Inbound marketing doesn’t have to be time-consuming. You can have your inbound marketing system up and running in seven days!
Utilize your customers
Your current customers are a great tool when you want to improve your inbound marketing. Creating a profile of your best customers makes it easy to identify your target market, streamlining your strategy.
Asking customers to fill out a short survey after they’ve made a purchase generates feedback about the effectiveness of your current marketing campaign, and will help generate ideas about improvements you can make that will lead to additional sales.
A loyalty program effectively builds a strong relationship between a business and customers. Ideas for a customer loyalty program include:
- Lower rates for regular customers
- The promotion of multiple purchases
- Special offers
- Reward points
Encourage customer participation
Ask your customers to participate in your inbound marketing campaign. They’ll have no reservation about mentioning you to their friends via social networking sites. Their comments will generate more sales than anything else since research studies indicate that people are 68 percent more likely to trust something they’re told by another human than something they’ve stumbled across.
Beef up your website
Your website is your best marketing tool. To be effective, it needs to be loaded with a slew of high-quality, accurate content. Create content, such as blog posts, that encourages customer interaction. In addition to being keyword rich to attract web crawlers and boost your SEO, your content should provide factual information about your business and your product or service. Marketing experts suggest having content that relates to each stage of the buying cycle.
Professional web designers report that customers respond well to websites that feature:
- A live chat option
- A high quality video detailing the businesses message posted on the homepage
When designing your business website, don’t cram it full of content. Your customers will respond best when the page has gaps, which are called white spaces, in the content. Not only do the white spaces prevent your customers from being overwhelmed by the prospect of reading through pages of content, the white spaces allow you to focus their attention on the key points you want them to remember long after they’ve logged off your website.
Before finalizing your website, read through it and make sure there’s a clear call to action. The content should be designed in such a way that visitors feel compelled to make a purchase, click on a link, or share the page.
Create a customer loyalty program
A loyalty program effectively builds a strong relationship between a business and customers. Ideas for a customer loyalty program include:
- Lower rates for regular customers
- Special offers
- Reward points
The main reason many business owners are reluctant to create a customer loyalty program is concern about cost. In the long run, most are surprised to learn that the overall cost of creating the program is minimal, especially when compared to the long term results.
As a rule, a good customer loyalty program will cost a fraction of what the business would have spent if it was trying to attract new customers. Many business owners were delighted when they not only experienced a positive reaction from their current customers after creating the loyalty program, but also observed significant growth.
When you sit down and apply yourself, you’ll be surprised by how quickly you manage to get a successful inbound marketing program up and running.