Given the rapid evolution of the industry, the definition of inbound marketing seems to be constantly changing. Although competition is on the rise, there’s never been a better time for marketers or aspiring marketers to carve out a niche by creating their own inbound marketing strategies. According to HubSpot, inbound marketing delivers 54 percent more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound methods. One thing is clear: Inbound works and personalization reinforces it.
One of the most important parts of the inbound process is delivering personalized, relevant, and informative content to your audience. Content personalization reinforces nearly every stage of the inbound process in some way. In this blog we educate you about the major parts of the inbound marketing process and show how personalization fits into each one.
Identifying Your Audience
Begin creating your inbound marketing campaign by determining who your target audience is. To do this right, you must have a good understanding of your buyer personas, so you can target them effectively. A buyer persona tells you what your prospective customers are thinking as they address the problem your company resolves. Buyer personas and delivering personalized content go hand in hand. Without buyer personas, content personalization would be far more challenging. Developing solid buyer personas gives you the knowledge you need to align your marketing decisions from message positioning to content personalization.
Content Creation and Landing Pages
After you’ve pinpointed your target audience and fully developed your buyer personas, the next step in the inbound process is develop and maintain a powerful website, which is no small task. Once you have a website established, you need to create content offerings and landing pages to generate leads. Creating engaging content helps convert traffic into leads.
When creating content, it’s important be sure it’s branded and visually appealing. In addition, incorporating links and keywords for SEO purposes is also encouraged to maximize shareability and visibility in search engine. You can personalize your landing pages, thank you pages, and thank you emails to add value and relevancy to your offerings. A customer presented with a personalized landing page or email is more likely to click than one who is not.
Converting Leads into Sales
After you’ve created content to generate leads, the next step is to begin converting those leads into sales. When a visitor inputs their personal information into a form on a landing page, they become a lead. In order to convert leads to sales, they need to be segmented and nurtured until they reach the moment where they realize your brand’s value and turn into a paying customer.
Most often, leads are nurtured through email marketing. Personalizing your emails substantially increases their effectiveness. Generally speaking, anywhere you can personalize content, you should. Emails should be designed to appeal contextually to potential buyers at various stages of the buyer’s journey. However, it’s important not to overpersonalize your content because you risk creeping out your customers and alienating them—often times for good.
Measuring Analytics
After your inbound campaign is well under way, you can start employing analytics tools to measure key performance indicators (such as visitor to sign-up ratio or sign-up to paying ratio). Measuring analytics allows you to see what’s working and what isn’t, so you can adjust your strategy for the future to avoid making the same mistakes twice.
With analytics tools, you can measure a number of different metrics including, traffic to leads, and leads to customers, cost per lead, and cost per customer. However, it is possible to get a lot more granular with your analytics if you so desire. Measuring analytics is a great way to determine whether or not your personalization efforts are effective or not. For example, you can A/B test two different versions of the same email to determine which messaging style is getting the best results.
Review
Inbound marketing is all about getting found by your target customer, but that’s just the beginning. After your target audience discovers you, you need to provide engaging content offerings and calls to actions to convert visits into leads. Once you have some solid leads, you can begin creating email nurturing campaigns to help them to progress through the sales funnel and eventually convert to customers.
Content personalization and overall relevancy are critical to the success of these first steps of the inbound process. Eventually, after your campaign is well underway, you can begin analyzing data metrics to improve your strategy. You can know how visitors are finding your site and which keywords are driving traffic, conversions, and most importantly, sales. Analytics allow you to be confident in your strategy because you have statistics to back it up. Personalization should be used to enhance the inbound process. When personalization and content work together, they create a positive vortex of engagement that creates customer loyalty and generates leads.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How Content Personalization Fits into Inbound Methodology
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