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A Practical Inbound Marketing Strategy for B2B Companies

Attracting leads is a daunting task for any company. Figuring out which way to go about attracting leads is half the battle. Inbound marketing might be your next best step while marketing your B2B company.

The internet has become a superhighway for communication. There are billions of avenues for users to explore. Interactive communication is what people crave most when they go online. They want to feel seen.

As a company, you should take this sentiment and run with it. You need to create content that your customers actually care about. This will get them to your website much more quickly that traditional advertising.

With inbound marketing, you can attract potential customers who are already interested in your product or services. These prospects have a higher chance of converting than those who stumble upon a poorly placed ad.

Simply put, inbound marketing is creating content that your customers care about and letting them find you. Let’s dive into the areas you need to be focusing on and some steps you can take to create an inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Want to brush up on what goes into an inbound marketing strategy first? Here’s a quick video to give you the cliff notes from Inbound Explained:

Quick Takeaways:

  • Establishing buyer personas to connect with your prospects will lead to more effective marketing
  • Complete research with your specific buyer personas in mind
  • Market directly to prospects in every stage of the buyers’ journey with purposeful content marketing

Establish Buyer Personas

But what does that mean? A buyer persona is a description of your ideal customer. You create a buyer persona using existing customer data, industry research and daily observations.

Furthermore, your buyer persona should explain what drives your customers to use your product or service. These observations can help inform future strategies.

buyer personas questions to ask

Image Source: AWeber

More simply put, buyer personas are an informed explanation of who you think your target audience should be. This is who you create content for.

This may be the most reliable way to qualify a lead.  Targeting anyone outside of this definition is a waste of time.

Research SEO Rankings

Source: FinancesOnline

Keyword research is how you’ll know what your target audience is searching for. This is what you need to write about!

Keywords drive your content, because the higher you rank with keywords, the closer to the top you are on Google’s search results. Seeing how your search rankings are performing is important to a healthy content marketing strategy. Be honest, when was the last time you clicked the fifth link down?

Organic search rankings are even better than paid advertising. With paid ads, the benefits stop with the buck. When your advertisement budget runs dry, there’s no progress left to show for it. With organic rankings, you build an owned asset that will continue to benefit your website in the long run. Prioritizing organic rankings is simply more cost effective.

How exactly do you decide what keywords to use and what content to write? Sites like SEMrush and Ahrefs grant valuable insight into keyword traffic, giving you the right knowledge to craft your content calendar.

Outline Your Content

The next step is planning out content for your website based on your SEO research. The key to a successful inbound marketing strategy is to write content for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Top of the funnel prospects who are just beginning their research will be looking for general information on your product or service. The further you move down the funnel, the more specific you’ll want to get. Make sure you have something for everybody, even if the top of the funnel might seem elementary to you. You are the expert here. If everyone knew everything you do, you wouldn’t have a business!

For example, let’s say your company sells stock trading advice. Create content focused on keywords identified in your research that your target audience is searching, like stocks or best investments right now. Write articles like:

10 Market Trends to Watch Out for in 2022

Top Investment Consultants in (State)

Richest Investors Right Now

When you answer prospective clients burning questions, you lead them right to your company page where they realize, hey! These people know what they’re talking about, and they do stock market consulting!

Create Your Content

So, you know what to write about, but what exactly does good, quality content look like? Here’s the basic rules.

  1. Word count matters

Google prioritizes articles within the 1,000-to-1,800-word range. Not enough or too many words will keep your masterpiece from ranking!

  1. Have an attention-grabbing meta description

Not only does Google pay attention to your meta description, but viewers do too! When your article comes up as a search result, the meta description is the second thing people see (after the title of course). The meta is a window into your content, so make it good!

  1. Call to Action (CTA)

A good CTA is how you connect with your audience. CTAs are the go get it portion of your article and are crucial to getting shares and engagement from your readers.

Include calls to action like starting a free trial, subscribing to an email list, or scheduling a free consultation. Don’t leave your readers hanging and give them something to do next.

Distribute Your Content

The next hurdle you face is content distribution. You gotta get in front of prospective eyes!

First thing you should consider is how often you can post. The more often, the better. An ideal schedule of 1 article per day increases your blogs effectiveness 4x compared to once per week. But content marketing can be time consuming for any team. Take inventory of your content creators and their bandwidth. You might consider outsourcing your blogs content creation for maximum effectiveness. P.S. most marketers do!

84% of b2b marketers outsource their content creation

Image Source: Ring Central

Once you have a schedule planned, think of where your company lives online, and more importantly, where your target audience frequents. For example, if you’re a SaaS company marketing your latest AI software, you probably won’t be focusing on Instagram views. Your prospective clients are likely marketing directors or website designers who look to LinkedIn for new technological developments. Go to them! Publish your content in more than one place, every. single. time.

But wait, there’s more! Use your content in your email marketing. The more you publish quality content, the more likely people will care about what you say and look to you for industry info so, create a newsletter where prospects can sign up to hear more from you. Spoon feed them the content you’ve worked so hard on by sending it out in your newsletter.

By maximizing the reach of every piece of content you reach an exponentially higher number of prospects. Don’t forget that leads don’t convert after their first click. You often need 7 or more touch points to make an impression.

Maintain and Change as Necessary

Every industry is different. Don’t just guess at what works best for your company, use your analytics to determine how successful your efforts are. How many people are seeing your content? What about clicks? How many are converting? These kinds of questions are what will show you the results (good and bad) of your inbound marketing strategy.

But how do you know if the customers you’re converting have been acquired through your inbound marketing strategy?

You can ask – Using surveys through your email marketing efforts can help you figure out just who has been using your product or service over a longer period of time. You can also find out how or why they converted. Having an open dialogue with customers also builds brand trust. People want to feel like your business cares about them.

Analytics – The backend of your website and content promotion tools can tell you a lot. You can see what part of your email newsletter viewers are clicking on. If you’re selling a tangible product, analytic tools can help pinpoint your repeat customers. Google Analytics shows you what content is performing best. Seek out the information that can better help direct your marketing efforts.

Test, test, test – The best way to know if something is working — run tests. Automation tools are the future of testing. You can run A/B tests on any variable you’d like. You can change the CTA in your newsletter, move the layout of your services page, and test different copy for your signup window. Then study the results to optimize your inbound strategy.

Wrap Up

Knowing where to focus your efforts to create an effective inbound marketing strategy isn’t always easy, but this outline is a great place to start! Now it’s time to create your own unique practical inbound marketing strategy. Get to it!

If the content creation aspect of this strategy looms over your head like a dark cloud, it might be time to consider outsourcing your content marketing. Lucky for you, you’re in the right place. (;

Check out our SEO blog writing service or schedule a free consultation today!

The post A Practical Inbound Marketing Strategy for B2B Companies appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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How We Rank #1 Get a Million Visitors (And Win All Our New Customers)

The battle for customer attention is real. Even more so now, with everything going on in the world, we are seeing a massive spike in new client requests for thought leadership content.

While some companies chase people around the web with ads and fill their sites with product promotions, we believe in the power of consistent content marketing to reach, engage, and convert relevant audiences to your business.

We know it works because the approach we use with our clients is the same: all our new customers come from the engaging, consistent, and customer-focused content we publish each week.

Our weekly content simply answers the questions our audience is asking, using the keywords they search for, and all with the goal of helping them to solve real problems with helpful content.

We make every effort to simply help our audience in the content we create. We believe that allows us to rank on the top pages of Google for hundreds of some pretty important keywords.

And serve nearly 1 MILLION WEBSITE VISITORS a year!

The Build-Up

Since I launched Marketing Insider Group in June of 2015, we have been publishing articles, creating deep thought leadership in the form of e-books, webinars and in-person keynotes, and using this approach as our only source of leads, revenue, and new clients.

Yes. Thought leadership. That’s all about sharing what you know with passion and resolve to help others:

We share that content out on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and sometimes IG. And I present as often as I can to live and virtual audiences. All with one goal in mind: to teach other marketers how they can get these same results.

Some people have asked why I give away so much knowledge and the answer is simple:

It works really well. And when I discovered this secret, I just had to share it.

  • It delivers ROI.
  • It doesn’t cost much.
  • It carries no risk.
  • And it works better than anything I’ve ever tried or seen in marketing!

And so, here, in this post, I’m going to share these secrets with you, so you can apply these insights and results to your business. Because we are our own case study!

The truth is, the only marketing I have ever done for Marketing Insider Group is the actual content builder service we sell: twice weekly, customer-focused, engaging, and helpful blog content.

weekly blog service

Organic Search Traffic and Rankings

First off, why is organic search traffic and rankings so important?

The main reason is because organic search traffic is the single largest source of traffic for corporate websites. So you should be highly focused on growing and maintaining that source.

So, how much organic search traffic do we get at Marketing Insider Group? A lot for a small little company . . .

We got just under 1 million visitors to our website in the last year. And 77% of them came from organic search.

More than 700,000 from Google, if you prefer.

The health of your website (and your brand overall) can be assessed based on whether your organic search traffic is down, flat or up.

Marketing Insider Group is barely a five-year-old company, but you can see in this image below that since we launched in June, 2015, we have increased our organic search rankings significantly since that time:

In fact, our top 100 rankings have grown 5-6x in 5 years!

  • We rank in the top 100 search results for 23,305 keywords!
  • We rank in the top 3 for 577 keywords. We rank in the top 10 for 1,451 keywords.
  • We rank for important customer keywords such as What is marketing, Brand storytelling, How to measure content marketing ROI, Why is content marketing important, Content marketing workshop, and more…
  • We get traffic and rankings similar to much larger companies with hundreds of employees, thousands of customers, and who are worth millions of dollars.

And those keyword rankings have helped us grow our organic search traffic by 6x in just the last 3 years to nearly 100,000 visitors per month:

We have dozens of pages that show up in Google’s coveted instant answers and featured snippets:

And nearly ALL our leads and new customers come from direct or indirect conversions from our website. What do we pay for those leads? Nothing.

I’d like to believe that we earn those leads by providing valuable information to our audience.

Because the people who know us, who subscribe to us, they share our content.

It then reaches more and more people every day. Some of those people link to our content. Some of those people reach out to us and ask for proposals and contracts.

Today, we average one digital marketing strategy project each month. We are delivering more than 100 SEO-driven blog articles to our clients per month.

We have clients that are listed on the Fortune 500. We have clients who are founders from growing startups who don’t even have a single marketing employee.

And we crush our competition because of the approach we take using customer insights to create effective content marketing plans with measurable results.

One of our clients shared this chart of the impressive 50% to 615% year-over-year organic search traffic improvements they are seeing since they started working with us!

In short, we deliver results for our clients, using the same technique we use for ourselves.

Why Does This Work?

This approach works because we know what Google is looking for: quality content, published consistently.

On our site, we started by publishing 1-2 articles per week.

Then we tested 2-3 articles per week. We tried guest posts. We tried syndicated posts. We tested 5 articles per week. We tried 7 articles per week.

In the end, what we found works the best is consistently publishing content on a few key themes. For me that includes:

  • Content Marketing articles 1x per week
  • Marketing Strategy articles 1x per week
  • Event marketing, or employee activation articles 1x per week

What I most want you to take away from this in-depth post is that even a small company, with no budget, and one employee can achieve massive marketing results just by publishing quality content consistently.

Content That Nails It

I have published 982 blog posts as of the day I wrote this article.

We typically write about 1,000 words on each topic, but some of our posts go as long as 3,500 words!

Yes, long-form works better than short content in most of the cases, because it builds expertise, authority, and trust — what Google calls EAT!

We have had more than 111,200 shares on Facebook, 340,000 shares on Twitter, 7,300 shares on Reddit and hundreds of thousands of shares on LinkedIn (they don’t allow access to the data).

Our Most Shared Posts Ever

(Check them out, one by one. See for yourself what works!)

3. Top 25 Content Marketing Influencers (2,700 shares  excluding LinkedIn)

2. Top 20 Content Marketing Blogs You Need To Read Every Day (2,800 shares excluding LinkedIn)

1. 26 Cheat Sheets Every Digital Marketer Needs (3,000 shares excluding LinkedIn)

Posts with the Highest Traffic Ever

3. Why Social Media Is Important To Your Business (182K views)

2. What is Thought Leadership and When Should You Use It (189K views)

1. 6 Examples of Genius Brand Storytelling (209K page views)

Best Articles in the Past Year

How Often Should You Blog (38K views)

10 Digital Marketing Trends You Need To Know (41K views)

If you went through these, you’ll be able to better understand…

Our Approach to Lead Generation

We have seen thousands of leads convert from the content we’ve produced. In fact,

  • 438 of our articles have produced more than 1 lead in the last 3 years.
  • There are another couple of hundred articles that have delivered at least one lead.
  • A couple of articles have produced over 100 leads.

But the main point of my analysis into what delivered all our leads is this: no one article produced ROI. It’s the always-on approach that delivers the results. It’s because we create content that converts ALL. THE. TIME. Not an article or two, here and there, whenever we think we have time. Make sense?

We share our content on the socials. And many of our leads come directly from the connections that our content has nurtured.

We experience super short sales cycles. We have never been in a bidding war with another company.

In full disclosure, I have tried some paid. We spent a few hundred bucks last summer on paid search. Every once in a while my ego gets the best of me and I boost a post I really liked on Facebook.

How many leads have those tests delivered:

A full, round ZERO!

I’m totally OK to test stuff. But if there is one thing that is wrong with marketing today it is the amount of budget spent on activities that don’t deliver results.

Which leads me to agree with this guy:

The 7-Step Process to Get a Million Site Visitors with Zero Ad Spend

Here’s how we do it:

  1. We focus on the keywords our audience is using and the questions they have when they search for solutions to their marketing and business challenges.
  2. We plan ahead and brainstorm articles for 6-12 months in order to create a content calendar.
  3. We share everything we know when we answer those questions. We use examples, quotes, videos, infographics, keynotes — whatever we think will help our audience.
  4. We share our content to our newsletter subscriber list, and our social accounts. But we also share other people’s content. Even competitors’! Because we know that is the best way to provide value to our audience.
  5. We are constantly testing our nurture streams and offers to inform our audience of what we do, without being too intrusive.
  6. We track and measure SEO (impressions, rankings, and traffic) relative to our competitors, the mainstream media, and influencers.
  7. We use that tracking to identify new ideas for content we would like to publish on those keywords. And then continue the same cycle.

And oh, we stick to our plan, no matter what.

I know that if you have read this far (oh my gosh thank you!) you must be wondering if this is too good to be true. Or you might really wish you had similar results.

I hope you can see with the data and screen shots that this really is how we have grown our traffic and leads with simple, helpful and regular content.

And if you want to see these same results, we’d like to point you to our standard, end-of-post call-to-action here:

If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content that’s published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service. Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books (a whopping $29 value). Get started today–and generate more traffic and leads for your business.

The post How We Rank #1 Get a Million Visitors (And Win All Our New Customers) appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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