Top 10 inbound marketing best practices

You may have heard that inbound marketing is the way of the future. At Honest Fox we are proponents of the inbound marketing method. We even wrote The Ultimate Guide to Inbound Marketing. Inbound marketing is the most effective way to produce high-quality opportunities. What is best practice for inbound marketing today you ask?

If you’re unfamiliar with inbound marketing, you can read our supreme guide to inbound marketing. Our guide will give you an in-depth understanding of utilising inbound marketing and how it fits into a digital marketing strategy.

Here are our top 10 best practice inbound marketing efforts:

1. Lock down your SEO Strategy – Optimise

Have you heard the rumours that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is dead? This couldn’t be further from the truth. Best practice SEO is well and still alive. It is one of the major factors for success in inbound marketing. It contributes to creating a website that gets quality organic traffic, across stages of the customer funnel. Is important to succeeding with your lead generation efforts.

Make sure you’re doing your best to optimise your pages. From an on-page SEO perspective, you should be ticking all the boxes for keyword optimisation. Along with internal linking strategies, optimise your pages for both primary and secondary keyword targets.

From an off-page SEO perspective, managing your backlink profile is still important. It is one of the main ranking factors according to the industry. Having a strategy to gain high authority links from industry-relevant websites will speed up your growth rate.

The final area to discuss with SEO is Local SEO optimisation is to ensure that your citations are all aligned across the web. Optimise your Google My Business and do research on rich snippet optimisation. This is an area, when executed correctly can deliver a swag of organic traffic.

2. Produce amazing content, focussed on all stages of the customer funnel

A killer content strategy is prime for success in inbound marketing. It is important to have relevant and valuable content. Across the three stages of the customer funnel.

If you are looking at the top of the funnel. You should look at doing keyword research to deliver a stream of content such as:

• Regular blog posts

• Comprehensive guides

• Tools

• Videos

To target potential customers when they are in the middle stage of the marketing funnel. You are trying to prove your authority and show how your company can help them achieve their goals and why you’re better than the competition. The content you could produce could be:

• Case studies

• Demonstration videos

• How to content (like this article)

When the customer is at the bottom of the funnel. This is about providing content which will help the client make a sale. You’ve got them interested, they’re engaged and it’s time to make a decision. Help them do that by providing content such as:

• Testimonials

• Product and service reviews

• A simple path to buy

3. Create Tools people can use

Tools were part of the previous section but it’s worth calling out their importance. Tools can be a super easy ways to deliver well-qualified leads to your business. Common examples of tools are:

• Pricing calculators – eg. mortgaging repayment, insurance estimates

• Assessment tools – eg. website grader, free online seo review, real estate house value

• Comparison tool – eg. mobile phone data requirements, energy company comparison

• Interactive quizzes – eg. how healthy are you

• Surveys and Polls – eg. voting for who you think will win an election

When you provide something of value you build trust and credibility. Potential clients are more willing to give your their lead details. Think hard about a tool you could create for your business and deliver value to your audience. You’ll find that these tools are high converting, provides useful information and is a lead and assessment qualifier.

4. Video content – Are we still reminding people about this? Yes!

Video continues to be one of the leading content types, yet it is often ignored. The reality is that, yes video content takes time and can be expensive to produce, but investing time and money into video has proven to drive great results. Here are some stats to back that up claim:

• Unbounce has reported. Having a video on your landing pages can increase conversion on these pages by up to 80%.

• Including video in your emails will increase your CTR (click-through rate) by 200-300%. According to Forrester.

• One billion hours of YouTube videos are viewed every day.

Another thing to consider when hosting videos on YouTube, is that YouTube search is the 2nd most used search engine after Google. Allowing people to find you on Youtube makes sense.

5. Make your content in-depth and high value

Gone are the days of smashing out 100’s of content pieces that are shallow and low value to drive traffic. Today, it is all about in-depth and high value. A study by Backlinko which looked at 912 million blog posts, concluded the following findings:

• You are 77.2% more likely to get backlinks from long-form content

• What is long? 2,000 words and diminishing returns from there

6. Data-Driven – Measure at all costs – Tracking – Conversions – KPIs

Make sure you are measuring everything. Data is king when it comes to inbound marketing. How do you measure success? How do you know what is or isn’t working?

It all comes down to making sure that you’re tracking everything. A data driven approach to your inbound process will deliver greater results. Trying a whole bunch of tactics without knowing how well you’re performing, doesn’t make any sense.

Identify what it is you want to measure, here’s our top 5 suggestions:

• Page lands

• Bounce rate

• Pages per visit

• Leads generated

• Actions taken

Use a free tool such as Google Analytics to do monthly reviews of your performance. The key here is to see what works and do more of that until you find something that works better.

7. Use your amazing content to drive leads

You have amazing content? So you’re getting a whole bunch of organic traffic. You’re posting this content on social media and its driving traffic back to your site. People are seeing your videos on Youtube clicking through to your website. These are all good things, but what are you doing to convert this traffic into leads?

This is where optimising your content driving traffic is important. Turning these pages into lead generation machines is key. How many CTA’s (call to actions) do you have on your posts? Have you got any lead generation content? eg. gated downloads, pop-ups, sign up to a newsletter, find out more. Getting traffic to your site is one thing. Turning these visits to potential clients is another thing.

8. Don’t forget about emails – Marketing automation and workflows still deliver results

Email? That’s a bit old school, isn’t it? Yes, it’s old but here’s a fun fact. Email is still the most effective form of inbound marketing for customer acquisition. Yes better than organic and paid search and almost double the effectiveness of social media!

The other major benefit of email marketing is how cost-effective it is when compared to other inbound tactics. On average, every $1 spent on email marketing generates $40 in ROI (return on investment).

With marketing automation you can create personal and customisable messages to your potential clients. By setting workflows (drip campaigns), you can nurture your leads through the customer funnel. Turning them into clients by providing high value, relevant content and tying back into your high-quality content play.

Finally, there is no guesswork with using email marketing. As per the data-driven approach you can see through whatever email platform you use, what is working and what isn't. You can test different subject lines or CTA’s. Then measure actions such as open and click-through rate to see what’s performing best.

9. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) – At all stages of the customer funnel and conversion points

Never underestimate the power of CRO. In point 6 we mentioned the data-driven approach to inbound marketing. CRO is making the most of this data and looking at ways to improve your conversion rate. You can use tools such as Hotjar or CrazyEgg to A/B test and work out what converts best.

Some examples of CRO tests you can perform are:

• Optimising your call to actions (CTA’s) – eg. does the text say ‘buy now’ or ‘click here’.

• CTA visual optimisation – eg. are the links the right colour, button size or colour

• CTA Placements – where are your CTAs located? Can you try in different locations?

• Page Titles and Meta Desc – optimising these to boost your CTR from search

Small numbers at the top of the funnel can become huge numbers at the bottom of the funnel. Every optimisation across the funnel will deliver greater results from the traffic you already have. It’s a no brainer really.

10. Build keyword optimised landing pages

When it comes to the bottom of the funnel people are ready to engage with your business. Creating landing pages which are conversion and keyword optimised are tactics often missed by many companies.

The way people search today indicates their intent. For example, if you are a plumbing business. Building out optimised landing pages to drive traffic on money keywords can be quite lucrative. An example of keywords in this service would be:

• Best plumber in [suburb]

• Hot water plumber in [suburb]

• Plumber repair service in [suburb]

• Blocked drain plumber in [suburb]

Using this tactic to drive organic traffic is effective but still needs to have valuable content and is unique to each page on site. The key focus is lead generation and keyword optimisation for each individual page. It can be a lengthy process to build these pages out but doing research will help you find high volume, low competition keywords. Pick the top 10, create landing pages and start measuring their success.

Honest Fox an inbound marketing agency located in Melbourne Australia. We also specialise in building data-driven websites that deliver results.

Want to level up or implement Inbound Marketing best practices in your business? We're here to help, drop us a line!