Inbound marketing refers to marketing that attracts a prospect to your company. As opposed to advertising that reaches out to get a prospects’ attention. The goal of inbound marketing is to lure visitors to a website, or to encourage them to like or follow you. Then to convert those prospects into loyal customers.
The stages of an inbound marketing campaign are:
- attracting prospects
- cultivating relationships
- sustaining those relationships over time
As you may know, social is a key component of an inbound marketing strategy. Social media allows us to attract target prospects through engaging content. Then we put our efforts to converting those followers into leads. With the final goal of turning them into customers.
But what are some inbound marketing techniques that we can use for social media?
And more importantly how can we implement them? Good question. Here are inbounding marketing techniques for social media that you should be using:
Landing Pages - 'The 10-4-1 Rule'
While most of your social posts will be valuable external content and articles relevant to the needs of your persona, a small fraction of posts will directly address your solution and provide a link to a landing page.
The number of 'landing page posts' to aim for is 10-4-1. This means that for every 15 social posts your company makes:
- 10 posts should be useful external content
- 4 should be links to your own company blog articles
- and 1 should link to a landing page.
Whenever you use social media content to gain visitors and leads, you need to create an effective landing page that addresses the issue raised in the post, and provides further action items. Otherwise, you may send your visitors and loyal followers off to other websites that you won’t get credit for.
Beware: linking to your homepage from a social media post may not work as effectively as you might think. Sure, your visitor may find content that addresses the issue raised by the post, but most likely it come along with a lot of other distracting information and menu links.
By creating a distinct landing page free from website navigation links, you’re sending the visitor to a page built to function only to address the need of the post they were interested in. This page is designed to provide a way for your visitor to convert into a lead, such as a form in exchange for an eBook, free consultation, discount, or any other type of goal you wish to establish!
Use Social Media Publishing Tools
Social platforms like Hootsuite and Facebook allow you to schedule posts far in advance so you can focus creating engaging, meaningful content that will actually interest your visitor persona.
Social media content publishing tools also help us to keep up the practice of posting on a regular basis. This way when our fans expect to hear from us, we have a post scheduled in advance.
Scheduling at least a few days in advance will save us a lot of time!
Use Social Media Monitoring
While some social platforms like Facebook and Twitter provide us with analytics tools that give us a better understanding of who our fan base is, they do not provide us with the personalization that social monitoring does.
Social monitoring allows us to see what posts and updates our fans are particularly interested in and how they are engaging with that content.
For example, creating a hashtag for a particular event will help show you how fans are engaging with your products or services and how they feel about it.
Use Social Media Analytics Tools
Inbounding marketing for social media is extremely important. And one of the most important components of social media marketing is analytics.
Major social media channels provide analytics tools that allow us to analyze our engagement rate and performance. Tools like these give us raw data about our activity on that specific platform. This data helps us to get a better of idea of who is engaging with our content, what posts they are engaging with, and what’s working and what’s not.
When using inbound marketing techniques for your social media practices, use the above 4 methods to make sure you are performing as best you can on each social platform.
Tags: Inbound Marketing