Tag Archives: Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing with my content marketing and consulting

Inbound marketing with my content marketing and consulting services will help you connect with potential customers and clients through engaging content. Streamline your online content publishing and distribution and improve your online and off-line sales in record time. With inbound marketing through my content marketing and consulting services you will

  • Increase your website traffic from search engines, blogging and social networking websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus
  • Optimize your conversion rate through compelling and convincing content on your homepage and other business pages
  • Get measurable results in your B2B and B2C marketing efforts
  • Generate more leads through e-mail marketing and blog publishing
  • Increase brand loyalty by continuously providing high-value content to your target audience through the media channels they prefer, and in a language they relate with

Encourage people to come to your website on their own instead of interrupting them and consequently, annoying them, possibly, for ever. Conventional advertising hardly works these days. It’s been shoved down people’s throats for decades now and everybody is fedup of it whether it is on the Internet or the conventional media such as TV and print.

People don’t like to be interrupted while they are engaged in their favorite activities such as reading articles, watching videos or interacting on their preferred social networking websites. They want to contact you when THEY want to contact you. They don’t want to hear from you unless they need your products and services.

The great thing about content marketing is that you can create a presence that can help people find you for the right reason, when they actually need you. Inbound marketing will be attracting two types of people to your website:

  • People who know you and the business you do
  • People who are looking for a service or a product that you can offer but right now they don’t know that you do

My content marketing and consulting services can help you attract both types of people by creating a presence that not only expands your reach, but also makes people trust you and respect you. For this to happen you not only need high-quality content you also need it with uninterrupted regularity. On your own it might be difficult for you to figure out what sort of content you should publish and which channels you should use to distribute your content so that it reaches the right people, or, the right people can easily find it.

Inbound marketing cannot be leveraged by merely publishing blog posts and articles under your website as well as article directories (that no longer seem to work after Penguin and Panda updates). For it to be effective, people should be easily able to find you and for that to happen you need right content at right places, and in case of a tough competition, on a regular basis.

Streamlining content publishing and distribution can be a challenging job without understanding your audience. You need to know

  • What they’re looking for
  • What catches their imagination
  • What channels they use in order to find the information they are looking for – search engines, blogs, news websites for social media and social networking services
  • What language they use while searching for, and talking about, your product or service

Why inbound marketing?

Market these days is driven by conversations. Due to various social networking websites, and even blogs, instead of believing in the messages telecast through various advertising networks, people tend to believe in what other people say. They talk to each other, they seek advice and they compare advantages and disadvantages before purchasing a particular product or service. They trust their friends, family members and colleagues more than they trust advertising and marketing professionals. They want to decide on their own rather than being told what to buy, and this is the greatest shift the world has witnessed in the field of business.

The best way of building such type of trust is bringing people to your website again and again and creating an environment where people come to your website on their own, knowing quite well why they are coming. But if people, right now, don’t come to your website to buy your products and services repeatedly and you need to bring them back multiple times (a sale rarely happens on the first visit) in order to convert them into paying customers and clients, what do you do? You spread your content on the Internet in various formats and then provide high-quality information on your own website when they come to you.

A positive sense of familiarity is the key component of inbound marketing. Provide timely and valuable content so that people begin to respect you, and create an environment that encourages two-way communication between you and your prospective customers and clients. The more they interact with you, the more they are exposed to your content, the more they come across your content on their friends’ timelines, the more they promote your content on their own timelines, the more they are able to trust you.

This can be achieved via targeted content marketing. Contact me to know how my consulting services can help you in this regard.

What is content marketing?

The main purpose of content marketing is to provide relevant information to your target audience. It’s a marketing “technique” that uses relevant and high-quality content to continuously engage a clearly defined set of people (your target audience/customers/clients). It focuses on acquiring new customers and clients without selling. It uses the concept of inbound marketing in which people come to you to access your content rather than you streaming your promotional and sales messages.

Content marketing is totally unobtrusive because although you use various means to broadcast your content (search engine optimization and social media/networking updates) it’s up to the recipients when and how they want to access your content. Unlike conventional advertising and marketing they don’t need to be interrupted while they are reading or watching something. They either search for your content, or they come across it while looking for something similar. Since they come across your content on their own, they are more receptive and understanding.

Content marketing is an ongoing activity. You cannot define it as a “package” although when you are professionally engaging content writers they need to define their work according to the effort involved and payment expected. Other than that, you continuously publish new content, streamline existing content and use various channels to distribute your content.

The “marketing” part here doesn’t involve using ads to promote your content. It simply means attracting people to your website or blog using high quality content as bait. This content can exist in any format – text, video, audio, images, animations, infographics, PDFs or slides – and it depends on the preference of your target audience. The basic components of a well-defined content marketing strategy are:

  • Understand your audience
  • Create and publish content according to that understanding, in preferred formats
  • Distribute that content using formats and channels preferred by your target audience

Why content marketing

Around 80% business decision-makers like to receive company information in the form of articles rather than advertisements (source). Whether it’s traditional media (television, for example) or the Internet people are constantly devising ways to either block advertisements and promotional campaigns or avoid them. For instance, many households these days like to record their television programs using their set-top boxes and later on when they are watching them, they fast-forward the advertisements. Nobody in his or her right mind tolerates advertisements unless something really compelling is being shown.

The same is with the Internet. For example using Pocket you can save the stripped-down version of articles and news so that you can later on read them without sidebars and advertisements. Almost everybody these days uses pop-up blockers. So you can easily see, given a choice, nobody wants to see advertisements and promotional material.

Well-written content on the other hand, is eagerly received. Suppose you are looking for a website content writer for your business. Whom would you hire, someone who shares lots of content writing information with you or someone you simply stumble upon via an advertisement? Of course you can argue that someone advertising (that is, spending money) must be confident enough to earn back that money and hence, must be a competent content writer but if he or she cannot be found without an advertisement, how he or she is going to help you increase your content visibility? If you want to advertise, why do you need content at all?

Via content marketing you create evangelists and brand ambassadors for your business because people eagerly share good content with each other. Suppose I write an excellent blog post on content writing and 20 people share it on their Facebook timelines. This is an endorsement. When people share your link they do it voluntarily and it means they really like what you have published. You spent, maybe, two hours creating a quality article or blog post and people go on sharing it for days, months, and provided you update it, even for years.

Another benefit of content marketing is that the benefit that you derive is not proportional to the money you have to spend. An advertisement in the newspaper lasts only for that particular day. Each time you run advertisements on TV, you have to pay for that time. If you advertise on the Internet you have to pay for impressions and clicks. Well-written articles and blog posts on the other hand give you non-stop traffic. Spend $50 on a blog post; whether it gets one click via search engines or another website, or 50,000 clicks, you just spent those $50.

Content Marketing and Consulting Services

The advertising and marketing landscape is changing fast, and content marketing and consulting (telling people what type of content to publish to target what type of audience) is playing a big part in this. According to this source 61% consumers are more likely to buy from businesses who regularly publish useful, informative content. Businesses all over the world are realizing that their audiences don’t appreciate push marketing; what they want is constant engagement and two-way communication.

Content marketing is the best way of reaching out to your target audience, engaging them and eventually, converting them, and my consulting services can help you in a significant manner. Aside from writing content and publishing it, you need a strategy that helps you figure out what content to publish, which platforms and communication channels to target, how to reach your audience, how to engage it and how to keep it informed. Consulting can help you in this regard.

Through my content marketing and consulting services I help you

  • Find out what your core audience is looking for
  • Create and publish content that is needed
  • Understand the language and search terms your target visitors are actually using
  • Shortlist channels through which you can promote and market your content
  • Streamline content publishing according to the attention you want to get
  • Understand web analytics and reorient your content marketing efforts accordingly

Benefits of working with a content marketing and consulting service

Brand recognition and familiarity: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if by the time your customers and clients approach you they are already familiar with the major features and benefits of your products and services and they are also acquainted with the way you like to conduct your business? Most of the business on the Internet happens on the basis of trust and a sense of familiarity. People who are more familiar with you will more eagerly buy your products and services.

Search engine optimization: The recent updates from Google have proven that your entire search engine optimization depends on your content. Whether it is content on your own website/blog, your authority on various social networking platforms or your content and links appearing on other websites or blogs, it is all about content marketing. And it is not just any content, your content needs to be valuable, relevant and well-written. It should also be easily accessible. Professional consulting services can streamline your SEO and conversion efforts.

My content marketing and consulting services also help you cover all the relevant topics your target customers and clients might be interested in. Once you have set rolling a well-defined and well-targeted content marketing strategy you want to provide every possible information related to your business to your visitors so that they are totally educated and empowered. This makes you cover all the topics related to your business. This further makes you cover all the relevant keywords and key phrases your customers and clients will use while trying to find you on the search engines.

A sustained content marketing effort automatically improves your search engine rankings.

Higher conversion rate: You need search engine traffic, and you need engagement, but eventually, what you need is a high level of conversion rate and my content marketing and consulting services can help you improve your conversion rate. All the traffic that comes to your website needs to convert in order to make you money. In this regard my content marketing and consulting services – both on-site and off-site – achieves two things for you:

  • Bring targeted traffic to your website
  • Engage that targeted traffic meaningfully so that it not only sticks to your website for a longer time but also does business with you

Multichannel engagement: Traffic doesn’t just come from search engines. It can come from multiple online and off-line sources. For the sake of this page, let us focus on just online sources. Your website gets traffic from

  • Search engines (of course)
  • Social media and social networking websites
  • From other websites and blogs who have published your links in order to endorse your content
  • Submission of articles and blog posts on other websites and blogs (as a payback they allow you to include your link and a brief introduction in the resource box)
  • E-books, white papers and case studies that people may download from your website or your partner websites
  • Online discussion forums and bulletin boards
  • Trusted and reputed press release websites
  • Your e-newsletter
  • Paid advertisements in the form of links and banner ads
  • Content syndication websites

A big part of my content marketing and consulting involves spreading your content across various channels so that it becomes available to a wider audience. You may not like to target all the channels (for instance, your target audience may be active on Slideshare and LinkedIn but not on Facebook and Twitter) and you will have to figure out what platform your target audience prefers. This is where my content marketing and consulting services can help you.