Inbound Marketing for Conversions
Inbound content marketing is a subset of digital marketing, it is one of the main conversion campaigns that use gated and ungated content. In digital marketing, prolific high-value content creation is the key to explosive success, all it requires is experience, creativity, and consistency.
Content Distribution
The pathway of a content marketing campaign goes through a standardized funnel and has become a norm. The distribution pattern usually follows a fixed approach using blogs, articles, social media platforms, and content publishing sites. Email messaging is also associated with marketing, and is a powerful medium to distribute posts, highlight reviews, testimonials, newsletters, propaganda, and personalized requests. Remember in the case of email messaging always keep an option to unsubscribe to prevent the message from being considered a cold call, spam, or undesired.
Focus on Target Audience
The campaign begins with creating a potentially convertible audience profile or target audience. For this, you should know your brand, product, or service well. Who will buy your products or become a client? Is engagement with the right persona possible?
Targeting a broad audience profile may be okay in the first phase, but all it does is assimilate profiles into bits and pieces that could be grouped as the target audience. This will also increase expenses when marketing using expensive social media ad platforms.
All communications in digital marketing lead to the discovery of profiles that could form an audience base in marketing campaigns online. Creating trust with the prospective audience is a great way of cementing the relationship with potential customers. This is a good way of creating affinity with your brand, a wide range of products, and service.
Search Engine Marketing is paid campaigns like organic efforts, and the advertisement mechanism directs ads to the right target audience on dedicated platforms automatically for the marketers. But this is not the case with organic inbound marketing campaigns the strategy is initiated from ground zero.
Gated Vs Ungated Content
Lets us first understand gated and ungated content. Gated content always requires customer details before they become eligible for reading. The gated content is often associated with a lead capture form that requires information regarding location, email address, and other demographic details. Gated content may be associated with a low-key questionnaire. This is one way of collecting additional profiles as a target audience or for inbound marketing. Most often the invitation is due to a past interest or query from the person.
Gated content examples:
- Case Studies
- Testimonials
- Reviews
- White Papers
- Market Research Reports
- Webinars
- eBooks
- LinkedIn Lead Generation Form
In the case of ungated content, there are no prerequisites. The reader does not have to fill out any form or subscribe, the common examples are blogs, articles, videos, ebooks, and case studies without any conditions. Ungated content is profusely used throughout the inbound campaign as they are easy to distribute, easily accessible, and saturates the web. Usually, gated content is used at the end of the content funnel whence awareness has led to consideration after consistent engagement and the audience is ready to take the plunge.
Power of Customer Reviews & Testimonials
Like some gated content customers or prospective clients have immense faith in testimonials and reviews if they are from a trusted source. Most of the product reviews and testimonials on websites and popular review sites are neglected as their authenticity is in doubt. But this is not the case with eCommerce sites, social media comments that act as reviews, and some well-known portals like TripAdvisor for example where reviews are posted by genuine travelers. As a matter of fact, professional review sites are proliferating the world wide web many of which have gained traction with prospective clients, subscribers, or customers.
Facilitating Goal Conversion
Customers are more likely to be convinced regarding products and services whence they receive a referral from friends and relatives. This is the benefit of creating extensive awareness for opinion formation. Old businesses and professionals already have an impressive base of past customers or clients who can make the word go around if all goes well with them. There has to be a buzz around a product or service or the brand that encompasses them. Marketers emulate the power of referral on online platforms during organic inbound content marketing campaigns. They consistently engage customers through their journey for positive solutions. A touch point that creates awareness leads to greater engagement with the lead and through gated content that convinces the final action can take place. This is the goal conversion moment during the customer journey online.
