5 Ways to Fuel Your Inbound Strategy

When content marketing works well, the target audience receives valuable resources to help them solve specific issues. It’s an “offer—give—and done” situation. Great for the audience and brand awareness—not so great if you are trying to build and nurture leads. 

So, we take those valuable resources and use them in the lead generation tactics of our inbound marketing strategy. This makes it an “offer—give—receive—nurture—repeat” situation.  

Now that you’ve implemented your inbound marketing strategy and have leads coming organically into your funnel how do you take it to the next level?  

Fuel your inbound strategy 

Where outbound marketing strategies throw a dart toward a target audience and hope to hit a mark, inbound marketing strategies use content and tailored experiences as a magnetized mark for the audience’s dart.  

When you make it easy and delightful to find the help they are looking for, the audience will be more likely to engage in your lead generation campaigns. You need to become a target that is easy to hit and delightful enough to keep playing. 

Do you make it easy for your customers to hit the mark? Here are 5 ways to fuel your inbound strategy: 

1.  Establish credibility

Use inbound tactics to gather, analyze, utilize and publish current customer data. The extensive, data-driven research can be compiled and used to present eye-opening data in a compelling story. Turn this into industry reports, white papers or in thought-leadership content to establish credibility with the audience. 

 2. Where does it hurt?  

You have valuable information at your fingertips—utilize your current customers to find out what their pain points are.  Ask them about their biggest struggles through surveys, interviews, or by scouring and engaging in social media. Find out what specifically has worked or hasn’t for solving their issues and frustrations. Then, you can solve those problems with helpful content at each stage of your marketing strategy. 

 3. Add curb appeal 

 Words are powerful and visuals enhance the experience. Blocks of text just don’t have the curb appeal that text plus visuals have. Make the content more dynamic and fun to consume by adding color, using charts, creating graphics, or playing with gifs and short videos. 

4. Work smarter, not harder 

Use marketing automation tools to make the customer experience seamless for them—and you. Inbound tactics cannot be successful if there is no follow-through on your end. Visitors who engage online should immediately become part of your nurture workflow, and automation makes this simple. 

5. Build a strong network of partners 

When you host or act as guest bloggers, webinar partners or content co-authors you build a network and become a trusted source in your field. When blogs have multiple authors, nearly 63 percent of people perceive the content to be more credible. Making this part of your inbound strategy results in beneficial backlinks demonstrates authority and showcases your relationships and acceptance in your industry. 

Engage. Delight. Repeat. 

Related Blogs:

• How to Use Blogging as an Effective Lead Generation Tool
• Content Management Strategy - Courtesy of Benjamin Franklin