Today’s increasingly competitive business has forced companies to find ways to keep customers interested and loyal to their brands. Traditionally, most companies used proactive marketing to present information to customers through various media such as television, radio, billboards, newspapers, and other media, which is called Outbound marketing. However, today, with changing consumer behavior and increased competition, there is a new form of marketing, which is Inbound marketing, which we will discuss in this article.
Inbound marketing uses content creation to present brand values to a large number of people, using repeat customers or those who like the product and its products to recommend and provide information to other customers and target groups. Marketers can use channels to reach them such as social media, as well as good website design and SEO, which will make it easier to reach target customers.
How to do inbound marketing?
Digital people are independent thinkers and free to find what suits them, and they spend almost all their time online every day, wherever they want.
Google is an important tool to provide answers to what people in this era want, making SEO more important to display brand content to people who search for content. However, SEO still depends on Google’s algorithm, which is constantly changing, so the content that the company has carefully created may not reach the target customers. Therefore, using Inbound marketing is a strategy that is used by choosing online media or print media that most target groups read regularly and then having experts or influencers in the media insert brand-related content into the content written for readers. This is a way to advertise or publicize smoothly and have a chance to reach the target customers more widely.
Adjust marketing strategies to increase the chance of reaching the target group.
Traditional marketing such as Outbound marketing has started to lose interest from customers because many times, advertising is interrupted and does not attract the attention of the target group. Even sending a letter to invite journalists to a product launch event may only attract the attention of a few journalists because nowadays there are many product launches and events. Therefore, companies must have an effective strategy to publicize products and products to reach the target group of customers more effectively. Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that combines the strengths of writing and creating content along with measuring results through blogs and various posts using Google analytics and social media analysis.
Effective inbound marketing can be described in another way: companies must treat the media like they treat their customers. Companies must understand the media, learn what interests them and provide engaging content and build relationships by inviting them to special events or creating special content with a simple and engaging share of the brand story. Because media has limited time, it is necessary to create branded content that is easy to understand.
How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Campaign
- Drive your campaigns with keywords and data. It is important to create keyword-driven content because your audience will search for specific topics or keywords to find solutions to their problems and use data-driven to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- Content creation and management analysis by analyzing the problems or pain points of the target customer group, inserting keywords or keywords into the content, creating content that is consistent with the focus points or themes of the campaign.
- Strategically place content by building links from authoritative websites to increase your site’s ranking on Google.
Inbound marketing guidelines
- The key to inbound marketing is the media and influencers who will act as a medium to tell the brand’s content and values to other target customer groups. Therefore, the company must identify the appropriate media and influencers in online media by selecting people who are influential and popular in online media, as well as people who have the right image for the brand, who will be able to send the content to other target groups in a powerful and credible way.
- You don’t have to send mass emails, but you have to target specific audiences. Sending emails to people who are not your target audience is useless because they will delete it or even report your emails as spam. So, target specific audiences and send emails only to those people.
- Transform your brand into an information hub for journalists and influencers by creating an online newsroom where media can access and gain access to useful information.
- Understand your audience as much as possible so you can create content and communicate with them effectively. Do research on your target audience, including their habits, behaviors, and preferences, to analyze the content that they will be interested in.
- Understand the content to be published, review and measure the results of published content, and update the content to keep it current and interesting.
- Create an effective website and measure its performance regularly. You need to answer questions like which pages get the most visitors, what keywords to use, what is the engagement rate of the audience? This information will be used to expand the market and promote the products.
- Measure performance to use the results to improve the content and Inbound marketing strategies that need to be used.
Techniques to increase the efficiency of your inbound marketing strategy
- Understanding the brand’s strengths and values: Companies need to understand who they are, what they want to offer, and the value they want to give to their customers, so they can push these things to their target customers to the fullest extent.
- Use analytics to understand your audience, whether it’s using tools like Google trends, Adwords keyword reports, Facebook audience analysis, or Google analytics.
- Plan your content creation by defining a clear target group and creating appropriate content that can solve problems for customers. The content created must be appropriate for the target group and easy to understand.
- Create an accessible press release and inbound marketing room with up-to-date media contact information, cutting-edge multimedia content with high-resolution images, and built-in social media links.
Are Inbound Marketing and PR the same thing?
The two above are different, but they work well together. Inbound Marketing focuses on driving more quality, targeted traffic to your website, converting that traffic into more sales opportunities, while PR works more on an awareness level, aiming to create a positive image and influence a positive perception of your brand. So which elements of each strategy should your company incorporate to create the perfect Inbound PR mix?
- Optimize your press releases for online search by using the right keywords in your PR content and press releases to boost your search presence.
- Use PR materials to generate more content. PR materials can be used to generate new marketing content such as infographics, e-books, podcasts, videos, etc. It works both ways. Companies can recycle or republish Inbound marketing content as appropriate for PR use and to add value to the content.
Building a New Business with Inbound PR Strategy
At its core, PR is about branding, but when it comes to tangible benefits like increased sales and new business, traditional PR can be seen as not playing a clear role in creating these benefits. Modern PR therefore needs to integrate inbound marketing strategies to attract target audiences to the website and convert them into customers, while also using analytics to measure the results.
Using Inbound PR strategies to create new businesses can be done by using PR’s greatest strengths, which is telling great stories and creating clear and entertaining content, combined with Inbound strategies by having media owners such as bloggers or influencers who have influence on social media convey those stories to people, which will create impressions and forward powerful content. Then link the content from those websites or blogs to the brand’s website.
In terms of measuring the results of the Inbound PR strategy used, you can use an analysis tool or platform such as Google Analytics, which can clearly show how much the links received from the media affect the amount of traffic to the website and how customers who enter the website from the received links become customers. This will allow the company to measure the results of the campaign and improve the strategies and content to appeal to the target group more.
Inbound marketing is a new marketing strategy that companies should understand and start using more. The key to this strategy is understanding the needs of the target customer group and creating content that presents the brand’s values through various media and influencers to reach the target group, making people interested and coming to the brand themselves, and making customers want to be the ones presenting good things about the brand to others. This allows the company to save money on public relations and increase sales opportunities.
There are many more interesting details about Inbound marketing strategies that we will present to our readers in the next opportunity, which is guaranteed to be useful content.
