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Wednesday, March 30th, 2016
   

Pull Customers In by Leveraging Latest Inbound Marketing Trends

In today's online world, your marketing communication can get lost in an ocean of competing brand messages. One of the best solutions is inbound marketing, which uses content created with the specific goal of pulling customers to your website. Studies find inbound marketing can generate 54 percent more leads than traditional marketing tactics. Read on for the latest inbound marketing trends, and how to profit from them.

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UTILIZE USER-GENERATED CONTENT TO BOOST ENGAGEMENT

Inbound marketing trends and best practices are ever evolving. One of the latest hot buttons is user-generated content. Studies find this strategy 20 percent more effective in generating buying decisions. Twenty-five percent of the search results for top brands lead to user-generated content. To tap user-generated content's power, use customer photos, social media comments and their reviews of your products in your marketing stream. The likely result: Increased customer engagement and brand awareness.

We examine the most important inbound marketing trends of 2016, and explain how to leverage those trends for maximum marketing effectiveness.

In a study of respondents across B2B, B2C and non-profit organizations, the preferred marketing approach of 75 percent of companies was inbound marketing, with just 25 percent choosing outbound marketing.

 

TELL YOUR CUSTOMERS' STORIES VIA INBOUND MARKETING

A subset of customer-generated content in inbound marketing is the use of customer stories about their experiences with your brand. These stories connect with customers on very personal levels, helping humanize brands and creating authenticity. Starbucks' recent "Meet Me at Starbucks" attention-generating campaign asked customers to relate their tales of getting together at Starbucks on social media. Encourage your customers to send visually-engaging stories that reinforce your brand message.

While among the hottest trends in inbound marketing, user-generated content and customer storytelling are but two developments helping propel inbound marketing's prominence. Following are several additional trends well worth watching.

  • Interactive content that leverages company research is a growing force in inbound marketing. The stats and figures supplied by research can be converted into quizzes, calculators, and other engaging and interactive marketing messages.
  • For decades, serialized stories have been effective in every medium from book and newspaper publishing to television. Use the same approach by creating episodic content that tells a story, capturing customers' interest one episode at a time.
  • It is increasingly important for a brand's inbound marketing efforts to be high quality, assume different forms and be distributed through different marketing channels. This has encouraged many leading marketers to bring on professional agencies to provide content marketing, public relations and social media firepower.
  • Marketers aren't just targeting customers but micro-targeting customers and prospects, using web data. You can do the same.

 

 

Read Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage and Delight Customers Online, by Brian Halligan and Darmesh Shah

In a survey by McKinsey.com, email marketing was found to be extremely effective. Ninety-one percent of people check email every day, and 59 percent of B2B marketers say email is an effective revenue generator.

Email or call us at 708-246-4211 to learn about today's hottest inbound marketing trends and how to best use them for maximum web traffic and business development.