If you want to grow your business, effective inbound marketing is the most efficient way to grow. The benefits of inbound marketing are well known. You only have to develop content once and it will continue to serve your business forever. In addition, it becomes the cornerstone of your other marketing efforts. You have unique content to share on social media, and content you can use to nurture leads.
In this article, we’ll explore 4 tactics that are outbound in nature to massively increase the efficacy of your inbound efforts. We’ll look at how to ensure your best buyers view your work. And also, how to improve your rankings in Google for more traffic.
Boost Your Search Conversions With PPC
Google has one job. They need to deliver the best, most relevant information for every search query.
That’s a pretty big job!
Think about what that means. If there are 5000 articles written on the same topic, how do they know which one is best and deserves to be #1?
The short answer is, they don’t. Google relies (in part) on trust signifiers generated by human activity.
Imagine 100’s of people all searching for the same thing. But instead of clicking on the #1 result, the majority of searchers click on the 4th result. What would happen? Pretty soon the 4th result would move up in the search rankings. And possibly displace the #1 position.
In other words, your search conversion rate matters. A lot.
The good news is that someone else has already paid BIG bucks to find out what copy converts well for almost any topic. And you can get their research for free.
Enter your content topic into Google and look at what ads appear. Here’s an example search for marketing automation for the hospitality industry.
You’ll notice that the first two ads revolve around ‘ease of use’ so that will be an important copy idea to explore for this article.
Ads cost a small fortune to run and PPC marketers take their budgets very seriously. They try lots of different ad variations and let Google display the ones that get the most engagement.
In other words, they’ve already done your copy optimization for you. Look at the wording used in the ads and see if you can incorporate it into your own copy.
Did Your Target Reader See Your Content?
We create content to solve problems for our ideal clients. It gives us an opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership. And give the reader a deeper look at how we perform services.
But what if your best prospects never see your content? Here’s the thing. 7.5 MILLION blog posts get published Every. Single. Day.
How many articles have been written on your topic? Probably more than a million already. If you want buyers to find your content it needs to rank in the top 5 positions, or it’ll probably get missed.
So what to do?
When you create content designed to help a specific niche, it doesn’t help them if they don’t see it. You made it for them so they deserve a chance to review it. Otherwise, what’s the point in creating it in the first place? Fortunately, this is easy to do using email outreach.
Email outreach may sound difficult and time consuming. But it’s dead easy when someone else does the work. Ask an outsourced sales assistant to make a list of your best clients and share your content with the people it was intended to help.
In your email tell them that the article was written with them in mind. And highlight the value you think they’ll get by reading it. Then ask if you can send them the article url. You’ll get more engagement by asking if they are interested rather than just sending an article link.
Lots of people are very receptive to this sort of approach. And it’s a great way to make yourself known to the people you most want to serve.
Advertise Your Content
Genuinely helpful content that solves a real problem for a specific audience deserves to be seen. Consider running an ad campaign to promote your content. It doesn’t cost (too) much and it can elevate your inbound efforts. You’ll have more brand recognition and more people sharing your work.
There is no shortage of ways to use ads to promote your content. But to keep costs low it’s best to run a small number of targeted ads.
On Google display network you can target websites where you know your target readers hang out.
On Facebook you can serve remarketing ads to people who have visited your website. Depending on what pages they visited, vary your content offer to bring them back to your website.
On Reddit you can target people who visit or subscribe to specific sub-reddits. So you know they have an interest in your topic and are potentially very interested in what you have to say.
Backlink & Social Outreach
A major factor of whether your content makes it onto the top page is how many trust signals your content generates. A backlink is just a link from a 3rd party site to your own. But they’re important because Google treats them as strong indicators of content value. If an authoritative site in your niche links to your content, it tells Google that your work should also be given some consideration.
Similarly, Google likes to see that content is getting some social traction. When people share your work it’s a good indication people find it helpful or useful.
As with content sharing, you can use email outreach to promote your work to acquire backlinks and social shares.
Explain the value proposition behind your article and ask if they’d like to see it. If they agree to review your article you can hint that you’d appreciate a backlink in an upcoming article. Or a social share if that’s more appropriate.
You’ll find that many people are pretty helpful. Most won’t be in a position to give you a link. But social shares take little effort and it’s a good way to help if they can’t accommodate you with a link.
And you’ll quickly discover the more people you have helping you promote your work, the better your content will do overall.
Promote Your Work!
Creating solid content is hard work. And these days it’s more challenging than ever before to get noticed.
With this in mind, use the 4 tactics above to promote your work. You’ll get your thought leadership in the hands of the people it was meant to help. And you’ll improve your brand recognition and search presence in the process.
Matthew Murray is the director of Sales Higher, a B2B lead generation firm. Sales Higher grinds through the data so you can focus on landing deals.
