Inbound Marketing: A Key Messaging Tip

Inbound marketing does not mean being a jack-of-all marketing trades. Quite the contrary, and too many businesses today are in the business of sales funnel management where a visitor is sent to a landing page and expected to release name, address, telephone, email. Businesses face even greater stumbling blocks if its content is an online store with nothing but products because the rising on demand culture seeks immediate resolution coupled with short attention spans. Inbound marketing though is SEO, and it in itself as well does not mean that someone who specializes in SEO be a jack-of-all marketing trades. See with all inbound marketing campaigns, it involves understanding what the targeted audience exactly wants, and positioning to deliver.  Unfortunately, far too many businesses assume they know what their desired target audience wants - and in turn - conceptualize sales funnel models around those assumptions. That's quite a fleeting assumption for the growing $60 million Gen Z, and the $2 billion .net via mobile (International Data Corp.) audiences. Nothing could be farther from reality; consequentially, here begins the losing sales funnel model.
On a recent trip to Kuala Lumpur, I overheard a sales meeting where cloud software was being pitched. As the two gentlemen engaged, it became more evident that the receiving audience was not going to buy. The pivotal moment came when the receiver asked about a shortfall concern.  As persuasive as the sales representative waltzed around the concern, he was unable to address beyond or assure that his firm's cloud did not have such a shortcoming. The receiver ended immediately the meeting, and elimination occurred. It was wasted time for both sides.

Sound familiar? It doesn't have to. When audiences are understood, created content is niche matched. Elimination happens at the early stages of the lead pipeline instead of trying to control the buyer’s journey. Niche content built exactly for target audiences’ sets up relevancy, trust, and quicker rank for market-defining keywords as well as product/category keywords. This drives better SERPs and content curation for multiple audience reach. Gone are the days of traditional B2C and B2B online marketing models. Searchers are quite specific, and websites that deliver the solution (which fits) win.

Moreover, no longer are visitor profiles sufficient for creating inbound marketable content either. Profiles need to inclusive of buyer insights. This interconnection is what empowers businesses to create niche content channel pipelines. The "sales funnel" then becomes an inbound lead sales pipeline of prequalified visitors.

Analysis of created content also becomes easier ascribable with ease of seeing what triggers desired response and what does not. Insights reveal:

• what targeted visitors want, 
• how to curate as well as spin digital content that resonates, and 
• how to differentiate from the competition. 

Some relevant Analytic measures to watch would include:

• Ranking for market-defining key terms and/or product/category keywords
• Converting SEO traffic
• Engagement
• Social mentions over competition
• Email conversions
• Email shares
• Increases in referral traffic that convert
• Bounce

With that said, almost every business today has marketing bottlenecks. There exists no magic bullet, or one-size-fits all solution. What inbound content marketing leverages are insights gifting business the ability to create digital content that visitors hear as an identifiable solution which in turn builds trust as well as motivates visitors to engage.

Resources:

R.L. Adams, SEO 2016 Learn Search Engine Optimization.
Ryan Levesque, ASK.
Eric Ward & Garrett French, Ultimate Guide To Link Building.
Website Magazine (April 2016), Keeping Up With Mobile Consumers, page 13.