Nick RhoadesEvery blog post or email offers the chance to generate leads. Each channel offers a chance to produce content that can educate, entertain, or inform your audience. However, with the ever-changing marketing landscape, it can be difficult to distinguish between trends that are just a passing breeze and ones that are truly here to stay.
That’s why we recorded the top three inbound marketing trends we think are designed to last and how you can implement them.
3 Fall Trends for Inbound Marketing
1. Create Evergreen Content
One of the most important inbound marketing trends atop the mountain of successful marketing is the creation of timeless, valuable content.
While this is not exactly a new trend, it should be treated as such; creating evergreen content, whether through writing brand-new content or optimizing existing content, will continuously provide value to your reader!
Note: Evergreen material is designed to have a long shelf life and continuing value, rather than current event-focused.
Dusting Off Old Content AKA Optimizing It
While it would be convenient just to write content then set it and forget it, information and links become outdated or updated. By updating your content to match the most recent search engine optimization (SEO) best practices and instilling it with the most value and relevance to your readers, you can restore your existing content to be as good as new. If you need help doing this, we have the perfect guide for repurposing content just for you.
2. Automated Tools
The tools and services you provide to boost customer satisfaction and meet expectations directly impact your brand. With so many holidays in the fall and winter, your team might not be able to handle the volume of responding manually to each individual request, which is why we love automated tools!
The bottom line is this: you must be able to provide your customers with quick answers to their questions, even if you only sell services, or they may consider a different alternative. Not ideal, but don’t worry; here’s the part where we help you out to ensure that doesn’t happen!
A good starting point we recommend is using automated tools. Automated tools are a great inbound marketing tool that can meet customer expectations and delight them, but also streamline your operations!
Set the Stage with a Clean CRM
A clean CRM means better data to power your marketing automation and content marketing strategy! For example, with HubSpot, you can create efficient workflows for your staff and customers who work behind the scenes to help fill in the gaps in your team! You can interact with your clients in this way without having to constantly do the work yourself or with your team. This includes automating workflows and email marketing.
HubSpot also allows you to:
- Establish workflow enrollment triggers
- Automatically create records
- Assign leads to your sales team
- And so much more!
Chatbots
Chatbots are great for assisting with communication and customer support. The market for implementing chatbots is projected to hit $1.25 billion in 2025 and continue to increase beyond that — a good indicator that chatbots are on the up and up from a functionality and helpfulness perspective.
Consider including a chat option on your website that’s properly designed to serve as the first touchpoint of communication. Just ensure user intent is considered while configuring your automatic answers to provide the most helpful responses and take the burden off your customer support team!
For example, with HubSpot’s “ChatSpot” tool, you can connect all your data in your CRM to a chatbot. This allows you to personalize your chatbots per contact and provide valuable information to them based on their existing data.
3. Implement Video Content
Today, short video clips are extremely popular across all age groups and demographics, especially on social media channels like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. (In fact, did you know that LinkedIn is decommissioning some of its static post functionality? Videos are going to be more and more important there!)
No matter what business you're in, if you don't include video platforms in your 2024 inbound marketing plan, you'll be missing out capturing the attention of a significant chunk of your target audience.
Some ideas for short videos to get you started are:
- Challenges your target audience may face
- General and helpful tips and tricks relevant to your audience
- Quick Statistics
- How your product/service differ from competitors
- Testimonials/reviews and how your product/service can help your target audience
- Case studies and industry reports for your field
- Product/service demonstration
- Day in the life of a worker at your company
- A quick tour of your company
Using videos to communicate valuable content can:
- Get and keep your audience's attention
- Deliver more information in a short amount of time than text-based content
- Give you the chance to flex your creativity and brand messaging
When positioned perfectly in your inbound marketing strategy, these are the perfect engagements to:
- Boost conversions and sales
- Build trust with your audience
- Grow your list of leads
- Reach a wider audience via social media
- Meet audiences where they truly are, which is from their mobile device
Implementing videos is a marketing strategy that you cannot afford to miss! Consider taking your business to the aforementioned social platforms to get started.
Tip: Use your views and engagement rates on social media to help gauge where your audience is at rather than spreading your business too thin across too many platforms! You can also utilize insights and tools on these platforms to help give you more direction.
Refining Your Marketing Strategy in 2024 and Beyond
As you can see, inbound marketing trends such as creating organic, valuable content, distilling and relaying information conveniently via videos, and leveraging automated tools to boost your operations are all vital to thriving in a competitive landscape.
What if we told you there is so much more you can add to your marketing efforts to maximize your ROI, cultivate great client relationships, and take your business to the next level? Well, it’s true!
Check out our Content Marketing Ideas Cheatsheet to help elevate your marketing efforts at every stage of the buyer’s journey!
