timely- Determine the amount of time within which you are supposed to reach your goal. This can be done very effectively if you divide your goal into small parts and establish deadlines for each smaller part.
2. You are confused about your ideal buyers
If you are not yet sure who is your ideal buyer, just STOP.
Inbound marketing is done to attract ideal buyers that will convert at the end of the funnel. If you don’t know whom to attract, you cannot create contents that will act as lead magnets. Your lack of knowledge about your ideal buyers will put you in a fix when it comes to doing personalized nurturing activities and communicating with your leads.
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves. ~ Steve Jobs
Trust the experts. The first step to do inbound marketing is to know your ideal buyers. Sit down with your sales team to understand the criteria to build a buyer’s persona. It includes the preferences, values and also the attitudes they display when looking out to get some information. Analyze how the customers react emotionally when they try to gain knowledge about the product when they are making a purchase.
Include demographic and firmographic details that you expect your ideal buyers to have. Have segments created properly to distinguish who are good leads and which ones will never convert? Only when you learn about your ideal buyers in details, you can formulate a strategy that will be hyper-targeted, personalized, and relevant.
Knowing your right customers lead to increased conversions. Click To TweetAlso read: A Walk-through Customer Acquisition and Customer Lifecycle
3. You don’t publish content regularly
Okay, you are not alone here. I have done this and have seen the consequences.
The reason why content publishing delay can affect your inbound marketing strategy is that the entire strategy’s backbone is CONTENT. You cannot do anything that doesn’t have content in it – be it downloadable assets, smart forms, landing pages, blogs, website, emails, mobile marketing or videos – everything depends heavily on content; not just any content but hyper-targeted, relevant, and context-based content.
You see, there is a reason why they say –
Inbound marketing is a content-driven process. Click To TweetFresh content impacts your search ranking. Why? Because people want to read fresh content and Google shows exactly what people “Search” for. You see, its more like a chain reaction. If you are not publishing new content regularly, you are boring out your readers. They don’t like to come and see the same posts over and over again. Think how would you feel if you’ve subscribed to a brand’s blog and all you get to see is their old blogs every time you check their blog. Your interest dies off, and eventually, you take back your subscription!
Thinking your potential leads would be any different, is vague. Secondly, Google indexes new content. Fresh content increases the chances of improving your content syndication wherein some third party links your content on their platform. This not just gives you more visibility but also improves your content authority. Google catches all of these and concludes that your content is genuine and valuable. Also, you must read Moz’s post on Freshness Factor to understand how fresh content posted on a regular basis has a positive impact on your SEO ranking. Ofcourse you know search engine rankings are very crucial to your inbound marketing strategy.
Is there an all-in-one solution to avoid these (And other) pitfalls?
Yes. To help you (and us) have an all-in-one solution, we built Aritic PinPoint. You know inbound marketing relies heavily on content. It is content that helps in acquiring leads, nurturing them, and eventually converting them. Whichever buyers’ stage it is, you cannot do without content. And by content, we mean everything – the kind of fields you use on your forms, the downloadable assets you create, your automation campaigns, blogs, emails, landing pages, and your social media updates.
That’s why Aritic PinPoint has progressive profiling to help in capturing leads without driving them away. Since you need lead information to launch your inbound marketing campaigns, you need to make your potential leads stay and give you the details on their own. Progressive profiling helps in building smart forms that make your visitors come back and gradually fill in their details. To ensure they come back, we’ve anonymous nurturing using browser fingerprint tracking. You club ad retargeting campaigns with this, and you will be able to capture leads faster.
Read: Progressive Profiling Can Improve Your Conversion rate by 20%
Within Aritic PinPoint, you can create your own content repository. We have the Downloadable Assets option where you can upload your content asset and use it later. Manage your assets easily on the cloud. 🙂
To do relevant inbound marketing campaigns, you must have proper segments. Manually dividing your leads can get tedious so we have dynamic segmentation which keeps your segments up to date, at any given time. Any changes, behavioral or demographic or event-based, are automatically updated in your segments. The best part is, you can automatically see the marketing stages of each lead which is an added bonus for your inbound marketing strategy.
I’ve already explained the need for creating new contents; contents that are SEO-enabled. Instead of looking for new tools to help in your SEO, simply use the SEO tracking feature in Aritic PinPoint. From looking up relevant keywords to doing competitor analysis, everything is sorted. Add to this, you have native integration with Google Analytics for further dissection!
Content creation is closely followed by content promotion and syndication. If you are not promoting your content, then your users will not know about it. While working around keywords is a great way to enable your users in finding your content against their search queries, there’s another way that offers instant gratification. Yep, you guessed it right, Social Media updates.
Social media platforms offer instant gratification what with getting more impressions, real-time activities, and sharing. Doing it manually is one way, but we’d say you can simply automate it. The social media features include RSS Feed option where you can just add your blog URL or the website URL and relax. Every time a new content goes live on your blog or website, a social media post is created and posted immediately. So neither will you have to do it manually nor will you ever miss on promoting any of your contents.
Other features like predictive lead scoring, lead profiling, lead behavior tracking, dynamic content on landing pages, push campaigns and SMS marketing are ideal to boost your inbound marketing strategy. Take a quick demo if you are not yet signed up or get a free account for yourself and see for yourself.
Is there any other crucial errors that you think marketers end up making while doing inbound marketing? Tell me in the comments.
[This article will be revised with more pointers once we experience them real-time or if you tell us about yours].
For SaaS companies, the free trial is perhaps the most important acquisition tool of all time.
The offer is easy to understand and transparent: try the software and see if you like it. If you do, sign up for a paid version. If you don’t, no problem.
Of course, as marketers, we want to make sure people convert from free trial users to paying customers as often as possible. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Data shows that free trial conversion rates have a wide degree of variance.
This blog post originally appeared on MarTechAdvisor.
Facebook has over 2.20 billion active users, which makes it the largest social media network in the world. A little over a decade back, Facebook was not much known. Today, it has billions of active users logging in multiple times on Facebook. Do you know any other success story as huge as Facebook? Moreover, with this momentum, can the active users go from billions to millions or thousands?
Probably no. Facebook’s craze is here to stay. Facebook is here to stay.
Think about it. Every single person you know is on Facebook, whether they understand the whole concept of it or not. People from every age group (13+ of course) is on this platform. Hence, it is only natural that marketers cannot ignore this social platform. Whatever be your target audience, you can bet they are on Facebook on a daily basis. The question is: How can you target these users with your marketing?
The rift between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, two of the most influential businessmen of our time, is proof that Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a futuristic concept. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, believes strongly in Artifical Intelligence. His company often releases research papers to showcase the integration of Facebook and AI. On the other hand, Elon Musk, CEO of Telsa and Space X, opined that Mark Zuckerberg’s knowledge of AI is limited. Well, Zuckerberg responded to Elon Musk’s statement leading to a highly-publicized clash of opinions. What we can draw from this rift, however, is that AI will continue to infiltrate our society in a variety of ways. Facebook’s eagerness to harness the power of deep learning is a pointer to the next leap in the social world. Social media marketing will collide with AI? Many marketers already believe that it has.
If you are a marketer, you must have spent hours figuring out the best practices that will trigger lead activation and create conversions for your brand. You have gone over all the said practices and traditional guidelines. It is likely that you are also focusing on creating educational content, planning out promotions for your content and also budgeting for paid ads. But what if creating a content strategy is not the only thing you should be worried about? You might roll your eyes at what I will say next, but what makes a content strategy successful is SEGMENTATION. And here I am talking about dynamic segmentation. Static segmentation is not out of the league, but it requires a lot of list building activities which can be a challenge given that your lead behavior is constantly changing.
Recruitment is not a one-way deal. As much as a candidate works to make his/her profile look great, so does a brand or recruitment firm. Attracting talent can be challenging if recruiters pose to look too clever or too easy with no interesting substance to grab a candidate’s attention.
Recruitment needs both the candidates and the company to be equally interested in each other. John Vlastelica, the Managing Director of Recruiting Toolbox, recommends leveraging the interest and passion of your respective candidate pool to trigger more attractive messaging.
B2B content marketing has its own set of benefits. There are several rules that one needs to follow to yield proper results for successful B2B marketing. Prior to all the rules and pro tips, what a marketer needs to focus is building the perfect content marketing strategy. If you are not aware how to start or where to start, we have got it all covered for you in this extensive guide to getting started with B2B content marketing.
What makes a customer happy? This is an essential question for every marketer whose work revolves around customers. Also for those who mainly focus on keeping them satisfied with their services always. The main reason behind an unhappy customer is lack of a seamless experience. From the first interaction with your brand or after they become a customer, they deserve all the attention in customer journey stages. Unified customer journey mapping plays an integral part to maintain the sanctity of the brand. A well-designed omnichannel strategy will make sure that customer’s convenience is always the priority in customer journey.
It is vital to model all your marketing strategies and business processes around consumers and their requirements for understanding the digital customer journey model.
Google is well known for providing the best services and is constantly working to deliver the best experience to its users. Users expect high performance when they are accessing the Internet. Not to forget they are the most impatient species in the universe. If they open a website, they want their content to load quickly without any delays, and even a little delay will lead them to bounce the site. The increasing bounce rate of landing page website is a crucial element that influences the user experience.