In this blog, we will cover the essentials of crafting an inbound marketing plan, including defining your target audience, identifying your goals and KPIs, and developing a content strategy that resonates with your audience. 

After reading this, you will have the tools and knowledge you need to create a comprehensive inbound marketing plan that drives real results for your business. So, let’s dive in and start attracting the right customers to your brand today!

Developing Your Buyer Personas

What is a Buyer Persona?

Understanding your personas is a critical step in building a successful inbound strategy. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, and they can help you understand their unique needs, challenges, and interests. By defining your personas, you can create a strong foundation for your business that will shape every decision you make, from product development to marketing.

If you’re new to personas, it’s important to understand that within your target market, there are likely to be a variety of different buyers. Depending on whether your business is B2B or B2C or both, your products or services could be purchased by business owners, finance managers, or the end consumer. Each buyer will have their own unique characteristics and preferences, and it’s important to understand these in order to effectively target your marketing efforts.

How to Create Buyer Personas

To create effective personas, it’s important to gather data from your existing customers and carry out secondary research to uncover unique insights about your target market. This data should include both qualitative and quantitative information, such as:

• Demographics
• Behaviours
• Pain Points

This data can then be used to create detailed profiles of your ideal customers, including their goals, challenges, and preferred communication channels.

By understanding your personas, you can tailor your messaging and marketing efforts to effectively reach your target audience. This can include creating targeted content that speaks to your persona’s pain points and interests, as well as developing sales processes so that they are designed to appeal to their unique needs and preferences.

In addition to driving content creation and marketing efforts, personas can also inform product development and customer acquisition and retention strategies. By understanding your ideal customer, you can create products and services that are designed to meet their specific needs and preferences and develop acquisition and retention strategies that are tailored to their unique characteristics.

Creating personas doesn’t have to be a difficult task. We’ve created a persona development template to help get you started.

With a deep understanding of your personas, you can create a business that is designed to meet the needs of your ideal customer and drive long-term success.

Setting Your Goals

Equipped with your buyer personas, you should be in a position to create some strong and tangible goals that should demonstrate whether or not your inbound campaigns are performing as well as they should be. 

To create an effective inbound strategy, it’s crucial to keep your goals in mind at all times, whether you’re new to this or looking to refine your existing plan. However, setting goals can be challenging, and many marketers miss the mark. To ensure your inbound strategy is working efficiently, it’s essential to keep track of your return on investment (ROI) from your marketing activities, and clearly identify what you want to achieve and when you expect to see results.

SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. SMART goals are a framework that helps individuals and organisations create goals that are clear, achievable, and measurable.

Specific

The goal should be clear and unambiguous, answering the questions of what, why, and how. It should define what is to be achieved and what steps need to be taken.

Measurable

The goal should be quantifiable so that progress can be tracked and measured. This helps ensure that you stay on track and can make adjustments if needed.

Achievable

The goal should be realistic and attainable. It should challenge you but not be so difficult that it’s impossible to achieve.

Relevant

The goal should align with your overall objectives, and be important and relevant to your business or personal development.

Time-bound

The goal should have a deadline or timeframe, providing a sense of urgency and ensuring that progress can be measured.

When setting your inbound goals, start by reviewing your current analytics to understand your current ability to attract traffic to your website and convert leads. Some essential KPIs to track could include:

• Monthly unique visitors
• Clicks
• CTRs
• Sources of traffic
• The number of leads

By analysing this data, you can set expectations for the future of your inbound campaigns, set realistic and feasible goals, and be ambitious without setting yourself or your team up for failure. Remember, running an effective inbound campaign takes time. So when assigning timeframes to your goals, keep in mind that patience is key. Stick with it, and the results will be worth it!

Top Tip! Remember that inbound campaigns require long-term thinking, planning, and execution. Continuously monitor your analytics and adjust your strategy as needed to achieve your goals. Stay motivated, and don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results immediately. Stay focused on the bigger picture, and over time, your efforts will pay off.

Conducting Content Research

In inbound marketing, content research refers to the process of identifying the topics, keywords, and content types that are most relevant and valuable to your target audience. The goal of content research is to develop a content strategy that aligns with your audience’s interests, pain points, and search behaviours, and creates content that attracts, engages, and converts your ideal customers. You can see why it’s important to start your plan with your persona research!

Content research is important because it helps you create content that resonates with your audience and drives traffic, leads, and revenue for your business. By understanding your target audience’s needs, interests, and behaviours, you can create content that answers their questions, solves their problems, and addresses their concerns, positioning your brand as a thought leader and a trusted advisor.

To do content research effectively, follow these steps:

Conduct keyword research

Use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to identify the most relevant and high-volume keywords that your target audience is searching for.

Analyse competitors and industry trends 

Study your competitors’ content strategies, social media activity, and engagement metrics to identify gaps, opportunities, and best practices. Monitor industry trends, news, and events to stay up-to-date with your audience’s changing needs and preferences.

Survey your audience 

Use online survey tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to collect feedback from your audience on their preferences, challenges, and content expectations. You can also use social media polls, comments, and feedback to gather insights.

Analyse your website and social media analytics

Use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or HubSpot to track your website and social media performance, including page views, bounce rates, engagement metrics, and conversions. Use this data to identify your most popular and effective content, as well as areas for improvement.

By doing content research effectively, you can develop a content strategy that is data-driven, customer-centric, and results-oriented, and create content that generates leads, builds brand awareness, and drives business growth.

Auditing Your Content

In today’s digital age, content is king, and most businesses are constantly creating content to engage their target audience. However, with so much content being produced, it can be challenging to keep track of what you’ve already created and what still needs to be developed. This is where content cataloguing comes in.

Cataloguing your content involves conducting a thorough content audit and creating a spreadsheet to keep it organised. Many businesses have a catalogue of content buried somewhere in their archive, which may have been removed from the public domain because they were deemed irrelevant or outdated. However, this content could still bring value to your plan, and by cataloguing it, you can ensure that it doesn’t go to waste.

To start, take a look through your company’s folders and make a list of each piece of content, noting the different topics, formats, and dates created. As you do this, take the time to assign your existing content to your personas – that is, who the content was intended for or who would derive value from each piece of content. This will help you identify any gaps in your content going forward, allowing you to tailor your future content to better engage your target audience.

Conducting a content audit can also help you determine which content needs updating in order to become relevant once again. By doing so, you can boost your organic visibility and bring in an influx of traffic to blogs that may have been posted for a significant amount of time. Overall, cataloguing your content can help you make the most of your existing content and streamline your future content creation process.

Getting Your Website Ready

Your website plays a crucial role in facilitating your inbound marketing strategy. It serves as the central hub for your online presence and is where most of your potential customers will engage with your brand. A well-designed and optimised web design can help attract, engage, and convert your target audience by providing valuable content, building trust, and facilitating the sales process. Here are some ways your business can ensure your website is ready for inbound marketing:

Prioritise the user experience 

Your website should be easy to navigate, with a clear and concise layout, and a user-friendly interface. Your visitors should be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.

Optimise your website for search engines 

A website that is optimised for search engines is more likely to attract organic traffic. Make sure your website is optimised for relevant keywords, and that your content is valuable and informative.

Implement lead capture forms

Inbound marketing is all about attracting and converting leads. Implement lead capture forms on your website to collect information from your visitors and convert them into leads.

Use data and analytics

Use data and analytics to track your website’s performance and make data-driven decisions. This will help you optimise your website over time and improve your inbound marketing efforts.

Be mobile-friendly

With more and more people accessing the internet from their mobile devices, it’s important to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. This means that your website should be responsive, easy to navigate on smaller screens, and optimised for mobile devices.

Overall, a website is a crucial element of inbound marketing. By ensuring your website is optimised for search engines, user-friendly, and provides valuable content, you can attract, engage, and convert your target audience, and facilitate the sales process.

Inbound Marketing at Loop Digital

Supercharge your business growth with our cutting-edge inbound marketing strategies. Our team of experts are dedicated to delivering exceptional results for our client partners by leveraging the latest inbound marketing practices. Experience sustainable growth and create exceptional experiences for your customers.

Take the first step towards success today by speaking with one of our experts or exploring our range of tailored inbound marketing packages. To deepen your knowledge of inbound marketing, don’t miss the opportunity to download the Essential Guide to Inbound Marketing today.

The post Planning Your Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

What is inbound marketing for small businesses?

Let’s start by covering what inbound marketing is first of all. Essentially, inbound is a term used to describe any marketing methodology where customers come to you to find helpful content or services. Traditionally marketing was outbound, meaning that a business would target customers first through channels such as email campaigns, cold calling and physical advertising. 

Inbound takes a totally different approach and relies on generating useful content or services that act as solutions to a customer’s problem. Solutions come in all shapes and sizes and could be simply providing an integral piece of information during the awareness stage, or providing a product or service during the decision stage. 

So what is inbound for small businesses?

Inbound marketing is a widely effective marketing strategy for smaller businesses as it allows them to grow organically with a relatively low spend. SMEs don’t have the same level of resources as established brands and will most likely have a smaller workforce. 

Inbound ticks a number of different boxes that are crucial to the successful growth and development of a small business. It generates a higher quality of lead than outbound, is far more cost-effective and helps to build authority and brand awareness. 

How inbound marketing can work for your small business

Inbound marketing isn’t intrusive

The truth is that there are millions of companies worldwide, many of which will be offering the services and products that you do. These companies are competing against each other to take up as much of the market as possible. This often leads to fatigue in consumers as they are constantly inundated with advertisements through online, television, radio and print channels. 

The beauty of inbound marketing is that your customers seek out your business when they’re ready. Not only does it make it a far more efficient form of marketing but it helps to avoid oversaturating consumers too.    

It supports your SEO strategy

Inbound marketing fits alongside your SEO strategy as you can generate helpful pieces of content for your users. Content is the sweet spot where SEO and inbound meet as SEO enables your inbound marketing campaign to flourish. After all, users need to be able to find your content when searching for it. By producing well-written and informative content, you will improve your rankings, increase traffic and maximise lead generation. 

Become a thought leader

In today’s competitive business landscape, it is more important than ever for small businesses to establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry. By sharing their expertise and insights through all forms of online content, inbound marketing can help small businesses position themselves as experts and build trust with potential customers. This can lead to increased brand awareness, website traffic, and sales.

Inbound is more efficient

Small businesses don’t have the same level of resources as larger, more established brands. This means that you have to be savvy with your marketing strategy and look for ways to maximise your ROI. Inbound is a very efficient form of marketing as the users that are coming to your website are already looking for a solution to their problem. Inbound channels typically generate a higher quality lead because of this.  

If you want to learn more about inbound marketing and how you plan, create and execute your own strategy, download our essential guide to inbound marketing today.

The best inbound marketing tactics for your small business 

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a highly effective inbound marketing channel and there are estimated to be 4.7 million social users worldwide – and this figure is growing all the time! It allows you to reach more potential customers, increases brand awareness and is a fantastic platform to form long-term relationships with your customers. 

Create a social media plan – Our first tip is to generate a social media plan well in advance and avoid posting at the last minute. Creating a comprehensive plan will relieve any stress that comes as a result of thinking about a post at the very last minute. You can then use a scheduling platform to set a time and date on which to post your content. Planning ahead with your socials means that you can dedicate a block of time to writing posts, meaning that you’re not getting pulled away from your business throughout the day.

Build a community – One of the most unique aspects of social media is the two-way communication that it allows for between brand and customer. Small businesses can benefit hugely from building an online community and having back-and-forth dialogue with customers. Interact as much as you can online, answer questions and respond to any comments where necessary. Even a simple ‘thank you’ for leaving a positive review will build a loyal customer base that is more likely to return in future.

Stay up to date with trends – Social media trends develop all the time and it’s up to you to stay switched on to any that are relevant to your business. Trends allow you to ride a wave of popularity as you generate content that resonates with your audience at a given time. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t attempt to jump on every social trend there is – always keep it relevant to your target audience.  

Blogs and Articles

Businesses can benefit from incorporating a consistent blogging strategy into their marketing plan. It will give you more authority within your field and, when used alongside SEO tactics, will boost your visibility online and increase your traffic. 

Know your niche – Rule number one; know your subject. This sounds obvious but you should have a clear focus on what content you want to write and stick to it, as this will help guide you in creating useful content for your customers. This doesn’t mean you have to keep it the same – thinking outside the box and producing content that fits into a wide range of sub-topics is a great way to keep things fresh. It also avoids covering the same content over again which can harm your SEO.

Carry out comprehensive keyword research – Blogging is nothing without the right keyword research. This all-important step helps you target your content to what your customers are searching for online and enables them to find your content in the SERPs (search engine results page).  

Keyword research works differently for smaller businesses and it’s not as simple as getting straight to the no.1 ranked spot on Google. The likelihood is that you won’t be able to compete at this early stage so you need to be more savvy with your strategy. Target longer-tail keywords that are less competitive for the best results early on.

Video Marketing

Video marketing continues to dominate the web as is a more natural and engaging way to consume information. When we watch a video, we are able to see and hear the person who is speaking, which helps us to connect with them on a more personal level. Videos are also more likely to be shared on social media, which can help you reach a wider audience. Connecting with an audience and growing brand awareness are two absolutely essential and inexpensive steps for small businesses. 

Utilise video to tell your story – Your story is what makes your business unique and sets you apart from competitors. It is also what will connect with your customers on a deeper level. Small businesses should utilise the personal nature of video and use it to form strong, meaningful connections with customers. Be sure to focus on your mission (what is your business’s purpose? What are you trying to achieve?), your values (what are the core values that guide your business?) and your passion (what are you passionate about? What drives you to do what you do?).

Showcase your products – Did you know that 64% of consumers make a purchase after watching some kind of branded video online? Video is a hugely effective way of showcasing your products or services and enables a customer to see your offerings firsthand. As a small business, you should dedicate resources to developing ‘how to videos’ and ‘product explainer videos’. This allows your customers to see how your product or services work, how they benefit them and ultimately whether they should invest. 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is essential for small businesses as it allows you to manage your customers and keep them coming back. Email marketing has the highest ROI of all forms of marketing, making it a great channel for businesses with limited resources. 

Build stronger customer relationships – Email campaigns are the perfect channel for small businesses that want to build stronger relationships with their customers. They allow you to interact with customers and share non-sales-related content. Provide a monthly newsletter that focuses on any useful information that your customers might want to hear about. By offering a story or advice alongside your usual promotional emails, you can help to strengthen your customer relations and build all-important trust. 

Create personalised content – Once you have a list of subscribers, you can start sending them targeted emails by utilising a CRM. This means sending emails that are relevant to their interests and needs. You can segment your list by demographics, interests, or purchase history to ensure that you’re sending the right messages to the right people, at the right time.

One of the best ways to get your customers to interact with your emails is to offer them exclusive deals and discounts. This will show them that you value their business and that you’re willing to give them a little something extra. Little extras like this will help to build strong customer relations and return customers. 

SEO

SEO has the ability to increase your online visibility and grow your business. Whether it’s on or off-page SEO strategies, small businesses can benefit greatly from utilising an SEO strategy.  

Don’t forget to make a user-friendly website – A user-friendly website is essential for small businesses in today’s digital age. A well-designed website can help businesses to attract new customers, build relationships with existing customers, and increase sales. A user-friendly website is one that is easy to navigate, has clear and concise information, and is visually appealing. It is also important to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly, as more and more people are using their smartphones and tablets to access the internet.

Build links – Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO so small business owners should dedicate time to building high-quality links – even if it’s just a short amount of time every month. The more sites that link to your website, the better you will perform in the SERPs. Email businesses and offer a link-for-link exchange – but remember; one link from a high-quality source within your niche is worth more than many links from lesser-quality sources.  

Supercharge your small business with Loop Digital

Here at Loop Digital, we offer completely bespoke inbound marketing strategies that are adapted depending on the needs and requirements of our clients. Our talented team are experts in inbound and have extensive experience in SEO, content marketing, email marketing and social media. 
Contact Loop Digital today to see how we can take your business to the next level.

The post Why Your Small Business Needs Inbound Marketing appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach to marketing that aims to attract, engage, and delight potential customers by creating valuable content and experiences that align with their needs and interests. Instead of interrupting people’s daily lives with intrusive ads, inbound marketing seeks to earn their attention and trust by providing helpful information, solving their problems, and building relationships.

By focusing on providing value and building relationships, inbound marketing can help businesses create a loyal customer base that not only buys their products or services but also becomes their advocates and evangelists. In this blog post, we’ll explore the key benefits and principles of inbound marketing, and show you how you can grow your business and delight your customers.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategic marketing methodology that focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting customers by providing valuable and relevant content that solves their problems and meets their needs. It’s a way to build trust and establish a relationship with potential customers by providing helpful information, resources, and solutions, rather than interrupting their day with unwanted or irrelevant ads. 

The last few years have evolved the way we as consumers, communicate, research, buy, sell and educate ourselves online. Throughout this period, marketers have had to adapt the way they market their businesses, services and products to cater to these shifts in behaviour. One of these primary adaptations was the shift from traditional marketing to inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing has skyrocketed in popularity over the last handful of years and is now used by marketers across the world. Despite its spike in popularity, the methodology actually came to life in 2006. Since 2006 the critical principles of inbound remain largely the same but it has undergone various changes to work in harmony with the modern world, its technology and of course, consumer behaviour. 

These changes were largely facilitated by the advancements in marketing technology. This technological movement brought with it CRM (customer relationship management) systems, marketing automation and various other marketing tools. The introduction of these tools has made inbound marketing more accessible, comprehensive and powerful. This approach to marketing is now more advanced and everyone wants in on the action, for good reason. 

Fundamentally, the inbound marketing methodology is built upon relationships. Your company’s growth depends on building meaningful and lasting relationships, from prospects to delighted customers. Inbound aims to move away from the more traditional methods of outbound marketing like the purchasing of ads, email lists, cold calling and generally seeking out your leads. Instead, inbound aims to draw in your prospects by leveraging valuable content.

With inbound marketing, you can help your users identify and overcome their challenges to ultimately achieve their goals. By providing valuable and engaging content your business can establish itself as a thought leader within your sector. Why is this important? Because your prospects, leads and customers are much more likely to purchase from brands they trust. 

Top Benefits of Implementing Inbound Marketing

This section of the blog will outline some of the key benefits of inbound marketing. Whether you’re a startup or a well-established business, inbound marketing provides a cost-effective, targeted, and measurable way to reach your target audience, build trust, and generate long-term results. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the key benefits of inbound marketing.

Cost-effective

Inbound marketing strategies are predominantly online focused, and the tactics are considerably cheaper to implement than the ‘old-school’ outbound methods like radio or TV advertising. A study conducted by HubSpot found that inbound marketing on average is 62% cheaper per lead than outbound marketing. 

Hyper-Targeted 

If you can produce content that is targeted to a desired audience or persona, the traffic that is generated is likely to be of better quality and much more qualified to make a purchasing decision. It’s worth noting that the more often you produce quality content the more frequently users are likely to visit your site. 

Build trust and credibility 

By providing valuable content, inbound marketing helps build trust and credibility with your target audience. This will ultimately become what will set you apart from your competitors and influence that all-important purchasing decision. 

Increased website traffic

Inbound marketing tactics like SEO, social media marketing, and content marketing can drive targeted traffic to your website, increasing the opportunity for conversions. Due to its omnichannel approach, inbound marketing strategies present the opportunity to expand your reach further beyond what may not have been possible historically.

Measurable results

With inbound marketing, although there are arguably more variables and complexities involved, your inbound marketing strategy should provide you with one single line of truth. Making it easier to track, monitor and measure the success of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions. 

Long-term impact

Unlike outbound marketing methods that offer short-term results throughout the duration of a campaign. Inbound marketing focuses on the longevity of your success, honing in on delivering long-term impact by building relationships with your visitors, leads and customers over time. 

Marketing and sales alignment 

Full cooperation and collaboration across your sales and marketing departments are needed to facilitate a successful inbound strategy. Sales provide valuable customer insights, which the marketing team uses to create targeted content that addresses their needs and challenges. This collaboration helps attract leads, increase conversions, and improve customer satisfaction.

What is the Marketing Flywheel?

If you’re already familiar with inbound marketing, the chances are, you’ll have heard the term ‘marketing flywheel’ being tossed around too. Invented by James Watt, the marketing flywheel is a model that demonstrates the momentum businesses can gain when their key services are aligned with one another. By aligning these services, your business can provide exceptional customer experiences which will ultimately be the key driver for your organisation’s growth. 

The aim of the marketing flywheel is to get you to see your business from a unique perspective, not to redefine everything you already know. When you start to conceptualise your business as a flywheel you’ll become better informed to make decisions and adapt your strategy. 

The Marketing Flywheel Explained

The marketing flywheel, the momentum it has and the energy it stores come down to three fundamental variables:

1. How fast you spin it
2. How much friction there is
3. How big it is

Successful companies achieve growth by optimising their business strategies to address these three areas. To increase the speed of the flywheel, implement forces such as inbound marketing, freemium models, frictionless sales, customer referral programs, paid advertising and investing in customer service. By prioritising customer success, you increase the likelihood of positive word-of-mouth referrals.

To maximise the impact of your forces, eliminate friction from your business strategy. Friction includes bottlenecks in internal processes, lapses in team communication, and customer-employee misalignment. Streamline teams, address customer churn, and simplify the buyer’s journey to reduce friction. Consider factors such as team alignment, straightforward pricing, and flexible customer engagement methods to minimise obstacles and create a positive customer experience.

The more effectively you can increase the speed and reduce the amount of friction, the more promoters you’ll generate, feeding into the forces that spin your flywheel. 

Inbound Marketing & The Flywheel

By this point, you may be thinking why are we dropping another methodology onto you, we promise that this is all relevant. The inbound marketing methodology should also be viewed as a cycle with your inbound strategy being the key ‘force’. When you use the flywheel to demonstrate inbound marketing, the sections are broken down into; attract, engage, and delight. 

Attract:

In this phase, you’re looking to draw in prospects. These users are likely to be engaging with your business and brand for the first time and as you well know, first impressions are very important. They will likely have a problem or will be expressing symptoms of a problem; they’ll be searching for a diagnosis. 

At this stage, you need to provide content that explains their problem in further detail, content that provides clarity and sympathises with the prospect. If you show your prospect that you understand and care about their challenges, you’ll begin to build trust with them. You want to earn a prospect’s interest, not force it.

Engage: 

This is where you can begin to introduce solutions and insights to their problem. When describing these solutions, you can start to include references to your own products and services and discuss how they’ll bring further value to them. 

When referring to the value of your brand or business don’t go overboard, you don’t want your readers, viewers, or listeners to feel like they’re being sold to. Instead, maintain a focus on solution selling rather than product selling, remember you want your prospects and leads to feel empowered.

Delight:

This is where your existing customers will sit. To delight a customer, you want to ensure your customers feel happy, satisfied and supported long after their initial purchase. Remember it’s far more expensive to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. 

By providing advice, expert knowledge and support to your customers when they reach out. Not all delight tactics involve manning a forum or inbox, you can set up intelligent chatbots, surveys, and email marketing to automate part of the process. Asking for feedback is also a great way to delight customers, feedback offers an opportunity for your customers to feel involved and connected with your brand. 

By continually delighting your customers you’re more likely to turn them into brand advocates or promoters. These promoters could recommend your business to others or publish a review online, this may spark the interest of another prospect increasing the momentum for your flywheel. 

Flywheel vs Funnel

Are we saying you should disregard all of your funnel models in support of the flywheel? Absolutely not, no. Your funnels can still serve a purpose for your business, marketing and sales strategies. 

A marketing or sales funnel is a classic tool that represents the stages a customer goes through throughout their buying journey. The top of this funnel is wide and aims to bring awareness of your product or business to as many people as possible but some of these prospects may not be remotely interested in what you have to offer. 

As the funnel narrows, leads pass through the different stages but only a small percentage make it as far as the bottom, taking that desired action. More recently, there’re questions raised about whether the funnel is an adequate representation of today’s consumer journey. 

However, with that said, the traditional funnel model, although loved by many, is outdated and fails to consider the impact of customers on business growth. The flywheel model offers a more comprehensive and unified approach, considering how marketing, sales, support, and service all affect each other and drive company growth. By viewing customers as a driving force, not just an afterthought, the flywheel allows for a more holistic representation of the forces affecting growth.

Going forward, the flywheel provides a complete view of your business growth, identifying key opportunities. Funnels will still be used to measure the performance of specific processes within a company, but they are just a part of the larger picture represented by the flywheel.

Do you need Inbound Marketing?

In the past, outbound marketing techniques such as cold calling, TV ads, and direct mail were the go-to methods for businesses looking to reach a large audience and generate leads. However, with the rise of digital technologies and the increasing use of ad blockers, these outbound techniques are fast losing their effectiveness.

Consumers today are bombarded with ads from all sides, and they’ve become adept at tuning them out. They no longer want to be interrupted by irrelevant messages or pushy sales pitches. They want to be in control of their buying journey and seek out information on their own terms.

This is where inbound marketing comes in. By providing valuable content and experiences that align with the needs and interests of potential customers, inbound marketing can attract leads who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Instead of interrupting people with ads, inbound marketing seeks to build trust and relationships by helping people solve their problems and answer their questions.

Inbound marketing can compensate for the declining effectiveness of outbound techniques by providing a more personalised, relevant, and engaging experience for potential customers. It can help businesses cut through the noise and stand out in a crowded marketplace. By focusing on providing value and building relationships, inbound marketing can create a loyal customer base that not only buys your products or services but also becomes your advocates and evangelists.

So if you’re looking to stay ahead of the curve and drive sustainable growth for your business, it’s time to embrace the power of inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing at Loop Digital

At Loop Digital, our team have adopted the latest inbound marketing practices to deliver the best results for all of our client partners. We understand the importance of achieving sustainable growth for your business, we leverage inbound tactics partnered with the flywheel model to generate exceptional experiences for our clients and their customers. 

For more information, speak to one of our experts today or explore our inbound marketing packages. If you’d like to learn more about inbound marketing, we recommend downloading the Essential Inbound Marketing Guide down below.

The post What is Inbound Marketing? appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

Learn how to build your inbound marketing strategy today.

This comprehensive guide is designed to help you understand the basics of inbound marketing and how it can benefit your business. We will take a deep dive into the marketing flywheel and guide you through the process of creating an effective inbound marketing plan. You’ll learn about the different tactics you can use to effectively attract, engage and delight your audiences. We’ll also explain how to measure the KPIs of your inbound marketing efforts to empower you to optimise your inbound marketing strategy, improve your ROI, and achieve your business goals.

This guide is your go-to resource for mastering inbound marketing and enhancing your customer engagement and satisfaction. By following our step-by-step guide you can implement an inbound marketing strategy that will attract, engage, and delight your customers, driving business growth and profitability.

Essential Elements of Your Inbound Marketing Guide

• The Fundamentals of Inbound Marketing
• The Benefits of Inbound Marketing
• The Marketing Flywheel
• How-To Plan Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
• The Best Inbound Marketing Tactics
• Launching Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
• Measuring Success – Inbound Marketing KPIs

Download guide

The post The Essential Guide to Inbound Marketing appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

In 2022 it is difficult to find the resources and funding to grow your business – but that’s where digital marketing comes in. Whilst it can be tempting to cut your digital marketing budget during tough times, like the current cost of living crisis. We’re here, alongside many other experts in the marketing industry to say that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. 

Digital marketing is absolutely essential for expanding your business. We recognise that during times of economic uncertainty, marketing may seem like just another expenditure. But in actual fact, if your business cuts marketing, it can be as detrimental as switching off an entire revenue stream. 

By getting smart with your digital marketing strategy you will be able to get results by spending less. It’s all about focusing your efforts in the right places and utilising practices in the most efficient ways. Join us as we list the most affordable digital marketing strategies in 2022 that are guaranteed to take your business to new heights.  

What does it mean to scale your business?

In basic terms, scaling a business means putting in the work to help your business grow and expand. Overall, the aim of expansion is to increase operational demand and increase revenue.

The real challenge with scaling a business is to do it in a sustainable fashion that aligns with your original business values. Scaling a business isn’t a walk in the park and must be carried out with extensive levels of consideration and exceptional attention to detail. It requires a great deal of planning and strategy, as well as the right funding, staff, systems and support. 

Scaling Your Business With Digital Marketing

Scaling a business is all about finding new ways to reach customers and create revenue, and there is no better tool for this exploration than digital marketing. Planning and implementing an engaging digital marketing strategy will help to increase traffic to your website, generate leads and increase your authority in the market. By getting savvy with digital marketing techniques, you can grow your business at truly rapid rates and achieve the success your business needs.

What Are The Benefits of Scaling Your Business With Digital Marketing?

1. You’re in Control

The beauty of digital marketing is that it’s all down to you. Don’t panic, this isn’t as scary as it sounds. You are in complete control of the direction that you want your digital marketing strategy to go in and have the choice of what platforms to focus your resources on. Whether it’s social media, SEO, content marketing or web design, get creative and build a strategy that works for you and your business. 

2. Improve Your Visibility

Improving your online visibility is a key component in scaling your business as it generates more traffic and increases your leads. New customers can find your products or services through successful content marketing strategies, or by increasing your reach via social media. The more people see your content, the more traffic and leads you generate and the higher your rate of growth. 

3. Planning for Short-Term and Long-Term Goals

Setting achievable short-term and long-term goals is the key to a successful digital marketing strategy. By tracking your strategy and working towards a common goal you will quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. Understanding this is key to successfully scaling your business and helps to avoid wasting time and precious resources. 

4. Affordability

Online marketing is often kinder on your budget than traditional forms of marketing. Businesses can get amazing results with relatively low investment, but it’s all about knowing where to focus your efforts for maximum success. Making the most of free tools and getting to grips with digital marketing techniques such as SEO, content marketing and social media marketing are all budget-friendly ways of growing your business.  

5. Target Customers at Every Stage in Their Journey

Digital marketing is great for targeting specific audience members at different stages in their buyer’s journey. By utilising digital marketing tools you can track and analyse exactly who is interacting with your content. You can also implement inbound marketing strategies to generate content specifically to provide solutions to the challenges your audience faces. 

The Best Marketing Solutions For Scaling Businesses

Content Marketing

Content is king. You might have heard this term being thrown around but it’s absolutely true. The importance of quality content cannot be understated, and it’s exactly the same for scaling your business. Generating a successful piece of content can take as little as a few hours and has the potential to attract large amounts of traffic to your website.    

The trick is, you need your content to be relevant, valuable and consistent in order for it to be truly successful. For Google, content that satisfies these three requirements to the highest level will be ranked higher, meaning more traffic to your site. A well-executed content marketing strategy has the power to increase your brand awareness and authority, improve your customer engagement, boost lead generation and drive extra revenue to your business.

SEO

SEO is a fundamental digital marketing technique that can seriously help to scale your business with little cost. Similarly to content marketing, SEO is about boosting your chances of ranking online – the higher you rank, the more potential customers will see your products or services. Relatively minor tweaks can be made to your online content that will seriously improve its SEO.

Organic traffic is important because people are looking for a solution to a problem. This could be anything from finding information on a subject during the awareness stage, to searching for a specific product or service during the decision stage. Organic audiences can be targeted by producing valuable content that provides solutions to specific challenges. This will ultimately attract more high-quality leads to your website.   

SEO is a broad subject so it helps to split it into two areas; on-page and off-page SEO. On-page refers to anything that happens on your website – think things like content, meta-descriptions, alt-text, page speed and internal links. Off-page includes anything that happens off your website, such as link building, guest posting and social media.

Web Design 

In the modern world, all companies and organisations should have a website, even bricks and mortar businesses. Your website is a visual representation of your brand and is a fundamental platform for communicating with your audience. Communication is key when scaling your business as it is how new customers find, interact and share your business. 

A website is used to share information, increase your reach and visibility, offer support and build your brand credibility – all things that help to boost your online presence, drive traffic to your site and satisfy your customers. 

In terms of expense, web designs are some of the widest-ranging digital marketing solutions out there. Large complex web builds can cost over five figures, whereas a small redesign can cost a few thousand pounds. Whatever the price, the importance of a website is undeniable in the modern age, so make sure yours is up to scratch. 

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a platform that most of us are familiar with in 2022. It connects us, allows us to share information and ideas, and is a hugely successful tool for increasing the reach of a business. It can be used as a lead-generation tool and is one of the most successful ways to promote your business if used correctly. Like with SEO, your business can benefit from a free-to-do organic strategy or you can supercharge your social media presence with targeted social media advertising.

When it comes to creating social media ads, by creating content that incorporates SEO knowledge such as keyword inclusion, you can boost your performance with the smallest of budgets. 

Inbound Marketing 

Inbound marketing certainly packs a punch when it comes to getting results on a conservative budget. These strategies commonly follow an omnichannel approach, using various marketing tactics and channels at one time. It’s a tool that is used to efficiently attract, engage and delight your customers, focusing on building long-lasting relationships.  

Whilst every inbound strategy will be unique, it’s normally formulated around generating content with the intention of providing solutions to challenges facing your target audience. This content encapsulates blogging and website content, but also includes webinars, videos, whitepapers, ebooks, podcasts, infographics and much more. 

The key to successful inbound marketing is doing your research beforehand to see what will promote the best engagement from your target market. Webinars and podcasts are great for providing a more human element to your business. Whilst white papers and ebooks are more suited to long-format, educational material. Next, it’s up to you to get creative! 

Digital Marketing Services With Loop Digital

Here at Loop Digital, we’re specialists in providing bespoke digital marketing services to a wide range of businesses across the UK, regardless of size or industry. We help our clients set and reach their marketing goals, ensuring high-quality customer service along the way. Whether it’s inbound marketing, SEO, website design or any of our other marketing solutions. You can be sure that our talented team of experts will take your business to new heights.

If you’re interested in any of our digital marketing services, contact us today. Phone us directly on 01604 806020  or submit an enquiry via our contact page. 

The post Affordable Marketing Strategies to Scale Your Business appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

When you look at businesses as a whole, the majority share one goal and one associated challenge; generating high-quality leads. Attracting new customers and retaining their attention through to purchase is a fundamental challenge for brands all across the globe. Fortunately, marketing automation is here to streamline and accelerate this process. According to a recent survey from HubSpot, 78% of media planners are utilising marketing automation, with 26% of the companies who aren’t, are planning on doing so. In the same report, 43% of marketers agree that automation has been the most effective trend for their organization’s growth.

Let’s find out why…

What is Marketing Automation?

By definition, marketing automation is the utilisation of software and technology to simplify or automate a variety of activities. 

Marketing automation is purposefully designed to help take the strain off your internal resources by automating monotonous marketing tasks. In addition to providing various shortcuts in completing time-consuming tasks, these marketing automation tools can also support you in providing more personalised experiences for your customers. 

Many people assume that the term ‘marketing automation’ is the same as ‘email automation’ but that isn’t quite true. Although marketing automation does encompass automated communications via email, it also does much more. Modern marketing automation tech harnesses the full power and potential of data to influence your leads through their buyer’s journey. Something that even big businesses still struggle with to this day. 

With the right marketing automation software (something we’ll cover more in-depth later), your business can save time, improve its organisation and convert more leads into paying customers. A big game changer for big and smaller businesses in both B2B and B2C markets. 

How does Marketing Automation work?

So how does it work? Well, we all have those evergrowing lists of manual, repetitive and sometimes tedious tasks. These tasks are often relatively straightforward, but time-consuming, a resource that us marketers are already pretty short on. Marketing automation helps to remove these distractions from our to-do lists and enables us to focus on bigger impact initiatives. 

Whilst marketing automation strategies will be different for every organisation, many of them will share some similar steps. 

A marketing automation strategy is typically constructed of the following:

• Landing pages
• Chaflows/chatbots
• Email marketing

In addition to these lead nurturing tactics, there are often various other small tasks going on in the background. From automatically generating meetings and reminders to sending follow-up communications. All of which will have the potential to save your business time.

Whilst your automation strategy might start small, it will evolve into a sophisticated process that encourages your users to take action when they are ready to do so. Modern marketing is all about providing value to your prospects because over time, this value will be reciprocated in the form of a purchase. 

One thing to bear in mind is that marketing automation is not a function you should set up and forget about. This is a common myth that unfortunately many believe. In order for your marketing automation strategy to generate the best results, it requires consistent monitoring and development. You must remember that automation is here to support your marketing, not do it all for you. 

Marketing Automation vs Customer Relationship Management

Although CRM platforms and marketing automation may seem similar at first, they both serve a unique set of purposes. This may or may not be completely new information to you but it’s important that we differentiate the two. Obviously, we cannot speak for all CRMs or all automation tools so bear in mind we’re speaking generically. 

So a Customer Relationship Management system helps businesses store, monitor and easily track communications with their leads and customers. A CRM is a go-to platform for collecting and connecting data from your leads and customers, whilst keeping it accessible to people across an organisation. Most CRMs are primarily sales-focused, with a key emphasis on the buyer stages that precede becoming an MQL (marketing-qualified lead).

The main purpose of a CRM is to improve the overall customer experience and increase sales, something that is shared with marketing automation. 

Although the two tools may share similar objectives, they predominantly target two segments of users; non-sales ready and sales-ready. As we’ve outlined already, your CRM will focus on the leads who have been qualified by your sales team and are sales-ready. Marketing automation on the other hand will focus on those users who are yet to enter or are in the early stages of their buyer’s journey ie. non-sales ready.

Marketing automation software or tools are designed to let you track and influence a prospect’s ‘top-of-the-funnel’ actions. From submitting a form or opening an email, your marketing automation strategy can help organise and schedule the next action until a goal is achieved. 

Today, many CRMs, like the HubSpot CRM have already integrated marketing automation tools within their systems, helping you unlock the full potential of both tools.

Top Benefits of Implementing Marketing Automation

Now that we’ve successfully explored what exactly marketing automation is, now we can walk you through some of the benefits of implementing these tools yourself. 

Building Valuable Relationships

Modern digital marketing is all about building and nurturing long-lasting relationships with your prospects, leads and customers. Marketing automation empowers businesses like yours to create and deploy a customer-centric strategy that is hyper-personalised. 

With automated marketing, your business can send the right messages to the right pool of users at the right time, improving the relevancy of your content. A recent survey suggests that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from brands that offer customised and relevant experiences. 

Remember marketing automation shouldn’t just be about what it can do for your business, but how it can support your customers. Your prospects, leads and customers are likely inundated with content, most of which they don’t want. Marketing automation helps you address your audience’s needs, challenges and goals and communicate messages that are aligned with this. 

Effective Lead Nurturing

With marketing automation, you can set up actions and workflows that trigger once a user has met certain criteria or taken a specific action.

All too often we hear brands complain about cart abandonment or lost activity. With marketing automation, providing you have the right credentials, you can send hyper-personalised messages that can influence the close of the sale. This would work best for impulse or smaller purchases. 

For more elongated buyer journeys, marketing automation can handle your sales follow-ups for you. Nurturing your leads can be a challenging and time-consuming process, but the result will be worth the wait. According to recent research, 50% of qualified leads are not yet ready to buy, making a lead nurturing programme even more crucial. 

With automation, you can create and send non-disruptive content to your contacts that help edge them closer to purchase, or booking a consultation for example. There are various tools at your disposal; whether that be email, website personalisation or re-targeting. All of these tactics can work cohesively to facilitate your inbound marketing strategy.    

Analysing the Buyer’s Journey

With marketing automation, you can unlock an entirely new perspective that can help you understand your customers and their buyer’s journey. By utilising marketing automation technology, you’ll be collecting more data that will enable your business to make smarter decisions. Even decisions that are away from marketing. 

This tech will empower your brand to effortlessly embrace ‘big data’. Depending on your tool of choice, many platforms will enable you to review data and analytics all from one place. They are a comprehensive solution for measuring campaigns and forecasting consumer behaviour, again, something that will direct your decision-making. 

In addition to simply reviewing the analytics, with many marketing automation tools you can create your own A/B or split tests to discover optimal channels and content. Supporting your business to fully comprehend how your sales and marketing initiatives are influencing your brand’s bottom line. 

Aligning Marketing & Sales

It’s so secret that in the majority of businesses, particularly in big business, marketing and sales teams don’t often see eye to eye. This misalignment is commonly caused by outdated or broken processes that essentially stop these teams from communicating properly. With marketing automation collaboration is key, your teams will be compelled to re-align their goals in order to create the strongest strategy.

Your sales team can provide highly valuable insights into customers’ needs and wants at different stages throughout their buying journey. With the help of those insights, you can create targeted content for prospects that aims to offer education or solutions to their questions and challenges. By joining forces, marketing and sales can provide information that attracts leads, increases conversions, and delight your customers.

Improving Your ROI

This one sort of goes without saying. If marketing automation can help achieve all of the above, it’ll undoubtedly have an impact on your business’s return on investment. Automation technology can help your teams manage and communicate with their leads more efficiently. This will over time bolster conversion rates and increase your company’s revenue. 

Marketing Automation at Loop Digital

At Loop Digital we love to utilise new and emerging technologies and marketing automation is a great example. We’ve been able to unlock the full potential of our marketing by leveraging the power of automation. Our multifaceted team have the skills and knowledge to deliver powerful marketing strategies and exceptional results. 

For more information about how your business can benefit from marketing automation get in touch with our wonderful team today.

The post Introducing The Power of Marketing Automation appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

As a marketer, you’ll already recognise the importance of converting your website’s traffic into paying customers. With that said, it doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s a challenge that we face regularly. 

So how can we combat this? Well, with inbound marketing, your business can start to attract the right people to your business. Captivating the attention of high-quality prospects who are actively seeking your products or services. If you’ve gotten to the point where you believe you’ve exhausted all of your options, trialled various different marketing techniques and still not quite reaching your overarching objectives, then this guide is probably for you. 

An Introduction to Inbound Marketing

For those of you who don’t know, we highly recommend getting to know. Inbound marketing is a relatively new marketing methodology that strives to move away from traditional, and often more expensive marketing techniques. A shift away from cold-calling and mass marketing to placing a much bigger emphasis on providing value to your prospects, leads and customers.

The inbound approach aims to draw in potential business by providing engaging and informative multimedia content such as blogs, whitepapers, videos and demos. The purpose of this is to recognise the user’s pain points and challenges and then provide the tools or education for them to overcome these barriers. Why? Because this will help establish trust between your business and the prospect, making these users more likely to return and purchase from you when they are ready. 

The inbound methodology is fundamentally built upon relationships. Your business’s growth depends on building meaningful and lasting relationships with everyone who engages with your business. That’s your prospects, leads and crucially, your existing customers. 

The online world continues to change the way we find, buy, sell and interact with brands online. As marketers, it’s our responsibility to develop the way we market our businesses to reflect the continuous shifts in consumer behaviour. Inbound can help streamline this evolution in your marketing. 

Understanding the Inbound Marketing Process

Our team often talks to businesses who can’t work out why their website isn’t converting. They’re attracting a high amount of traffic but those site visitors are not becoming customers. We spoke to one business owner who was exasperated at the bounce rate their site was experiencing.

One of the first things we reviewed was their on-page content. Their homepage featured engaging copy and visual elements, so that wasn’t it. The page was also ranking with search engines well enough to have a high volume of visitors, not that either other. 

The problem this client faced was their website was attracting the wrong people. Users who weren’t interested in their products or services.

What was missing was relevant and high-quality content that was targeted at their desired keywords and customer queries. This tactic focuses on quality, not quantity. Bringing the right traffic to your site, the people most likely to become customers.

But how do you do this?

With inbound marketing, you bring the customers to you, you don’t go to them. With Inbound marketing, you don’t waste time and or resources on attracting customers who aren’t interested in what you have to offer. You target the ones who are. Inbound marketing helps your prospects while outbound disrupts their experience. 

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Building Your Brand Awareness

Thanks to the huge advances in tech, even the smallest of brands can gain recognition around the world. With more users than ever using search engines to diagnose their problems and find solutions, your business has the opportunity to be at the forefront of those searches. By providing content that is unique, informative and engaging, you can increase your brand’s online visibility. 

Content that is particularly compelling can receive shares across different channels and platforms, extending the reach of your content even further. This will enable new prospects to discover your business.

Cost-Effectiveness

Inbound marketing strategies are commonly formulated around online channels, this is because they are cheaper to implement and offer a stronger ability to track performance. Moving away from the old school, traditional methods like TV advertising or radio, both of which come with a hefty price tag. 
Recent studies have revealed that a consistent inbound marketing strategy can decrease the average cost of lead by 80% in five months. Various case studies have proved that inbound can generate leads in a much cheaper manner than outbound marketing. 

Achieving Long-Term Success & Sustainability 

Whilst the inbound methodology can provide a variety of different quick wins that your business could implement, inbound is commonly referred to as the ‘long game’. However, this long game is formulated around bringing long-term success to your business. 

Inbound is a sustainable approach to marketing, it enables you to continually share, and optimise content to repeatedly generate buzz around your brand. Whereas outbound campaigns will only continue to generate results for your business for the duration of the campaign. Inbound content will continue to live and potentially thrive in the digital space for as long as they remain valuable and relevant. 

The only drawback of this longevity is the initial start-up phase, you shouldn’t expect to start seeing results overnight. It’ll take time for your content to gain traction and be recognised as valuable by search engines. 

Target All Stages of The Buyer’s Journey

In most cases, your buyer won’t be ready to commit to a purchase after their very first visit to your website, particularly if we’re looking at a more costly purchase. Nurturing your leads is now a crucial process in securing new business. 

Inbound marketing allows you to attract traffic to your site that converts. Rather than bringing in people who aren’t interested, you’ll attract people who are actively seeking your products and services. This helps improve the efficiency of your marketing and increases your return on investment. 

Inbound Marketing focuses on nurturing your customers through their buyer’s journey across three different stages:

Attract – Bring in the right people. The people who will benefit from what you offer. You can do this through great SEO and by building your industry authority. 

Engage – Present informative and entertaining content. Set out how what you offer will solve your customer’s problems. This is where you build trust and influence your leads to buy from you.

Delight – After a purchase, offer meaningful follow-up communications. Turn a one-time consumer into a loyal customer. This will lead to them promoting your business to their own network of prospects, family, friends and acquaintances, furthering the reach of your brand. 

How to Attract Your Audience

In the attract stage of the buyer’s journey, your primary goal should be to turn your strangers into visitors. The first step to generating leads is to create and publish great content. This could include:

• Blogs
• Social Media Marketing
• Video Marketing
• PPC & Online Ads
• Informative Webpages
• Press Releases
• SEO

To do this effectively, you’ll need to have a solid understanding of your ideal buyer’s pain points, challenges, needs and goals. These insights should form the foundation of your overarching content strategy. To uncover these insights about your buyers you’ll need to carry out some market research. 

To get started, we highly recommend creating 3-5 buyer persona profiles, these are semi-fictitious representations of your ideal buyers. This research will reveal unique perceptions about your target market, from demographics to common purchase pathways. If you need more help with this, we highly recommend downloading our Persona Development Template. 

How to Engage Your Audience

The next step is the consideration and decision stages of the buyer’s journey. Throughout these phases you’ll need to engage your audience, turning your prospects and leads into customers. At this point, the user has identified their problem and is exploring various solutions to help them overcome their challenges. 

This is the critical point where your business needs to position itself as a resource of value, you can do this by providing expert insight that articulates how your visitors can combat their hurdles. Here are some of the inbound tactics you could implement here:

• Email Marketing
• Downloadable Content
• Landing Pages
• Marketing Automation
• Chatflows and Bots
• Case Studies
• Demos and Webinars
• Comparison Tools

You’ll need to ensure you include strong and relevant calls to action within these pieces of content. These CTAs should involve capturing user data, which will enable you to continue to market to your leads via other means, like email marketing. This will also help define an ideal path your users can take to progress through the buyer’s journey. 

In terms of the content you produce, remember you don’t ever want to appear as though you’re going after the hard sell. You will need to remain neutral with your content too, only outlining the truest facts and quality information. This will influence your prospects to view your brand more favourably and instil confidence to consider your brand as a provider of the solution they need. 

This emphasis on empowering your visitors will help your prospects come to their decision on their own terms. 

How to Delight Your Audience

The delight stage is your opportunity to help your existing customers find success with the product or service they have purchased from you. The goal here is to convert these everyday customers into loyal brand advocates. By providing excellent customer service and by providing the tools necessary for your customers to reach their goals, your customers evolve into another avenue for your brand to reach other prospects. 

This can be achieved in various different ways but predominantly this relates to reviews and referrals for your brand. Here is a list of potential content types your business could leverage here:

• User-Generated Content
• Newsletters
• Customer Support Information
• Exclusive Offers and Discounts 
• Smart Content and Customer Portals
• Product and Service Updates

By demonstrating to your customers that you’re still invested in them, you’ll continue to maintain the long-lasting relationship that you have established over time. This has a shared benefit for both your business and your customers. Your business will enhance its abilities to retain customers as well as encourage repeat purchases and your consumers will get the most out of their purchases with you. 

For more information about how to delight your customers, we highly recommend downloading our Essential Guide to Inbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing at Loop Digital

In the modern market, businesses need to do more to effectively attract, engage and convert their prospects into long-lasting customers. Our specialist team of marketers have lots of experience in planning, strategising and implementing impactful inbound marketing initiatives across various sectors. For more information, call us on 01604 806020 or speak to one of our experts today.

The post How To Change Your Website’s Visitors Into Paying Customers appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

In 2022, consumers will be expecting to see more videos from your brand. Irrespective of what format it’s in, video has become a fundamental part of our everyday lives, from broadcast and out of home to social media and live streaming. Video marketing has done and will continue to dominate the marketing space for years to come.

Video & Inbound Marketing

Video can be used to enhance your inbound marketing strategy across all points of the buyer’s journey. With opportunities to grow your brand awareness, generate new leads, and convert unsure prospects into paying customers.

Inbound marketing is a methodology that focuses on growing your business by creating valuable content and nurturing long-lasting relationships with those that have an interest in interacting with your business. Essentially this content should support your visitors to identify and overcome a problem and video serves as the perfect medium to communicate this information. 

How is Inbound Video Different?

Inbound video isn’t all that different from your standard video marketing materials. Where the key differences are, relate to the messaging within the video itself and the purpose of the video content. 

Video marketing is commonly used to showcase a brand, using glossy animations and footage to sell to users en-masse. Inbound video aims at addressing the problems of the viewer and providing value. The purpose of your videos should be specific and put your end-user at the centre of decision making. 

A great place to start when drawing up initial ideas is to ask yourself: “how will this video empower the viewer?”. As with other tactics within your inbound programme, you need to consider how it addresses the specific challenges of your target market. 

While your other content can also provide value to your visitors, leads, and customers, video content helps engage your audience more effectively through visuals, sounds, and words. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to the 10% who retain it from written text.

Video Marketing & The Buyer’s Journey

As mentioned before, your video marketing strategy can be curated in a way that complements the buyer’s journey. In inbound marketing, this journey is broken down into 3 key stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. 

Awareness

Within the first stage of the buyer’s journey, the user has become aware of a problem. This user is likely researching online for resources to help them diagnose the issue. A video that aligns with a user’s pain points will be valuable and help your content resonate with the viewer. 

Consideration

At this stage, the user has a full understanding and has defined their problem. They will be actively researching sources and an option to solve them. At this point, you can begin to introduce your brand’s offering, whether it be a product or service. Again, it would be key to refer to and empathise with the user’s pain points. These videos should be less about selling your offering but instead demonstrating to viewers how your brand can help them. 

Decision

Arguably the last stage of the buyer’s journey, this is a critical stage of the process that will make or break the close of a sale. Within this penultimate step, you’re looking to reinforce the unique selling points of your brand. Whilst strictly separate from a video strategy, a live webinar exploring your service or product could provide strong value here. Alternatively, a demonstration or video case study will influence your lead closer to a sale after learning the top or key features of your offering. 

In addition to encouraging visitors through the buyer’s journey, video is an incredibly powerful tool for customer empowerment or the ‘delight’ stage of that journey. Tutorial and how-to style videos can help your customers find success with your product or service. These happy customers will then transition into brand advocates, referring new customers to your brand. 

5 Benefits of Inbound Video Marketing

There are a huge variety of benefits and goals that can be achieved by harnessing the full potential of inbound video. Industry surveys have found that 86% of businesses leverage video as a key marketing tool, up 63% over the last 3-years. 

Whilst we have seen a huge uptake in video consumption, it’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily apply to ‘traditional video’. By traditional, we’re referring to Hollywood-style productions that the global giants produce. Whilst these costly assets will always have a place within marketing, we’re talking about the uptake in short-form videos. Revolutionised by channels such as TikTok, these videos are often inexpensive to create and are commonly shorter than traditional videos. 

Aside from the fact that video is a primary channel that has seen continual growth over the years, let’s take a look at some of the other key benefits that inbound video can offer your business.

Increased Conversion Rates

A better user experience enhances the opportunity you have to secure a conversion. By adding video to key web pages, like your landing pages, you’ll add another element that your user can engage with. Videos demand attention from your visitors, influencing them to stay on pages longer, learning more about the product or service being offered. 

A study found that you can increase your conversion rate by 80% by inserting a video into a landing page. Videos are a great way to quickly demonstrate the value of the product and service being offered on that page. And the best part is, you don’t need a huge budget to do it!

Improved Online Visibility & SEO

Inbound video can enhance the performance of your SEO activities, by using associated keywords and target phrases in titles, descriptions, and alongside other written content. With over 46% of product searches beginning on Google, by adding video to your media plan you can capture more of the search real estate. Now that search engine results pages are more comprehensive there is an increased opportunity for your video to appear on page 1. 

Another great thing about inbound videos is their shareability. Because inbound videos are designed to provide value to their viewers, users are more likely to share them with others in their network expanding your reach.  

Higher Return on Investment

As we’ve outlined throughout this blog, inbound video doesn’t need to be a costly venture. In fact, you don’t need to invest in an expensive production; the more authentic and natural your content is, the better chance it has at resonating with your target audience. 

With today’s technology, everyone has the ability to create high-quality video content with minimal resources. You may be fortunate enough to have access to a Hollywood budget, however, you can get the job done at a much smaller expense. Spending less on the production of your content will increase your return on investment, not to mention the fact that 80% of marketers say video has directly increased sales.

Giving The People What They Want

Modern-day consumers are absolutely bombarded by video advertising across all realms of their lives, from mobile to broadcast television. Due to this, we have become more demanding, we know exactly what we want to see and learn about. A recent survey found that 54% of consumers said they’d prefer video content over other formats from a brand or business. 

By creating videos that are educational, easy to understand, and communicate shared interests you’ll generate legitimate interest. This interest then translates to shares, repeat visits, engagement, and other interactions from your users. Not to mention how it can contribute to your brand consumer’s relationships.

Building Trust & Relationships

With inbound video you can effectively humanise your brand, with extremely saturated markets across almost all sectors, a brand with a face can be what sets you apart from your competitors. In addition to this, it gives your business the opportunity to share your company culture, values, and helps reinforce your brand identity. 

A fundamental part of any successful inbound marketing programme relies upon the trust established between your brand and your customers. Without it, your prospects and leads may decide to purchase from elsewhere. By supporting your visitors to overcome their challenges with helpful content like videos, you’ll begin to build trust. 

Loop Digital Inbound Marketing Agency

At Loop Digital we create inbound marketing strategies for a variety of businesses across different markets and niches. We take the time to get to know your business, goals, and target market to ensure we create a solution that will maximise your return on investment. If you’re interested in growing your business with inbound, visit our complete marketing packages or get in touch with our team today.   

The post How To Use Video Marketing Within Your Inbound Marketing Strategy appeared first on Loop Digital Marketing Ltd.

Key Elements for a Successful eBook Marketing Subscription

Provide more value to your readers with our handy digital marketing checklist.

• An Eye-Catching Cover
• Table of Contents
• Engaging Written Content
• Actionable Tips
• Visuals
• Statistics & Data
• Links
• Calls-to-action

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