As a noted statesman once suggested: Those that fail to plan, plan to fail. As America's first ambassador, Benjamin Franklin knew the importance of creating a marketing strategy to cultivate interest and support worldwide, long before the Internet was born. These days, inbound marketers have a variety of tools to tell them how well they’re doing with their marketing plans, making it easier to tweak them until they’re perfect. One goal that is common with all inbound marketers is high traffic counts. However, other strategies like social networking, may also have goals like cultivating shares and likes. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques can be a first step towards establishing an estimated traffic volume, but ultimately what determines the sale is the buyer persona. When marketers take care to address all these aspects of inbound marketing, they’re well on their way to creating a winning strategy.
Google Analytics can reveal interesting information on traffic volumes for specific keywords that have been searched via its search engine. It can also help inbound marketers locate long tail keywords that are less competitive, but can still yield high traffic counts. Analytics, other than Google, can even tell you what your competitors are using in their marketing strategies, too. Once you know what keywords to target, how much traffic you can expect, and how it compares to your competitors, you can then start to market these items with specific goals in mind.
In the past, advertising success was measured solely in conversions. Conversions are still highly important, but may not tell the whole story for an inbound marketer. The goal of inbound marketers is to create buzz for their website by targeting a specific demographic to attract attention, often anticipating the audience's needs via buying personas (these are special demographics most likely to convert). Track them. Other goals are just as important to track are likes and shares on social networking sites. How many times was a tweet retweeted? What topics were of most interest to your friends and followers? Which links brought in the most traffic? These are things the inbound marketer must also track as potential successes.
content that attracts attention and place it in several venues: a blog, social networking sites, and article archives. Include links that take people back to your website and track which are most successful. If you are trying to tweak your content, consider doing A/B split testing by modifying a title or a call-to-action and seeing which version gets the most responses. Redesign the website so that it is more customer-oriented and less product-centric. Responsive website design will accommodate mobile phone users while letting those on their desktop still see everything perfectly, too. The content should appeal to your customers and be interactive to get them to participate with your business as unofficial promoters of your site. Keep tweaking your keywords, topics, content, and mailing lists until you discover the sweet spot where your products virtually sell themselves. It may take a few tries, but once you get the hang of it, you will be able to keep your audience’s interest high, generating even more traffic as your content gets shared and commented on across the web over time.
