How to Use Inbound Marketing to Engage Your Target Audience

Using inbound marketing is one of the best ways to engage a target audience. With traditional outbound techniques, you call on any number in the phone book or post an ad where anyone can see it, so you’re not really targeting anyone. You’re just hoping someone will be interested. But with inbound, you’re zeroing in on a target audience, so you can engage with them in order to convert them into customers. It’s a highly successful marketing technique that can give you a great ROI. Here’s how.

Before you can even begin to target your audience and engage the right type of customer, you need to understand who that is. Perform some market research ahead of time and figure out who’s most likely to be interested in your products or services. For best results, be as specific as possible. Are they male or female? What age bracket do they belong to? What’s their job description and role at the company? Are they parents or single bachelors? The more you now about your target audience, the easier it will be to engage with them.

SEO is a powerful inbound marketing tool. Done right, it can drastically improve your website traffic and it can send the right kind of people to your site. By understanding, through research, the keywords of preference that your target audience has, you can use them in your content to attract them.

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Once you know who your audience is, blog to them. Anticipate their needs and write about the things they want to learn about. Answer their questions before they even know they have them. Pique their curiosity with intriguing content. When you’re only blogging about yourself and your products or services, it’s hard for anyone to connect with you through your posts. When you personalize your content, with the right topics, language, and tone that your audience will connect with, you have a better chance of engaging them. And don’t forget to add a comment section so they can get in touch with you!

Social media is great for connecting and interacting with people all over the world. You’re not boxed in to a geographical area. There are groups and communities dedicated to your type of industry and products or services. And this is where your target audience will be hanging out. If someone isn’t interested in learning about box cutters, he’s naturally not going to join a group about them, right? So create profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ and start engaging the types of people you’re looking to sell to. You can also learn a lot about their needs and interests just by listening in on conversations they’re having, too. Listening is the first step to engaging.

When someone clicks on one of your links, he should be directed to a landing page. You shouldn’t have just one landing page for all your links. You should be individualizing them based on the content and the call to action you want the visitor to perform. If you have several different target audiences, make sure to make different landing pages and calls to action that speak to each of them separately. You should have varied landing pages for the different stages in the buying cycle, too.

Inbound marketing won’t work overnight. It will take some time to research what your audience needs and then build a strategy that works around those needs. Then,your strategy will need to be put in place, worked on, and readjusted with additional information that comes from tracking your results. Inbound marketing can be highly beneficial for engaging your audience—you just need to have the patience and expertise to do it right. Know your audience, blog to them, use social media, and create individualized landing pages.

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