Years ago, marketing meant making TV commercials, ads for newspapers and magazines, banner boards, and pamphlets to spread awareness about a particular product or service. All marketing channels were directed towards the general public, as it was almost impossible to target a specific segment of the market.

However, now things have changed and more or less for the better. Digital marketing is the new black in the marketing world, and it has evolved over the years, allowing marketers to promote their products and services to a specific target audience. But with many developments going on and new tools and techniques being introduced every other week, businesses need to step up their game and bring themselves up to speed with the latest trends and tactics.

From social media marketing and retargeting to content strategy and email marketing, you have to consider all online avenues of inbound marketing to drive traffic to your WordPress website. This post provides you with a complete checklist of things that you should consider including in your inbound marketing strategy to gain better visibility and attract more visitors for improving sales and profitability. But first, let’s have a quick look at what inbound marketing is all about.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing refers to producing content that lures potential customers to a website, keeps them hooked, and compels them to keep coming back for more. Unlike the traditional methods of radio, newspaper, and TV ads, shooting emails, and cold calling, this form of marketing puts a great deal of emphasis on the customers instead of the product or service itself.

Generally, inbound marketing is the combination of the following ideas:

• Content Creation: The foremost aspect of inbound marketing is the creation of content that attracts potential customers by providing solutions to their problems, and encouraging them to share it with others who may also benefit from their offerings.
• Lifecycle Marketing: The best case would be that your targeted leads become captivated with your content and eagerly spread the word around about your business. However, such leads just don’t grow from the ground. Each of the leads you attract through your content essentially starts off as a stranger. Your goal should be to convert these leads into regular visitors, who will eventually become your customer, and ultimately a promoter.
• Personalization: The most important part of content creation is that it should “speak” to your potential customers. Over time, you will develop a better understanding of their specific needs and wants, which will enable you to refine your content.
• Multi-Channel: Inbound marketing involves grabbing consumers’ attention on not just a single platform – you need to approach your customers from where they are. This means that you need to publish your content in places where your customers are most comfortable in interacting with your business.
• Integration: Inbound marketing is like a continuous improvement process – you create content, share it on different online channels, analyze its performance, and then improve it to better cater to your customers’ specific needs. You need to seamlessly integrate everything together and publish the right content at the right time in the right place for the best possible results.

In a nutshell, the basic idea behind the inbound marketing technique is to craft appealing content that grabs the attention of your target audience. In other words, the kind of content that enables your potential clients to solve their problems addresses their needs and answers their questions. Then share this content on platforms where most of your target audience likes to spend their time to provide maximum exposure.

The Inbound Marketing Checklist You Need for your Business

Whether you are a startup or an established group of companies, focusing time and resources on running a full-fledged inbound marketing campaign will prove to be beneficial for all. Here is the ultimate inbound marketing checklist you have been waiting for. Read on!

• You must first fully understand your business goals for the month, quarter, and year.
• You need to calculate estimated figures for several things, such as close rates, average revenue, and profit per client, website traffic per month, and leads per month to support your marketing strategy.
• You must have a clear idea of your primary target market, and take time out to create a persona for your audience.
• You should evaluate the pain points of your target market that can be resolved with your products or services
• You need to integrate a unique selling point in your products or services that make them stand out from the competition.
• You need to work on creating ways to tell your potential customers a story about what makes your business the best – make sure they are easily relatable.
• Find out all the places where your target audience loves to hang out, i.e., the social media networks they use, the website they visit, what kind of blogs they are into, the newsletters they have subscribed to, and others.
• You have to create content for your target audience to understand your business and how it can help them with their problems through different kinds of digital media, such as blogs, videos, infographics, webinars, assessment tools, and others.
• Develop a Low Risk and Direct Business Offers that can assist your potential customers through the decision-making process.
• You should create a blog, and update it regularly with interesting content relating to your business.
• Dedicate time to research and pick out 20 keywords most relevant to your business, and strategically spread them throughout the different sections of your website. A word of caution: steer clear from black hat practices.
• Integrate the keywords into the content of your website, and create landing pages that are targeted toward helping the client make the purchasing decisions.
• Start an email campaign and send highly actionable emails to your prospects, clients, partners, and other stakeholders on at least a monthly basis.
• Start a lead nurturing campaign for prospective customers who show interest in your business after visiting your website.

With this, you have fully rolled out your inbound marketing campaign. Now for the final touches:

• Integrate your inbound marketing campaign in your sales and services process, allowing you to give the same treatment to your prospective clients throughout your marketing and sales funnel.
• Establish a lead generation goal for every month and use the analytical tools to gauge your performance of your inbound marketing strategy.
• Based on the data, review your performance, make improvements and introduce new things, especially the ones that are trending, to get the best possible results.

Being a business owner, you must have loads of responsibilities on your shoulders, which can take marketing to a lower rank on your priority list.  But with inbound marketing, you can easily attract new customers and keep the existing ones loyal by using different forms of content we have discussed in this post. Remember, the secret to a successful inbound marketing campaign is to create content that attracts your potential customers and compels them to share it with other users at the right time on platforms they like to use.