The 4 Inbound Marketing Techniques You Need to Know

Even in the B2B world, it has been established that the hard sell no longer has the power to generate the sales needed to sustain a business. What is powerful in the marketing world, and that has replaced the hard sell approach in many industries, are smart inbound marketing campaigns that use the right strategies to increase traffic and improve conversions. Implement these four essential inbound marketing techniques right now to begin the transition to the inbound method. If you are already familiar with inbound, make sure that your marketing strategy includes the following:

1. SPEED UP YOUR WEBSITE.

Because many inbound marketing techniques involve prospects actively engaging with your website, inbound marketing simply cannot be successful without a fast, efficient website. Furthermore, the following three inbound best practices will not work if your website does not load in less than four seconds.

To decrease your website's loading time, start by getting rid of third-party applications that bring no additional visibility or revenue to your website. Replace these with high-quality, low-resource graphics like flat design and cloud-based apps that keep the onus of loading files off of your web host and out of your stream of data.

2. START A BLOG OR PODCAST.

Content marketing is a key component of the inbound strategy. It can establish your company as an information provider and thought leader, and provides prospects with a reliable source of industry knowledge. It allows prospects to engage with your brand and familiarize themselves with your company before having a purchase need; when that purchase need does materialize, however, your company is better positioned to be included in prospects' purchase consideration set. Blogs and podcasts are some of the first content resources that you should create as you begin to build your company's content library.

Furthermore, to comply with search engine optimization and inbound marketing best practices, your business needs legitimate, useful website pages that other websites can link to, thereby bringing prospects to your site organically. These should not necessarily be conversion pages, seeing as many consumers are immediately turned off when they come across this obvious trick. While you absolutely should use content and links to increase the amount of total time that potential customers spend with your brand, you must ensure that these links connect prospects with pages that are not immediately trying to sell them something. Be patient: after your brand becomes ubiquitous in the minds of your visitors through your library of resourceful content, they will likely choose to buy from you on their own accord.

3. LINK ALL OF YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA SITES.

Social media is a major element of any inbound marketing strategy, and making sure your social presence is consistent and connected across all platforms is one of the most important inbound marketing techniques related to social media. After you create profiles on the smaller, niche-oriented social media hubs of your industry, connect them to your larger social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This creates an intra-web of resources for your potential customers. It shows your organization as a cohesive whole, and it will keep your potential customers within your content for longer periods of time.

Linking all of your social media sites also gives you a leg up on visibility within the major search engines. This is especially important if your business has yet to establish itself online within your industry for certain keywords. The fastest way to build a searchable profile within these keywords is to link all of your social media. Make sure that you create links with appropriate anchor texts. Use long-tail keywords that are localized and searchable according to your city or your state. As a final link-building tip, make sure to optimize all of your multimedia content (including blog images) with alt tags and appropriate titles. Major search engines view the titles and/or alt text of multimedia in the same way that they view headlines on website text content; that is, they are essential in ensuring that your website pages have high search engine rankings.

4. CREATE ENGAGING, FULLY RESPONSIVE VIDEO CONTENT.

No matter your industry, your content and the way your present it must be accurate, relevant, and unique in order to truly engage your target audience and establish legitimacy for your brand. Delivering your content via a video platform is a great way to achieve both engagement and legitimacy. Video marketing allows you to present more information in a shorter time period than any other avenue of communication.

Making your content fully responsive also gives your company a leg up on the competition in the mobile arena. Content on mobile phones and tablets can be personalized in ways that other content simply cannot, and since mobile usage is only increasing, being able to offer responsive video content that prospects can engage with in the mobile space will greatly enhance the effectiveness and competitiveness of your inbound marketing strategy. Additionally, since April 2015, Google has heavily punished websites that are not fully responsive, with other major search engines sure to follow shortly.

Consumers are now hoping to become more knowledgeable about their purchasing decisions than ever before. As such, an effective inbound marketing plan is essential for the success of your B2B company. Make sure that your site is fast and that you offer fully-responsive and engaging content that links to other content you’ve produced and published elsewhere. When you have the right inbound marketing plan in place, you’ll start to see increased traffic, more conversions, and more sales over time.