Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies

Successful inbound marketing depends on your ability to engage your leads and to nurture them through their buyer’s journeys. However, you’re going to have to attract leads first. Because technology keeps evolving and the way that people use the Internet keeps changing, it’s vital that you continuously update your inbound marketing strategies so that you can continue to attract high-quality leads. With that in mind, the following are a few inbound marketing strategies you should consider implementing this year:

1. Focus On Optimizing Your Content For Featured Snippets

Although you can still attract a lot of high-quality leads by ranking first through third on Google’s SERP, it’s no longer the first thing that users see. Instead, the first thing that appears on Google’s SERP is their featured snippets. Websites listed in featured snippets tend to get a boost in organic traffic since searches often click on the website links listed on the snippets.

Learn More about Google’s SERPs

2. Develop Relationships With Micro-Influencers

Social media influencers have massive followings. This means that if they highlight your brand on their channels, it could significantly increase your company’s exposure. However, such social media influencers tend to have broad audiences, which means many of their followers may not fall within your target audience. On top of that, it can be difficult for a small to a mid-sized company to get the attention of such an influencer, much less to convince them to promote your business.

Instead, you should consider finding micro-influencers. These are influencers with smaller audiences that focus on more niche subjects. You’ll have a better chance of building a relationship with a micro-influencer — and their audience will probably have greater overlap with your target audience as well.

3. Create Short Video Content

Although long-form video content is certainly effective, it tends to work better as an engagement tool rather than an attraction tool. Short-form video content does really well on social media especially. People are more likely to watch through the entire video and share it with others on their social channels if it’s on the shorter side. Social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok also focus on short video content, and those sites have skyrocketed in popularity over the years.

4. Consider Using Progressive Forms

Potential leads are often discouraged from converting through opt-in forms if there are too many questions.  If they feel like the offer isn’t worth the information they have to give up, they’ll just leave your site without converting. You can solve this issue by using progressive forms. Progressive forms require that leads fill out a new form every time they download a new resource instead of asking for one form to be filled out upfront. The advantage of doing this is that you can just ask for a couple of details each time so that it doesn’t feel like they’re providing that much information to you.

5. Optimize For Voice Search

Voice assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, have drastically increased the number of voice searches performed over the past few years. While text-based searches are still the most popular way to perform a search online, voice searches continue to increase. In 2019, a third of the U.S. population used voice search. As such, you may want to begin optimizing for voice search. You can do this by adding a voice search snippet to your blog posts. You can also begin writing content in a more direct and conversational way.

6. Optimize Your Website For Mobile Use

There are now billions of smartphone users in the world today. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile use, it’s going to hurt your search rankings. Additionally, mobile users who do stumble onto your site are going to have all kinds of trouble navigating it. This is because a site not optimized for mobile use won’t display correctly on smaller screen sizes.

7. Adjust Your Content Strategy Around The Use Of Clusters

Topic clusters are a more organized way to create content. Essentially, you create a pillar page on a certain topic, then create separate pages (such as blog posts) that cover related subtopics. These pages are then all linked to your pillar page, creating a cluster of content. The reason this is so effective is that it leads to a higher number of internal links. As such, visitors have an easier time navigating through relevant content, while search engines have an easier time identifying context, which can lead to boosted rankings and more organic traffic.

Finding new ways to attract your target audience is critical to your inbound marketing efforts. Because people change the ways that they use the web as they adapt to new technology, it’s important that you continually revisit your inbound strategies. As such, consider implementing some of these inbound marketing strategies to attract new leads in 2021.