2023 Inbound Marketing Guide for Agencies

As a marketing agency, survival has become quite difficult due to the growing competition and constant pressure of delivering value to your clients. In order to achieve this and build a solid brand, you need to have a robust inbound marketing strategy in place. In the absence of a thoughtfully planned marketing strategy, you can be tempted to do everything that seems logical under the sky.

Businesses are under huge pressure to sell; however, aggressive paid advertising techniques do not always seem to work. People get irritated soon and choose to stop viewing ads that frequently appear online and annoy them.

Inbound marketing is based on relationship building, and it involves sharing interest-based content to attract target audiences. This is a soft yet highly powerful marketing approach as it involves serving relevant content to those who are looking for it.

Furthermore, it works for all the stages in the customer journey, right from awareness to conversion and "repeat sales."

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a set of practices aimed at attracting the target audience of a business. It helps the prospects move forward in the sales funnel through the desired and informative content. It is extremely powerful as it offers real value, builds trust-based relationships, and accelerates the process of conversion.

Why Makes Inbound Marketing So Effective?

As discussed above, inbound marketing attracts potential customers through engaging and informative content. So, instead of interrupting them with outbound calls and messages, businesses adopt a value-based approach that is based on a marketing blueprint. It prioritizes buyer persona and their needs and prepares a smooth road map to conveniently push the customers down the sales funnel. With inbound marketing, you attract customers when they are interested in the products and services you sell, increasing the conversion percentage.

Inbound marketing is based on the following crucial elements.

A. Blogs, articles, and answers on sites like Quora and Reddit

B. Search engines

C. Company website

D. Social media

The Inbound Marketing Methodology

To convert a customer, first, you need to attract them through blogs, videos, and other types of high-quality content pieces. We also utilize keywords in text-based content so that the prospects can reach you through search engines.

Social publishing is also enormously popular to attract new customers, who are complete strangers to your brand. The next step is conversion, wherein you get the desired action completed by those prospects. We use forms, calls to action, and landing pages to convert them.Once a prospect shows interest in your products and services, they become leads. Later, we follow up with them using our robust CRM, email, and other workflows till they become paying customers. To make them lifetime customers, we use surveys, smart content, and social monitoring. The happy customers stay loyal to your brand for a long time and even become brand ambassadors.

How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy?

An effective inbound marketing strategy has to be data-driven. You need a lot of information about your target audiences, such as their buyer's journey and its various stages. You also need to conduct market research to know the market trends and demand patterns. And then, you finally need to set your inbound marketing goals.

Steps to Creating an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy

To successfully implement content marketing, you need to create an effective and sustainable strategy. Here are a few steps to create a powerful inbound marketing strategy.

1. Understand Your Client's Target Audience

In order to make a robust inbound marketing strategy, first, you need to identify the potential customers that best match your client's products and services, and for this, you need to build a buyer persona.

The next step is to craft effective and persuasive content to target those customers.

The buyer persona of a customer usually includes the following elements -

• Interests and behaviors of a customer
• Demographic details (e.g., age, occupation, gender, marital status)
• Current needs, pain points, and emotional state
• Objectives, goals, and lifetime aspirations

People vary in terms of their physiological and psychological orientations, so it is better to build multiple buyer personas.Pro Tip: You can use surveys and on-the-spot feedback to learn in-depth about your customers and their needs. Since needs are dynamic, you need to keep yourself updated about the current market trends.

2. Use Customer Journey Mapping

It is a critical step that most businesses tend to skip. You need to document everything that influences customers' buying decisions at different stages of their journey.

The below graphic summarises things you need to know at every stage in the customer journey -

The answers to these questions will help you craft and use relevant messaging to boost your campaigns.

3. Conduct Market Research

It is considered the principle of inbound marketing strategy formulation. Some popular techniques that businesses use for market research are as follows.

• Feedback forms and follow-ups
• Online surveys
• Communities & focus groups
• Direct feedback
• Using the sales team to get customer feedback

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4. Set Relevant and Measurable Goals

Identify the different goals you need to achieve from multiple streams of digital marketing, SEO, email marketing, and video marketing. The key performance indicators that you have already defined can be considered as your inbound marketing goals. Set SMART goals, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

Inbound Marketing Strategies to Implement

Here are some of the most effective inbound marketing tactics to implement in your campaigns. Remember, you should have a dynamic approach.

1. Create Informative and High-Value Content

Create high-value and informative content that effectively addresses the pain points of your customers and re-purpose it to suit the different marketing channels.You can create educational videos, blog posts, reels, ebooks, infographics,Ā  podcasts, picture messages, whitepapers, and fillable templates.

2. Track Your Performance

You can track your performance using different auditing tools such as the DashClicks Analytics app, etc. Performance tracking will provide you with critical information regarding your best-performing content, high-traffic sources, and your brand positioning compared to your rivals.

3. Optimize Your Content

If you successfully optimize your content using the relevant keywords, you will become the darling of search engines; we mean it! It will not only help you attract your target audience but also build a noticeable online presence and powerful brand. To achieve this, you need to first perform advanced keyword research.

Avail of Dashclicks fulfillment services to optimize your content with the best keywords.

Use the Right Metrics to Prove the ROI of Inbound Marketing

Adopt a data-driven marketing approach. You will need the relevant KPIs for that.

Here are some of the inbound marketing metrics you can track -

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Subscriber Growth
• Engagement
• Click-through rates (CTR)
• Acquired backlinks
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Open-rate
• Views
• Lead quality
• Traffic to lead ratio
• Lead to customer ratio

Here are some of the metrics you can try for your Google Ads campaign -Ā Metrics For Your Google Ads Campaigns

Final Words

Grabbing the eyeballs of prospects has become extremely difficult in the wake of increasing competition. Inbound marketing helps boost brand awareness, build trust, and build a powerful brand that sells.

To succeed in inbound marketing, you need to outperform your competition. Tracking inbound marketing performance becomes a tedious task when you use a number of channels for your marketing campaigns.

The number of activities involved in inbound marketing campaigns can get intimidating for marketers. DashClicks' white-label automation tools can make life easy for you while running and tracking inbound marketing campaigns.