Inbound Marketing in 2016: 3 Elements Your Business Needs In Order to Succeed

Inbound Marketing sounds more complicated than it is. Discover which 3 elements you absolutely need to have in place in order to succeed and generate leads for your business in 2016 – the inbound way.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is based on the idea that the consumer searches on the internet and makes his buying decision depending on the information & content he finds there. So the more relevant information he finds about your company & services, the more he trusts your brand because his friends already trust your brand, the higher the chance he’ll choose to contact you or buy from you.

Does Social Media play a role in Inbound Marketing?

Yes, Social Media plays an important role in an Inbound Marketing strategy because it gives companies the opportunity to reach out and connect with their audience. And it’s a proven fact that an engaged & engaging social media presence reassures clients that your business is reputable & can be trusted ! But Social Media is just one of the factors… Let’s have a look at

The 3 Elements Your Business Needs In Order to Succeed With Inbound Marketing in 2016

Responsive Design

As you have probably realized by now, Inbound Marketing has to do with the internet – and your website. So if you have a website that’s not internet marketing ready, then don’t waste more time on Social Media or writing blog posts. You need a website that’s able to capture leads (more about that in element 3) and equally important: your site needs to be responsive. What does that mean? It means that your site displays well on smartphones and tablets. Did you know that according to Google there are more searches per month from mobile devices than desktops?

Go ahead and test your site right now and see how it looks like on the different devices. Just put in your site url at the top and click on the different device sizes in the top right corner. If you can’t read the font of your site, no one else can. And no, visitors won’t be bothered trying to increase the size and scroll from left to right.

More traffic to your website

Once your website is ready to ‘receive guests’, you need to make sure they come. ‘Build it and they will come’ doesn’t work, or at least it’s not enough. There are different options to get more targeted traffic to your site:

Content: Publishing regular & relevant content is one of the best ways to increase your traffic for the long term. Content is indexed by Google (if optimized for the search engines) and if you write content that fits your target audience, your posts will show up in their search results. Content Marketing is maybe one of the most time consuming, but also the most long-term investments. Once you publish your blog post, it can generate you free traffic for decades!

Social Media: Now that you have content, Social Media become relevant because you actually have something to share!

Ads: If your budget allows it, paid advertisement is another option to get more traffic to your site and/or content. I’m sure you have heard of Google Ads, Facebook Ads but even Twitter or Instagram have their own advertising options.

An E-Mail Tool To Capture Leads

The 3rd element of an Inbound Marketing strategy is the lead-capturing step. It’s all very nice to create content, get lots of traffic to your site (people love to boast about their traffic…) but what really matters is if you capture the lead. How do you do that? By giving them something they really want … in return for their e-mail address. Ha, cheeky I know. But once you have their e-mail, you can continue to send them valuable information… that eventually leads to a sale.

There are many tools for E-Mail Marketing. The most popular one is Mailchimp which works fine if you’re just starting out. It’s free. If you have more complex needs there is Aweber or Constant Contact. Personally I have recently switched from Aweber to ActiveCampaign and love it. But that’s if you want to set up more complex automation which gets difficult with Aweber. So take your pick and get started today!

Will you implement these 3 Elements to be ready for Inbound Marketing in 2016?

You might also enjoy this video conversation with Stephane Burkhardt about The Inbound Marketing 101