What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is about being part of the conversation. It’s about generating leads that turn into delighted clients. Being part of that conversation means sharing helpful, relevant content. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your ideal customers, your best prospects will come to you.

Traditional marketing is marketer centric – usually consisting of cold calls, cold emails to those who have not given their permission for you to contact them, and ads that generally interrupt.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is customer-centric – meant to attract and inform via remarkable content – blogs, whitepapers, videos. Inbound marketing is based on knowing your customers (their “personas”) and creating and leveraging content just for them. Your content should act like a magnet, to capture your prospect’s attention – so they come bounding in to you for more helpful information.

In this series, we’ll highlight 5 easy and straightforward steps needed to bring prospects in to you, to build leads, conversions, and delighted clients. We’ll jump right in with #1 – optimizing your website.

1. Optimize Your Website

Is your website optimized?

Your website should be the hub of all inbound marketing and lead generation activity. Websites should evolve – they should not be static. If you are a start-up and currently don’t have a website, or are evaluating your current site, please keep these in mind:

Relevant, Helpful Content. Content publishing is the most powerful strategy available to increase inbound links, boost search engine rankings, and generate leads.

Clean Design. An easy to understand format, relevant and consistent look, color scheme, font hierarchy, images, short sentences and paragraphs, bullets, and boldface all mater.

Streamlined Next Steps. What would you like your site visitors to do next? Ask for a product demo? Call for more information? Download an eBook? Subscribe to your blog? Produce calls to action so that potential investors will be able to engage and ask for additional information.

Check out our next tip: Step #2: Build Your Blog