While Blockbuster has closed all of its stores, Netflix has grown to over 60 million subscribers as a new marketing platform, the Internet, grows. This is a classic example of the pros and cons of developing a brand in a digital age. While Netflix’s brand really doesn’t have that clever of a slogan or a super flashy logo, the company has managed to navigate their brand’s image into the daily lives of over 60 million people (Actually, it’s probably triple that if you consider how many homes have multiple users under one subscription). What does Netflix ode for their success?
While technology and innovative thinking are important components, Netflix owes a lot to the fact that they have built their brand around the customer and customer preferences. They’ve made a cheap, convenient, and commercial free way to watch television. Rather than glorifying their brand through the right pitch, as many cable companies have done, they built a brand that crafts their entire business model around the customer’s convenience, which inevitably brings customers right to their door just like companies who adopt inbound marketing.
Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot, describes what works for brand image well when he said, ”Don’t interrupt what your buyers want to consume – BE what they want to consume.” In an Internet dominated world, content is what allows you and your company to “BE what they want to consume.” A brand image is built on the content they serve and every path and touchpoint that leads to reaching a sale. Inbound marketing works by delivering valuable content along each stage of the journey, which is why brands who adopt inbound marketing reach an average of 54 percent more leads than traditional paid methods. Inbound marketing tactics like SEO, blogging, content offers, social media and much more work because they lead a customer to a brand online naturally, which wouldn’t be possible with outbound marketing methods.
Whether you have an app for budgeting or sell electrical engineering equipment, your content should be valuable and informational to help grow authority in your industry. Brands like Google, HubSpot, and MoZ have all built their brand images on being an authority brands in an online world by providing their website visitors with valuable content . Here are 10 inbound marketing tactics to build your brand image much like that of these well-known companies.
- Value proposition: Before you can make any inbound marketing tactics successful at building your brand, you have to have a clear understanding of your company’s value proposition. A clear value proposition states what you do, how you do it, who you do it for, and what makes you different from competitors. It’s at the core of all inbound marketing tactics.
- Buyer personas and journey: Knowing exactly who your target audience is by building out a buyer persona allows you to build a brand based on what is interesting or valuable to them. It also helps you to build content that fits each stage of the journey they take to becoming a customer.
- Website design and structure: Inbound marketing is all about driving visitors to your website and turning them into leads. Effective website design and structure not only helps to generate leads, but it will also show what your brand is worth.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Nothing creates a better brand experience on the Internet than making it easy to be found online. With 61% of global Internet users researching products online, making yourself found through search engine marketing (SEM) will create a smooth brand experience. (Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance, 2012)
- Blogging: Consistent blogging is critical to SEM, but it also helps you to keep content fresh. When your content is fresh so is your brand. Keeping your customers and prospects informed regularly through blogging allows you to keep your brand in touch with them more often.
- Social media: Like blogging, social media allows you to keep your brand in touch with your audience on a day to day basis. Outside of being a platform where you can offer your audience news, blogs and other valuable content, it is also a platform that improves your brand’s image by giving your audience a voice and a chance to interact with your brand.
- Email marketing: From subscriptions to personalized emails, inbound marketing allows you to improve your brand’s image through the information you share and the a email’s voice, tone and design elements.
- PR: Typically, PR isn’t thought to go with inbound marketing, but it is actually a very effective channel to distributing your brand’s image and message, especially inbound content. If your audience finds information through media, then PR allows you to reach them; however, product promotions and typical company news won’t stand out to media like inbound content.
- Personalization and segmentation: A one-size fits all approach only dilutes your brand. As you’ve likely heard before, try to be everything to everyone and you become nothing to nobody. A good example of effective personalization is Amazon’s recommended purchase CTAs that are said to generate an additional 10-30 percent in revenue. Personalizing and segmentation allows you to tailor your brand to the micro personas or characteristics of your audience.
- Analytics: Inbound marketing is data driven and allows you to predictively build a successful brand by monitoring brand image metrics such as website visits, social media engagement, email performance, search engine presence, inbound links, and much more. Monitoring your brand through analytics allows you to react to negative brand performance and repeat what’s successful. For example, HubSpot’s Social Monitoring tool allows you to automatically get notifciations anytime your brand is mentioned on social media.
In a digital landscape, branding and inbound marketing go hand in hand. Building your brand’s image online means you have to use inbound marketing tactics because forcing your brand into conversations doesn’t work. Learn more about building successful inbound marketing campaigns by downloading this guide.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 10 Inbound Marketing Tactics to Improve Your Brand’s Image
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