By Pete Winter

Inbound marketing: How it Works? (What is Inbound Marketing Part 2)

online media channels Inbound marketing combines content marketing, social media and marketing automation to create a complete process and strategy for building audiences and generating leads. It does this through:

Content marketing

This is about creating and designing content that people want, based on demand. The content could be white papers, eguides, webcasts, mobile apps, animations and video. Whatever format it’s in, the essential thing is for it to be of a high enough quality to build your profile as a trusted source of information. The other essential thing is to ensure that you have a regular flow of this high quality content on your website and your online profiles to keep the visitors and search engines coming back for more.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimisation is a natural – and very important – part of online marketing. It enables you to analyse and identify the online demand for your product or service. Once you understand the demand by seeing what people are actively looking for, you know which keywords to optimise your content for. By consistently optimising all the content you’re producing, you can boost your search engine rankings and drive more targeted (and more potentially profitable) traffic to your website.

Online marketing

Online ‘hubs’ are where people go to find information and get up to date with issues in their industry. This type of resource may be a website, a blog, a forum, an industry publication, or a community created through social media. These are your potential distribution hubs. So send out your content to these sources and they’ll help drive traffic to your website. Your content could be: press releases publish in key industry publications and websites, discussions, polls and surveys on communities that your target audience use.

Lead nurturing and marketing automation

Lead nurturing and marketing automation allow you to match your content with the specific stage your potential buyer is at, whether that’s “It’s all new to me, but I’m interested.”, “This sounds like something useful.” or “I’m not sure it’s for me at all, but I wanted some free information.”…Whatever stage it is, your website should provide content that is relevant to the audience you have generated.

Depending on the stage your visitor is at, this could be content that gives them an overview of a specific topic, an update on an industry issue or an invitation to an online community. Marketing automation allows you to deliver the right type of content to actively nurture visitors into leads and leads into customers.

Applying technology

To ensuring that inbound marketing works effectively and consistently, you need to make it a strategy that is both repeatable and transparent. You can achieve this by using technology platforms that actually allow you to see, in all your content, what people like most and what drives the highest number of leads and sales. This technology also lets you view which channels are the most effective in bringing traffic to your website – and which traffic turns into leads and sales.