No matter how great your e-commerce store is, there is a high chance that it will fail. Why? In most cases, the reason is poor marketing. Luckily, it is relatively easy to learn basic marketing practices and start implementing them into your strategy.
That being said, you could still end up spending a lot on marketing and seeing no results. That’s why it’s important to understand different types of marketing – and one of the most effective ones is definitely inbound marketing. Hence, here’s everything you need to know about building your own inbound marketing strategy for your Magento 2.
Table of Contents
I. Understand What Inbound Marketing Is
As explained above, the first thing you need to do is understand what inbound marketing actually is. To put it simply, inbound marketing is about converting your prospects into customers by attracting customers with valuable content. While this may sound simple, there are actually many nuances to keep in mind.
Content will be your primary tool in the process, so you will need to focus on making it valuable and helpful to your specific target audience. However, it is also crucial to personalize customer experiences once you have attracted their attention. Engagement is essential to converting prospects into customers.
This is why the entire concept of inbound marketing can be summed up in three words: Attraction, Engagement, and Delight. The last stage is where you empower and delight your customers with their purchases. Every stage is important in its own way, so it is critical to understand them before you start planning your strategy.
The main point of inbound marketing is to get customers to “come to you” instead of “going to them”. That’s exactly why it is called inbound marketing as opposed to outbound marketing. Some of the most popular techniques in inbound marketing include content marketing (including social media marketing and email marketing), search engine optimization, and others.
II. Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy
Once you have understood the essence of inbound marketing, you can start planning your strategy. By far the most important digital marketing technique in inbound marketing is content marketing. By creating high-quality valuable content that is relevant to your target audience, you attract potential customers to your store.
Of course, this is when you need to perform extensive target audience research to understand what your customers are interested in. What are their needs and interests? What are their pain points and problems? How can you address these in your content? And how is this relevant to your products?
Make sure to plan your content strategy in great detail and take into account the different channels and platforms you can use to publish content (e.g. your blog, other blogs and websites for guest posting, social media, and so on). You will need to have a schedule for posting content as well as content quality guidelines you can follow.
Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to create all the content yourself. You can outsource it completely or partially by hiring an experienced writer from the custom writing reviews site Rated by Students. This way, you can have a successful content inbound marketing strategy while focusing on other aspects of your business.
III. Integrate Social Media Marketing
While social media marketing is technically a part of content marketing, it is often discussed and planned separately because of the specificity of the platforms used for publishing social media content. For instance, instead of focusing on keywords, you will most likely have to focus on hashtags that act as keywords to some extent.
Just like with your general content marketing strategy, you need to plan out your posting schedule and content quality guidelines. Choose the platforms that are most used by your target audience, but don’t try to be everywhere at the same time. Remember that you can still open new accounts for your business on other platforms in the future to be able to build the best Inbound Marketing Strategy for your Magento 2 store.
Remember that the content you post on social media will help you improve brand awareness and recognition while also connecting and interacting with your audience. However, your primary goal is still to direct potential customers to your website which is why you will need to use links often throughout your social media activities.
IV. Master Search Engine Optimization
The next step in planning your inbound marketing strategy is to master search engine optimization. SEO plays a critical role in your website search rankings. Thus, it is absolutely essential for you to know how to utilize SEO to its fullest extent and how to set up your store to be discovered by more potential customers.
If you don’t have much experience or expertise in SEO, you might want to let someone else handle it for you. Alternatively, you can get help from professionals by letting them help you with some aspects of SEO. For example, a professional writer from the writing services reviews sites Top Writing Reviews can perform research for you and create reports with relevant keywords that you will need to use in the content you publish on your blog.
Take into account that SEO is not only about the keywords you use. It’s also the link profile of your store (both internal and external linking as well as backlinks) and other aspects such as on-site optimization. You need to create meta titles and descriptions for your web pages and add alt tags to your images. In other words, don’t overlook anything important.
V. Focus on Customer Engagement
So far, the activities discussed are mostly used to attract prospects to your website with the help of content. Once you have attracted potential customers, you will actually need to persuade them to buy your products. This is the second stage of inbound marketing strategy where you engage with customers.
To some extent, you will be doing this already with your content, especially when it comes to social media. However, there are still specific techniques you need to use to engage your prospects when they are already on your website.
One way to do this is by having a live chat or chatbot installed on your online store. Let the chat send an automatic notification to the user to ask them whether they have any questions about your products. It’s a common way to start a conversation with the prospect and potentially convert them.
In addition to that, you should still engage with customers elsewhere. For instance, email marketing can be very effective, especially when you are informing subscribers about sales, discounts, etc.
VI. Continue Creating High-Quality Content
Last but not least, don’t forget about the final stage of inbound marketing which is Delight. This is when you need to empower your customers and delight them with the purchases they make – but also the content you offer them.
To put it simply, you need to create something truly valuable both in terms of content and your products. Once the customer makes a purchase, they need to be happy and satisfied in the long run. This will encourage them to come back to your store in the future. It is the final stage of inbound marketing, but it is essential for building your customer base.
VII. Conclusion
To summarize, there are many digital marketing techniques you will have to use to make your inbound marketing strategy strong. However, it will all ultimately pay off in the long run. Use the techniques and tips from this article to help you create your own inbound marketing strategy and start attracting more customers to your online store.
Author Bio:
Lafond Wanda is a professional content writer, copywriter, content strategist, and communications consultant. She started young with her writing career from being a high school writer to a university editor, and now she is a writer on professional writing platforms— her years of expertise have honed her skills to create compelling and results-driven content every single time.
