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SEO and inbound marketing strategy are two common aspects of digital marketing. But did you know each marketing method is closely connected?

Let’s break down the intimate relationship between search engine optimization (SEO) and inbound marketing, what they can do for your brand, and what steps you can take to get the most out of these powerful marketing concepts.

What Is an Inbound Marketing Strategy?

Inbound marketing is a popular term in the modern marketing world. Unlike traditional marketing, the concept focuses on creating value for customers through your marketing activities. You can do this in a variety of ways by writing inbound marketing content such as a blog post, infographic, video, news article, and social media posts. 

In contrast, outbound marketing emphasizes things like television ads, billboards, and cold calls. These marketing efforts are interruptive in nature and don’t provide value.

Inbound marketing focuses on fostering engagement through targeted content. When done well, inbound marketing seamlessly presents itself to a potential customer. Quality content will make itself heard, seen, or otherwise consumed as a part of a positive experience consumers opt into.

Inbound marketing is a long-term strategy, which makes it an interesting (and important) part of growth marketing in particular. With growth marketing, the emphasis isn’t on building a company quickly. Avoid tactics such as email marketing or influencer marketing. That’s called growth hacking, and it can lead to fast results that don’t last.

Growth marketing focuses on creating customer-focused growth that steadily builds over time. In that sense, inbound marketing is a major part of the “long game” that growth marketers have in mind as they set up frameworks and build out strategies.

What Is SEO and Why Is It Important for Inbound Marketing?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” This is the process by which marketers use tools like keywords, hyperlinks, and technical configurations to optimize your online content. When done well, SEO helps your relevant content organically show up higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). This means more people see it, click on it, and visit your website.

SEO is an integral part of any inbound marketing strategy. It draws the ideal customer to your content when looking for answers to related search queries. When that content is well-designed, it answers their initial questions. It also encourages the reader to remember the brand that provided helpful, thoughtful content.

Good SEO attracts the attention of a prospect and establishes that you are a useful resource and can offer them value. At that point, it passes the torch to inbound marketing. This uses tools like gated content, samples, demos, and newsletters to encourage visitors to take the next step. From there, they enter your sales funnel, moving from awareness to consideration and eventually decision-making.

To put it another way, inbound marketing and SEO serve two separate but essential and complementary functions. SEO brings traffic to your content. Inbound marketing encourages those visitors to enter your sales funnel.

How to Work SEO Into an Inbound Marketing Strategy

The complementary nature of SEO and inbound marketing makes it easy to see how they flow together. But what can you do to make sure that happens with your own brand? Here are a few tips to help you ensure your inbound SEO is synergistically worked into your inbound marketing campaign:

Stay Focused on the Customer

It doesn’t matter if you’re working on SEO, inbound strategy, or both. You should always have the customer in mind. From choosing keywords to answering questions, make your target audience lie at the heart of every action and decision that you take. It's important to target existing customers and a new lead. 

Write for the Reader First and Search Engines Second

SEO is important, but it isn’t everything. In fact, it shouldn’t even be your top priority. As you invest in customer-centric content creation, make sure you’re writing for the reader first and search engines second. Don’t overuse keywords or optimize at the expense of readability or experience. Engage readers first. Then optimize content so search engines can find it.

Consider What Part of the Marketing Funnel You’re Targeting

Both SEO and inbound marketing target the entire marketing funnel — or they should. Often marketers get focused on the top of the marketing funnel. But remember, valuable content is helpful to your customers at any part of the customer journey. From brand awareness to how-tos and whitepapers, make sure everything is optimized and targeted for a specific part of your funnel.

Create E-E-A-T content: 

Remember that content marketing is central to any SEO strategy. As such, in order to have genuine value, it must clearly communicate that value to the reader. E-E-A-T content stands for “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.” These are four filters you should have in mind with every piece of content you create. Not only will it create more value. As consumers engage more, it will boost your SEO and attract more visitors, as well.

Creating Synergy With SEO and Inbound Marketing

When you can tap into the power of both SEO and inbound marketing, they can work together to create incredible results. The challenge is creating a growth marketing framework that unlocks the power of both at the same time.

 If you’re struggling to create an effective inbound marketing strategy, reach out. Our team at Relevance can help you make the most of these two potent aspects of growth marketing for your brand.

Just like a sales funnel, a content conversion funnel is meant to drive conversions. It starts off by creating awareness on a certain topic and ends with a conversion.

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your brand or products. In fact, 95% of B2B product buyers consider content trustworthy when they are evaluating a company.

This powerful statistic establishes the importance of content marketing. However, to make sure that content marketing helps you get conversions, you need to have a content conversion funnel in place. This can help you plan the journey of potential buyers better.

Before we get into the advantages of a content conversion funnel and how you can create one, let's take a close look at what it actually is.

Content Conversion Funnel

The content conversion funnel is the process through which you take your visitors that leads to converting them. You create the content flow to convert visitors into actual customers who will pay for your products.

When a website visitor arrives at your site, you'll want to grab those eyeballs with catchy headlines, useful information, and existing content that serves to support your legitimacy. According to the Content Marketing Institute, you'll also want to make your content source format accessible to all.

There are four stages to the content conversion funnel:

Most people don't move through this process along the defined path. That is why you need to have a content conversion funnel in place. The funnel will not only help you drive the visitors to make a purchase but will also help you plan and create content.

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Before we dive in any further, let's take a close look at each stage of the funnel.

Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is the first stage of the funnel and is meant to attract and educate your audience.

This content should add value. It should answer questions or solve the problems of your audience. It should essentially help generate brand awareness in the long run.

One way of figuring out if your digital content is working is to check the number of views and shares it gets. At the same time, you should also see if the people viewing and sharing it are a part of your target audience.

Evaluation Stage

This is the stage at which the leads that you've attracted during the awareness stage will start evaluating your brand.

They will look for content to determine the legitimacy of your brand and develop trust. Based on this stage, visitors will decide if they want to purchase your product or services.

This type of content should generate leads and also influence them. If visitors are converting from this content, then it is successful.

Nestle, for instance, released their Toll House Chocolate Chip recipes. These recipes included chocolate chips as the main ingredients. This helped build the brand's image in the minds of consumers. It validated the brand.

Purchase Stage

This stage involves convincing your leads to make a purchase from you.

The content should result in a conversion. It should influence the purchase decisions of your leads. It should also influence the content pipeline.

To analyze if this content is successful, you can conduct reviews or surveys. The survey responses and self-assessments can give you a fair idea of your success.

Delight Stage

Many companies overlook this stage. However, it is especially important for companies with a subscription model.

The delight stage will help you build a loyal audience that will help you grow your business going forward.

Customers abandoned as soon as they make a purchase will likely be only one-time customers. However, if you can delight them with your response and special offers, they may become repeat customers.

Why Should You Create a Content Conversion Funnel?

According to Kapost, content marketing produces three times more leads than paid search for every dollar spent. It also offers six times higher conversion rates than other methods.

The primary reason for this is that content marketing helps you improve your website's search engine optimization (SEO).

It can help you get more pages indexed and even get more backlinks. This can not only help improve your website's authority but can also help you create brand awareness.

Content marketing not only reduces your costs but also helps increase your conversion rates.

But if you don't plan your strategy well, your content marketing campaign can fail. Which is one of the main reasons you should have a content conversion funnel.

How to Create a Content Conversion Funnel

The first step in creating a content conversion funnel is to figure out who your target customer is.

You create a funnel for the purpose of selling your products. For this reason, it is important to know who your target audience is because you must tailor content to the requirements of your target audience.

You will need to figure out the challenges that they face so that you can solve them through your content. Is your product able to solve their problems? At that point, you will have sparked their interest in making a purchase. Then you tailor content according to each section of the funnel.

1. Awareness Stage

At this step, focus the content on expanding your reach to spread brand awareness. The goal is to get the attention of people who have an interest in your products. It's on you to create great content that would be of interest to a potential customer. You may need to create a buyer persona and conduct AB testing as you develop your digital marketing campaign.

The content marketing efforts of today's digital marketer will include some combination of Google Analytics, keyword research, email marketing, social media, and marketing automation. Social media channels, in particular, can help facilitate rapid distribution. Some of the best types of content that you can create for this stage fall into one of three categories.

Curated

This sort of content creation revolves around posts that are easily shared on social media. They are very easy to create and share easily. However, these sorts of posts can become spammy all too easily. You must also ensure that you add your own views to the content to give it a personal touch.

Infographics

Infographics are images with bundles of information. They show a variety of statistics and data that is very easy to interpret. Infographics can generate high engagement and views as well.

Blog Posts

A blog post is a great type of content when done correctly. Blog content can help improve your website's SEO and can also be highly informative to your audience. Your website traffic can increase dramatically if your blog posts are well-written. And when you can create and share blog posts, the overall reach will increase as well.

Other great types of content for this stage include videos and podcasts. These can dramatically increase your conversion rates and boost your lead generation as well.

2. Evaluation Stage

The content that works the best in the middle of the funnel should be educational in nature. Relevant content provides the key to the conversion process. Authentic interest and compelling content converts mere readers into customers. You'll want to make sure that your contact info is readily accessible at this stage of the average buyers journey.

The awareness stage concentrates on getting the attention of people. The evaluation stage should show them why they should purchase a product or service from you. The content should show why your products or services are useful for them. It is only then that they will continue through the funnel to make a purchase from you.

Ideally, you should get the contact information of consumers during this stage to convert them into leads. The main purpose of the content is to ensure that consumers who see this content will continue to the bottom of the funnel.

The most popular forms of content for this step include:

Case Studies

Data is the primary driver behind case studies. They showcase statistics and other data gathered during a test.

White Papers

White papers provide statistical data and academic style reports as well. They help convince your audience that the product or service you offer can solve their problems.

Ebooks and Free Guides

This form of content revolves around "How-to" get things done. Target these at providing solutions to the problems faced by your audience. This content should describe and show consumers how your product can solve their problems.

You can also include worksheets as a part of this stage. They can also help you with lead generation.

You should also take the time to build attractive landing pages and optimize them for conversions. Similarly, if you're an eCommerce business, a visually-appealing website is even more important for you.

You can leverage WordPress to build your eCommerce website or landing page. This platform provides the foundation for over 30% of the world's websites, many of which also sell goods.

3. Bottom of the Funnel (Purchase and Delight Stage)

These stages should be extremely personal. The content that you create for the bottom of the funnel should show your leads the added value that your paid product offers. This should be in contrast to the free value that you've already been offering them.

One of the best ways of distributing this content is through an email autoresponder sequence. These emails can be sent to people who have provided their email addresses to you. The sequences will build up gradually and bring the user to the point where you can ask for the sale. You can do this with a great call to action.

You can offer demos and trials of your products or services to your leads to give them a hands-on experience. Other popular forms of content for the purchase stage include discount codes, webinars, and testimonials.

For the delight stage, you need to ensure that your customers are happy with your products or services.

The best types of content for this stage include special offers, member-exclusive giveaways, and product guides. You then aim this content at making the customer experience better so that their renewal rates and product usage increase.

Final Thoughts

Having a well-charted content marketing strategy is essential for success. And that includes a well-planned content conversion funnel. You need to think up content ideas tailored to your target audience for maximum effect.

At each stage of the conversion funnel, your content marketing world should be based on the primary goal or target of that stage. This will ensure that you can succeed in your goals for that stage and, in turn, increase conversions. If your company does not have a content marketer on staff, you may find success reaching out to a sales conversion service or other digital PR agency.

If you would like to set up a time to speak to a Relevance strategist about content conversion, schedule an appointment.

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