Vaibhav Kakkar, CEO, Digital Web SolutionsMarketers these days have to wear many hats. From understanding the ever-changing digital space to exploring ways to retain as well as attract new customers they keep experimenting with different strategies. However different their techniques may be, one thing is similar: they have to create brand awareness, retain customers, and find ways for continuous growth. An effective strategy that suits these goals is: inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is the process of attracting the attention of potential and existing customers through content creation. Through this technique, you can reach out to your audience by aligning your strategy with their interests, and this strategy is also much more cost-effective as compared to other marketing techniques. In fact, businesses that rely on inbound marketing save $14 more for every newly acquired customer.

Inbound strategies come with these additional benefits: 

• Increased brand awareness
• Influence on future purchases
• Enhanced engagement and hence more user-generated content
• Better search engine optimization

So let’s look at some of the most successful inbound marketing techniques that can help win new customers: 

1. Blog your way to success

Blogging is not just an excellent way to stay on people’s radar, it’s also a great way to integrate relevant keywords and stay optimised for Google. This makes blogging essential, irrespective of your area of business. Hence, delivering regular and fresh content becomes vital.You can do it with not just blogging on your own site but also by guest posting on other sites. When you post on industry expert sites, you get backlinks for your own website through hyperlinks. This ensures relevant traffic deviates back to your own website. Similarly, if you invite guest bloggers, you get in the traffic of their followers and ensure your blog stays active too. This mutual exchange helps create authority and capturing the mind space of the target audience better.Thus, use this technique as it results in a good inflow of traffic and even has the potential of translating leads to sales. 

2. Tap into the power of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a technique in which brands partner with online ‘influencers’ to promote their products or services to their trusted followers. These brand advocates can help you get exposure to their audience or can vouch for you by through posts on your social profile. These influencers drive the message in a more organic way as the followers admire them and trust their opinion. Also, this medium delivers the key messages in an engaging manner and without being invasive.

 

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 The influencers can choose to post from their own personal social profiles or even cross-post content from the brand's platform. This helps give both the benefit of collaboration. To ensure that this partnership works effectively, set some rules like the number of times they will post, the keywords or hashtags to be used in every post, etc. Additionally, this effectiveness can be measured against various metrics. From knowing first-time visitors to determining the improvement in brand awareness through total sessions, average user time on the website and total page views, the performance can easily be measured. So you can measure the success of your campaign and then create better influencer strategies in future. 

3. Choose the right social platform

Marketers are always debating over the better social media platform without a definite answer. For B2C companies, Facebook and Twitter are effective channels. These channels work well for B2B brands too but Quora, Reddit are two platforms that should not be ignored. Where Quora is a highly moderated and controlled environment for Q&A, Reddit offers a lot apart from just giving responses to your queries. Though both Quora and Reddit have different designs, former more sophisticated and later functional, they both are user-friendly. However, different or similar their functionality or use maybe, with the provision to ask or answer questions and even follow the questions and people, it enables in creating customized streams of information. This thereby allows brands to directly reach the target customers that share the same interest as the business. It also supports in creating thought leadership by answering questions and by subtly mentioning the key messages of the company. Thus a good way of generating leads as your brand gets positioned as an expert.So, as an inbound marketing technique, if not already allocated, Quora and Reddit deserve much more of your time.

4. Grab attention with videos

The importance of videos can be seen in their demand. Almost 5 billion Youtube videos are watched every day. So videos can help you bring inbound traffic to your site, your Youtube channel or any other social profiles. From landing pages, product pages, social media channels, etc., the more relevant videos you have the more searchable you become and the higher you get ranked on the search engine. If  a video resonates with the audience, is useful, or evokes an emotion, it has the power of becoming viral. It also benefits brands to generate quality leads which result in higher conversions. For instance, Coca Cola’s “The Last Customer” campaign got over 2mn views.

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Video content also has the potential of creating motivated and engaged brand advocates, and with the shares and mentions, it can even reach out to untapped markets and potential audiences. In fact, videos also get preferential treatment from the search engines. Product demos,interactive live streams, social and explainer videos that showcase the features and utility of a product or service can positively influence the buyer’s decision.

Closing thoughts

To conclude, creating relevant and meaningful content that is designed specifically keeping your target audience in mind is essential for the above inbound marketing techniques to succeed. It is time to step further and talk the language the customers understand and wants to hear. Make use of videos and graphics. Blog consistently. Answer user queries on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, explore Quora and participate in relevant discussions or give your company a try on Reddit has other features than Q&As. These effective inbound marketing strategies have the ability to grow your business, attract leads and convert them into customers. So include these in your inbound checklist.

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About the Author: Vaibhav Kakkar is the CEO of Digital Web Solutions, a globally trusted agency with a full suite of digital marketing & development solutions. Vaibhav believes in building system over services, and has invested in multiple tech startups including RankWatch, NotifyFox and a CRM software to help scale up client agencies from scratch to niche-leaders with million dollar turnovers.