3 Key Inbound Marketing Trends to learn before you step into 2018

Inbound Marketing Trends

In the last few years, there has been a high inclination towards inbound marketing practices, because people are finding outbound marketing techniques too expensive and archaic. And inbound marketing contradictory for them is affordable and effective.

Inbound marketing strategies are changing the way businesses market their products and services. This new marketing technique is considered more effective and result-generating as people will be advertising only to the audience they want and not the whole nation.

Inbound marketing ‘trends’, ‘NOTE’ the word ‘TRENDS’ here, they change every year. Trends are like clothes, once they are worn out, you have to buy a new one. They easily get worn out because they are frequently used.

Now, few days and we will start with a new year. So, what are the trends that we are going to follow in the up and coming year?

In this blog post, we are going to learn about the three most crucial inbound marketing trends that need to be adopted.

Generally, marketing terms are confusing, too confusing for the comfort of amateurs. So, before we learn about these trends, let’s understand inbound marketing in detail.

What is Inbound Marketing?

‘Inbound marketing focuses on attracting prospective customers to the business through various strategies. Inbound marketing basically involves blogging, branding, SEO, and social media.’

Businesses use inbound marketing to naturally bring inbound traffic. The whole process is about creating content that aligns with customer’s interests and helps them make a better product purchase.

Content creation is an integral part of inbound marketing.

All marketers have to do is create compelling content and share it with customers on popular social media platforms. The content structure should be designed exclusively to promote branding and once customers get attracted, they will easily convert and close a deal for you.

Inbound marketing is defined by four phases.
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Source: Hubspot

A brief explanation of Inbound Marketing Process

Phase I – Attract

To attract the right set of audience (relevant traffic), marketers have to create content and blog that address the issues of customers and use social media channels to reach them.

Phase II – Convert

Once traffic flows, the goal will be to convert the incoming traffic to leads.

Landing pages, CTA, forms will be optimized to achieve this.

Phase III – Close

Closed loop reporting, CRM, lead nurturing, will be performed to keep the leads engaged, close deals with them and bring more customers.

Phase IV – Delight

It’s necessary not to lose the existing customers.

The fourth phase involves utilization of best channels to maintain a better relationship with the existing customers.

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Top Three Inbound Marketing Techniques to bring more qualified leads for your Business        

  1. GUEST BLOGGING

Guest blogging is considered the best strategy for quality link building. So what is guest blogging and why should it be a part of your inbound marketing campaign?

Guest blogging involves writing and publishing content on third-party websites to expose the audience to a relevant brand.’

I feel, maybe I should break down my explanation.

There is an XYZ publication with a good amount of audience. You write a blog, a well-researched, engaging blog post and publish on their website.

In exchange, you will get to link back the post to your actual website.

Benefits?

It’s a win-win situation for both.

The website will have high-quality blog posts for its readers, while your brand/website will be able to benefit from link juice and will gain good traffic and leads.

Criteria for Guest Blogging-

  • Your expertise in a particular niche/industry should show in your writing.
  • The content piece should be free of typos and grammatical errors.
  • Your blogs before should have a good readership.
  • Should have links from reliable sources.

According to John Doherty, Founder of Credo, ‘guest posting feeds multiple needs. The method helps you gain more readerships, builds a brand, improves SEO, and more opportunities for better business.

  1. ii.Detailed, Lengthy Blog Posts

You want to grow traffic to your website and you are starting from scratch. And if you ask advice from any professional inbound marketer he would definitely ask you to blog.

Blogging is free, effective, and result-generative and definitely promises good influx of traffic, provided it is VALUABLE.

Now, what definition would fit the word “valuable”?

I know it should be unique, grammatically correct, optimized for search engines, etc and etc.

Doing all these, if your blog is still a cold spot on your website then it clearly shows that your readers are not happy with something.

Think, what could be the reason?

Hmmm, what about the length?

Well, have you ever given a thought to it?

As per the reports by SEMRush, it was found that the average Google first page results contain 1,890 words.

So, if you are blogging just for the sake of adding some content to your website, then your 500-word blog will not get you anything.

It is true people don’t have time to read but they never mind reading a well-researched blog.

When Neil Patel, who is a co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics performed A/B testing on his website he found that content with 1,292 words generated more leads compared to the one with only 488 words.

So, if you ask what is the ideal length of a blog is, then it’s clearly not 200 words because people will not jump excited looking at your summarized, low-quality content. Also, if you want Google to stamp your content as thin, then maybe you can pitch writing only 200 words.

Now coming to the magical number ‘500’, even this number is a failure.

If you have hesitation trusting this info, check the content word length of top 5 websites on SERP.

  • iii.Forms Live Chat

There was this trend may be a year back that we should keep website forms optimized to increase conversions because there was a drastic drop in conversions as customers found it difficult to ackowledge lengthy forms.

Today, we are discussing again forms with a new trend revolving around it, and it’s about completely about removing forms and gated content.

Gated content represents online material such as videos, white papers, and articles that require users to fill/complete a form before they can access the content.

David, CEO of Drift in 2016 removed gated content from his website. The reason, he felt it’s a cold way to invite a potential customer to his website. The risk they took gave them best results. The website generated more inbound leads without forms.

Now, what will be the trend?  What would replace forms?

A live chat system.

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