Remington Begg
The inbound methodology has quite a few key aspects to it, including doing your research to develop your buyer personas and then creating a strategy for content creation to reach those potential buyers. As people fill out forms and give their contact information on your website, those are turned into Leads and evaluated as to whether they have the real potential to be customers. As these people make the decision to purchase and move to become customers, you then delight them in a way that turns them into evangelists and repeat buyers.
That quick breakdown of the stages and steps of inbound marketing is a best case scenario that only happens when everything is setup and working properly. All too often, people try to implement their strategy without having all of the necessary basics beforehand. These include:
#1 SEO Fundamentals
Before any kind of content strategy can be implemented onto your website, you need to make sure you’ve done all you can to optimize it for Google rankings. That includes the “on page” elements, like your page titles. Basic SEO best practices tell us we need to optimize your title tags. If you’re homepage’s title tag starts with “Home,” (for example “Home | Logan & Co”) that’s an easy one to start with. You are wasting valuable SEO real estate by having “Home” listed first and you can get a quick organic traffic boost by simply replacing it with your company’s most important target keyword. To keep the example from above, a better choice would be “Fort Myers Graphic Design | Logan & Co”
#2 Removed Noindex/nofollow Meta Tags
When a site is being developed, web developers often use a special meta tag called “noindex / nofollow” to make sure that while the site is being worked on, it doesn’t get found and indexed by Google. Sometimes though, web developers accidentally leave these tags behind when they launch the site. The unfortunate result is that the company has a great new website that can’t be found in Google because it’s not being indexed. Luckily, a quick check can tell you if your website has any of these tags left in.
#3 Working Links
Broken links can happen to the best of us. It could be as simple as a typo or copy + pasting the wrong thing. If your website is old, it may be linking, both internally and externally, to pages that no longer exist. User experience on your website is a huge part of establishing yourself as an industry leader and building the trust required to convince someone to make a purchase, and leading someone to click on a broken link totally undermines that.
#4 The Ability to Check Performance
Meeting or missing of your marketing goals should be based on data, not gut feelings. In order to know how much your new inbound strategy is helping you out, you have to first establish some “before” numbers. Not having marketing automation software, like HubSpot, on your site is one thing; it’s another not to even have Google Analytics installed. You must have a way to track and analyze your site’s performance before you move forward.
#5 Deliverables
As mentioned before, collecting contact information is the first step toward gathering Leads and deciding who to contact. In order to give your website visitors a reason to leave their information in your forms, you need to give them something they want in return. These are called “deliverables.” It is often something like an eBook or white paper, but it can be a free trial as well. Without a deliverable to give your website and blog viewers, your Lead Scoring won’t be able to get off the ground. The more valuable the deliverable, the more Leads it will bring in.
#6 Call-to-Action Buttons
And how do people get these deliverables? With Call-to-Action buttons (CTAs)! One of the most common misunderstandings in inbound marketing is to assume people know what to do and forget the call to action. There should be some type of CTA to tell the reader what to do next, preferably tied to what is contextually relevant. Your viewers need clear, actionable verbs like “ Download” or “Subscribe” so they can fully commit to the next step. There’s a lot of helpful tips on exactly where you should place your CTA and what they should look like explained here, but making sure you have them built out and ready to move people along is the key.
There you have it: six things you need to make sure you have covered before you can begin rocking the internet with your remarkable content. If you think you have those taken care of or you just want more information about inbound marketing, download our free eBook The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing to more detailed information.
