The Inbound Marketing Methodology: Attract

The methodology starts with attracting your target audience. Your business should focus on attracting customers by publishing blog content, optimizing web pages, and getting active on social media. Content will play a major role throughout the inbound methodology.

Build Buyer Personas

To create content that converts, you have to know more about your customers than their demographic information. Dive deep into their goals and challenges. Explain what they do on a typical day. What do they care about? What are their behavioral patterns?.

Once you have this information, you can create buyer personas: Semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. Armed with these profiles, you’ll be prepared to create content that speaks to your customers. Later on, you’ll be able to have more winning sales conversations. 

Optimize for Search Engines

Today, most people who are looking for a solution start their process by using a search engine. Because of this, you need to make sure that your business gets found in search results. Ideally, your website will be the first one of the first suggested sites for a number of your prospects’ different search terms.

Publish content containing keywords that match up with the terms your target audience will search for. You may need to do research on key terms and phrases, but you can do so with keyword tools or with a marketing CRM like HubSpot.

Most people searching online won’t go past the first or second pages of search results. Shorter search phrases are more often used, so when you are writing your blog content make sure to incorporate the same short phrase a couple of times throughout your post. To start creating keyword phrases, begin by creating a list of about as many as you can. Search engine optimization software like HubSpot’s can tell you the search volume and difficulty for each term as well as your ranking.

There are other tactics for search optimization, such as backlinking and building topic clusters with content. But a solid keyword strategy is the best way to start.

Create Useful Content

Inbound marketing is about attracting your customers, not interrupting their lives with your messaging.  You can do this by providing the customer with the right content at the right place and time through their preferred channels. Content could be any tangible media that you create to help educate customers on something within your industry that they may have questions about. It could be written material such as a blog, visual media such as a webinar, or a downloadable ebook that gives them a lot of useful content.

Whatever media you are using to produce content on your website, remember who you are creating it for and what problem it will help solve. Make your content as unique as possible. Focus on quality rather than quantity. There are millions of blogs on the internet. What makes yours special?

Publish regularly so you always have fresh content going out. A good content strategy in the attract phase of inbound marketing is a reliable and cost-effective solution to growing your business.

Promote Your Content

Going beyond just creating content, you must organize and manage how you deliver it as well. Any business that intends to implement an inbound marketing strategy should prepare a calendar for publishing. Choose regular times to promote your content through social media, email, or ads.

Attract

At the Attract stage, the inbound marketing methodology has only just begun. It takes time to get to closing the sale. However, staying organized, doing research, and relying on your creativity are all you need to grow a successful strategy.

Building content and managing it properly is an easy task if you use the resources offered. Inbound marketing can take time to produce significant results. Stay committed and keep putting our great content. It will take hard work to build a larger online presence. Content should help convince anyone to buy your product or service!

Now that you understand the Attract stage of the inbound marketing methodology, you're ready to learn how to convert your visitors into leads.