An eventful and challenging year is behind us and the year 2022 also has some new and exciting things in store for all of us. Much has changed, others remain constant. This also applies to the key learnings from our inbound marketing blog. In this article we have summarized the most important findings from the past year for you.
Addressing your desired customers: Content is King is still the case
Inbound builds on content. With this you attract visitors and convince them of yourself. How it works? Your content must fit your target groups and buyer personas. People are the focus of content marketing, so you should always align your content strategy with them.
Deliver informative and useful content that builds on each other and logically links content together. In this way, you create successive topic complexes that allow readers to delve more deeply into the respective topics – so-called topic clusters. These consist of a pillar content – the central main topic – and the associated cluster content – the subtopics.
And this is how you create a topic cluster
- Use surveys, interviews, and research to find out what’s on your buyer persona’s mind. Try to localize about 5-10 main problems.
- Create topic areas to which the problems can be assigned.
- Use keyword research to map subtopics to your main topics. Concentrate on long-tail keywords. These are not as competitive as short head keywords and provide detailed search results.
- Fill in your categories with possible headings.
- Research your industry to see whether your chosen topic promises success.
- All done? Then the content creation begins.
Create several topic clusters and build up a content marketing strategy. Check at regular intervals whether the content you have developed still fits the defined persona. Accept adjustments to the persona’s content and/or profile, if necessary. In addition, the following things should be planned: time and budget, technical implementation, assigned competencies and content creation.
The result of this is the content that addresses your target group precisely. This now has to be published, distributed and shared. Your own website and social media are the perfect place for this. Whether LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter, place your content wherever your desired customers are already on the go.
This is where the Slideshare platform excelled last year, especially in the B2B sector. Nevertheless, it is also important to create a clear structure and plan. Therefore, you should design a social media strategy in advance.
Generate more leads: SEO and website usability are becoming increasingly important
Once you’ve engaged your readers and visitors, your goal should be to convert them into leads. The chances of you succeeding are a lot better with a modern and user-friendly website than with an outdated one.
Still not convinced to launch your new website? Then take a look at these 10 reasons why you shouldn’t delay your website relaunch.
Equally important is active and targeted search engine optimization. What use is excellent content if it is not visible? SEO was already a topic in online marketing trends more than 10 years ago and will certainly remain so for just as long!
The timeless measure is indispensable in content marketing and is still in constant change due to the constantly changing demands of the search engines. Make sure you pay attention to the mobile optimization of your website and attach great importance to the user experience.
Closing more deals: aligning marketing, sales and service
If you have already generated more leads with our tips, there is only one step left: turning the lead into a customer.
A smooth and close cooperation between the marketing, sales and service team is the be-all and end-all. With just a few steps you can strengthen the marketing and sales alignment in your company.
If marketing hands over qualified leads to sales, it is important to plan how to deal with them sensibly and to generate as many customers as possible. Design a goal -oriented lead nurturing with the help of marketing automation and save a lot of time and effort.
These automated workflows also support you with email marketing , which is important in converting leads into customers. Especially in the ongoing pandemic, email marketing has proven to be very effective and many companies are seeing a rapid increase in ROI.
But watch out: Last year, Apple gave the e-mail world a real shock with its new data protection functions. These have caused open rates to become a little less reliable as a metric. You should therefore decide in 2022 whether opening rates are meaningful enough for you, or whether you want to use clicks on links in your emails as a benchmark for the success of your email marketing.
We’ve put together a few tips to help you design the perfect email in no time. You can also use our 36 templates
as a guide when composing your emails .
Conclusion
From visitors to leads and finally to deals: a lot has changed in 2021, other things remain the same. A new year doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the inbound marketing wheel. You should just make sure that it doesn’t overtake you with the momentum of innovations. We hope that we were able to help you with successful inbound marketing in 2021 and that you can now get even better off in 2022 with our tips.