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An In-Depth Look at the Inbound Marketing Funnel

Date published: November 07, 2012
Last updated: November 7, 2012

A lot of people say they do "Inbound Marketing," but how many marketers actually approach their campaigns with a defined strategy? A good way to get started is to first understand the anatomy of an inbound marketing campaign, what your sales funnel looks like, and where different kinds of content fit into that funnel. Here are three ways to contribute to your inbound marketing funnel by creating content.

1. Review Trends in Your Niche

Trends, whether they are social or business-related, are a key driver of search intent and inbound marketing. It's important to stay well-informed on current news in your niche, and to understand the social response to those trends. Look beyond the obvious trend-setters, like news and Twitter hashtags. For example, analytics tools such as Moz, use data to show the dynamics of keyword trends over time. By understanding this, it's simply much easier to predict how your content will do over time. Now, this is not to say you should write a blogpost about every single current trend. Utilize the trends in your niche to create content.

2. Create Brand Trust

When creating content that converts, relate to your audience by taking trend details into consideration, answering a question, and drawing people to your brand as a whole. Additionally, it makes a world of difference to also explain how your audience plays a role in your brand, as well as offering solutions they didn't know they needed. If there's a product or service you offer, that's great! You can mention it in your blogposts, create a feature blogpost on it, or you can gently direct your audience to your website's "About" or "Services" pages. It's better to relate to your target audience than to be overly-promotional. Trust takes time.

3. Tailor Content to Your Audience

Building online brand trust is an awesome inbound marketing tool, but stop and think about something -- connection. Relating to your audience through trends and creating brand trust is not enough. It's also about really connecting to your audience. What is your brand's mission? Who is going to search for the keywords in your content? What is their search intent? Asking questions like these can help you better understand your target audience. After all, you want to tailor your content to fit the needs of the target audience you're trying to attract.

A complete and robust inbound marketing campaign consists of high-quality content marketing, CRO, marketing automation, a CRM and re-marketing. When your content is tailored to prospects in different stages of the funnel, you can move them through to conversion quickly and effortlessly!

Sources:

  • SEOmoz.org/blog
  • HubSpot.com
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