Regardless of industry, inbound marketing is rapidly changing the way businesses approach their marketing and sales strategies. Unlike outbound marketing which puts the impetus on salespeople to reach out to prospects, the inbound methodology is designed to provide relevant, educational content to prospects throughout each stage of their buying journey: awareness, consideration and decision. While there are many considerations to be made when building your inbound marketing strategy, it’s nice to know that there are some quick wins that can drive immediate results in our funnel. Here are six examples of easy-to-implement tactics that can improve your KPIs at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Quick Wins for Attracting Web Visitors
Blog Linking: Using in-line CTAs
In-line CTAs are pieces of text that are linked to other external or internal web pages. In an SEO lens, the more links a webpage has, the more opportunities search engines have to analyze and understand its content. When creating organic content such as blog posts, it’s important to include some internal links to additional supporting pages to indicate that there is not only one keyword-focused piece of relevant content, but a network of keyword-supported content that contributes to the value of your website. This is called internal linking strategy, and in addition to helping search engines, it allows your visitors to intuitively navigate the resources of your website and decrease bounce rates across your pages.
Identifying spaces to add internal links to your existing blog articles helps to uncover new topic clusters and additional blog titles to add to your editorial calendar.
Product-Focused Paid Search Campaign
Whatever your paid distribution budget is, every business should run a paid search campaign designed to capture searchers in the decision-making phase looking to purchase your product or service. This type of campaign requires minimal keyword research, and should be laser-focused to only bid on keywords that indicate the user’s intent to buy. Align your landing page headers to the search-intent keywords with an above-the-fold form and you’ve created an optimized, solution-focused landing page that tells visitors exactly how to take the next step toward purchasing, whether it be requesting a sales consultation, registering for a product trial, or scheduling a meeting.
Quick Wins for Generating Leads
Pop-up Forms
Whether your website is hosted on HubSpot or another CMS, HubSpot’s out-of-the-box pop-up forms can drive short term improvements on lead generation across your site. While not robustly customizable, these forms are easy to launch and can make an immediate impact when deployed on highly-trafficked pages. Since they’re so basic, these forms should ideally promote a top-of-funnel offer, such as subscribing to blog notifications. Once established, your team can develop more sophisticated conversion pathways that meet users where they are in their buying journey.
Leveraging Gated Content
Once you have some valuable content offerings for your website visitors, it’s important to leverage every opportunity to gather information about your site visitors and learn more about the leads in your database. One especially effective way to capture this information is by gating your premium content behind a form. White papers, eBooks, infographics, reports, and on-demand webinars are all good examples of premium content that hold enough value to encourage potential leads to exchange a bit of information to access. The key is positioning this content with calls to action (CTAs) in relevant areas of your website, such as blog posts or resource pages, and providing optimized landing pages that feature an above-the-fold form and clear description of the content offer. Performing a quick conversion path audit can reveal gaps in your CTA strategy, and uncover opportunities to reach your audience in more places across your website.
If you’re looking to learn more about the contacts in your database, implementing progressive forms can allow you to present new questions to the leads you’re driving to your premium content, capturing new properties each time a contact fills out a form. For example, if you’re sending an e-blast to share a new piece of downloadable content, you can identify a segment of your contact database that is missing valuable pieces of information such as company name, website, annual revenue, key challenges, etc. Ensuring that your forms are set to offer progressive form fields for contacts that you’ve already put in your database will allow you to continually build out more insights on your leads over time, paving the way for further segmentation and more impactful sales conversations down the road.
Quick Wins for Nurturing Your Database
Post-Download Follow-Up Emails
One of the simplest ways to boost your email health score and enhance your relationship with new leads is to set up automated emails that immediately deploy when a visitor fills out a form to download or access gated content. Historically, post-download emails have a drastically high open rate when compared to one-off or drip email campaigns. Often, the notification will capture the user’s attention while they’re still thinking about your content, and instinctively will access their inbox and open the email. This is a great opportunity to thank your reader for downloading and present them with another call to action, such as a piece of relevant content, an upcoming event registration, or a product demo video.
The key here is to offer a next-step call to action that aligns as closely as possible with the next stage of the buyer’s journey, relative to the last piece of content viewed. For example, if someone downloads a high-funnel checklist to help improve efficiencies in their workplace, it would make sense to offer another top or middle-funnel piece of content, rather than a bottom-funnel ask, such as talking to sales or requesting a demo.
Thank You Pages
Another great way to add value and keep your visitors engaged is to create Thank You Pages that offer additional pieces of recommended content after downloading gated content. This should be a mix of organic content (blogs) and anything you’re promoting on your site, whether it be an upcoming events page, product-related tools and resources, customer testimonials, etc. This is another chance to be strategic about positioning your website content to a visitor who’s just shown interest in your content offering. If you’ve built out a topic tagging matrix for your existing content, you can align these automated recommendations with similar topics, value propositions, or personas that you’ve tagged in your existing content inventory.
Quick wins are great ways to implement some immediately impactful changes that will help drive results in the short term. However, full-funnel demand generation takes a lot of time and focus building a strong foundation, setting long term goals and KPIs, and generating a deep understanding of your audience and their relation to your products and solutions. Ready to start driving more valuable leads, building efficiencies into your pipeline, and empowering your sales teams with inbound marketing? Request a consultation with our team.
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