There are certain doubts about what inbound marketing is and what outbound marketing is about the terms that we might think are antagonistic but may not be, since there are some strategies that can be outbound and inbound marketing. Would you like to meet them?
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing always is a focus and objective the user and seeks to attract it non-invasively through means that provide quality to the user and for this we usually use mainly two strategies;
Content Marketing: We are going to create content that gives a value response to user demand.
Social Media Marketing: We will try to attract a community of people who follow us because they like the information we share and what we communicate.
What is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is known mainly as traditional advertising, as well as the PPC or “Pay per Click,” which try to show services or products to the user that they have not explicitly requested, therefore it is a more invasive mechanism.
How to Benefit from Inbound Marketing
1. Increase The Number of Qualified Leads
It is one of the main objectives since we need to attract qualified traffic to the top of the funnel or also known as Top Funnel, to convert it into qualified leads.
2. Reach The Relevant Audience
Do not lose sight of the fact that this strategy seeks to design a user profile very well to attract, to achieve a better result, and using the least possible investment.
3. Increase Income That Comes From Current Customers
We not only seek to attract and convert new leads into customers but also to retain and encourage our customers to continue buying our services and products.
4. Reduce The Cost of Lead Acquisition
This is a great challenge; we have different channels of traffic acquisition as they are; organic, social, referral, and PPC, and we always try to get the lowest possible cost per lead.
Depending on the campaign we carry out, one channel or another will work better for us, but due to my personal experience in the majority of projects that I have made the lowest cost per click I have always achieved with Facebook ads.
5. Demonstrate the ROI of Marketing Actions
This is easy to demonstrate because we are going to track all the URLs and campaigns that we carry out to know the conversions in leads that come from each channel and thus be able to calculate our ROI accurately.
How to Apply Inbound Marketing to a Blog?
Part of the base that getting traffic is not a goal for a Blog but a means to achieve it, we have to convert the traffic we receive into qualified leads, and these leads into customers, and so we can generate revenue with our blog but this how we get it.
To achieve this, you will need to have one or more lead magnet in your blog, but what is this from the lead magnet.
What is the Lead Magnet?
Lead Magnet is a free content of excellent quality that you offer in your blog in exchange for the visitor to leave their data, mainly their name and email.
Benefits of Lead Magnet
- It helps you get potential customers of your brand.
- It is easy and cheap to launch.
- Helps us make our brand known more quickly online
Lead Magnet Examples
Two lead magnets that work very well are a free course and a free ebook, but I will explain it better with real examples that I think maybe of better use to get leads with your blog.
Curso 365 Mkt
A free digital marketing course that has exceeded all initial estimates since it exceeds 19,000 leads and will soon exceed 20,000 students.
The impact created by the course has been so significant that its name has become a keyword that appears in any keyword analysis tool such as SEMrush, Keyword Tool IO, Xavi, etc.
A course that lasts 365 days and is taught by 44 teachers from 8 different countries has aroused high expectations for tens of thousands of people around the world.
There is the possibility of registering a specific module for the entire course; in this way, a list of thoroughly segmented leads is achieved.
Free Basic SEO Ebook
An ebook that already exceeds 6,000 downloads and has worked very well to obtain quality leads from people interested in learning the essential aspects of web positioning.
A few days ago what I have done has been to make a content upgrade to the posts with more traffic, and I have added a button to the different ebooks or lead magnet, to increase the conversion of said traffic and the statistics are impressive as you can see in the Image capture a little below.
The button that has been added in each of these articles is similar to the one I put below.
As you can see, it is a large and very striking button so that nobody will go unnoticed.
When the user clicks check what happens, without leaving the page, a data collection page appears so that the user can download the ebook, notice that the page is entirely personalized and visually attractive, and where only two data are requested; the name (without surnames) and your email.
We know that from the third field, the conversion rate starts to plummet, so keep that in mind.
Surely you will be wondering what tools I am using to capture leads in the blog, so I am going to talk about them now.
Best Tools to Increase Leads for Your Blog
Sumome
Until recently, Sumome was my primary lead capture tool of my blog, and with which I have obtained more than 40,000 subscribers.
But the conversion rate was around 5 and 6%, and I decided to increase the conversion rate and decided to switch to a payment tool called Thrive Leads, which also has many more advanced features to capture leads.
However, I still recommend Sumome because it is not only a lead capture tool but also a powerful tool to achieve greater social integration of the blog, attract more social traffic, etc.
I explain everything in this detailed guide about Sumome.
Thrive Leads
With Thrive Leads, you can do real wonders to get more subscribers for your blog; you can even try the subscription button with a different color to analyze which color is best converted.
In addition to capturing leads, we can use it to drive traffic to a post or product that we are promoting or, for example, I am using it to ask my readers to lend me a hand with their vote in the 2016 Bitácoras Awards.
This is the image I am using;
And it is working much better than I thought because it looks at how the visit chart had triggered when I made this change.
So thank you very much to all the people who have supported me in the 2016 Bitácoras Awards, and if you have not already done so, you are still in time to help me be one of the finalists this year.
You have to click on this URL http://bit.ly/bitacoras2016, then log in with your Facebook and Twitter account, and click on the vote button, which you will find at the bottom left of the page, you will have to scroll a lot down to see the vote button.
I recommend this guide by Thrive Leads by Javier Elices in the Monetized Blog.
Mailrelay
It is the tool I use to create autoresponders, to create segmented lists, and to send emails to subscribers.
The truth is that I am thrilled because I am working very well, and in addition to getting a lot of traffic to the blog (thousands of visits every time I send an email), I also manage to generate income.
I recommend this Mailrelay guide from my friend Antonio Cambronero from Blogpocket.
Channels to Attract Traffic to The Top Funnel
1. Organic
One of the primary and most potent sources of traffic acquisition for a Blog or a web page on the Internet, but we mustn’t depend so much on this channel because if in case we have a penalty and lose traffic from the Google search engine we must have other avenues that maintain the constant arrival of that qualified traffic we are looking for.
2. Social
If we know how to apply an excellent Social Media strategy, we can attract a large number of visits from Social Networks.
3. Referred
We need to attract traffic from other blogs, and the easiest and most used way to get it is by publishing a guest article on that blog.
4. Email
Through this channel, we can get thousands of visits a week to our blog.
5. PPC
A priori, we can think that pay per click is just an outbound strategy, but we can also use it in a blog as an inbound marketing strategy, for example, to use it for an ebook or a course.
The best-known forms of PPC are:
- Facebook Ads.
- Twitter Ads.
- LinkedIn Ads.
- Adwords.
- Outbrain.
6. Webinar
Do you know what you should keep in mind to improve your Inbound Marketing strategy?
Competing in the digital environment is very complicated. Brands struggle daily to attract the attention of their consumers, and consumers, meanwhile, are saturated with advertising impacts.
The key? Not to start competing without having analyzed in-depth the success stories and failures, without having the necessary knowledge and without having drawn up our marketing plan.
I invite you to this webinar where you will discover how to adequately define and combine strategy and tactics to optimize the available resources with ten essential keys that will make your marketing plan a success.
Conclusions
Now you know several ways to apply inbound marketing to your blog and allow you to get qualified leads and customers.
You already know the most effective channels to attract traffic to lead magnet and PPC channels that you can use as an inbound strategy.
Remember that you have to track each of these campaigns to be able to measure the cost per lead accurately and thus be able to calculate the ROI.
Do you apply inbound marketing to your blog?
What is your favorite lead magnet?
Did you like this post? Share your thoughts with us via comments!
