By Ed Pierce, Fleet Industry Marketer
A significant number of marketing tactics available today and the evolving state of marketing best practices challenge marketers to find the best, ROI-driven successful Inbound marketing strategies.
Your website, content development and marketing, social-media efforts, and email-marketing campaigns — all of your digital presence — work together to become an effective lead generation and qualification source.
Let’s look at specific digital tactics that address the needs of fleet service providers who generally face long sales cycle times as prospects assess numerous stakeholder needs, research a variety of different offerings involving providers from disparate fields, and weigh the pros and cons of each.
The result: building brand awareness and trust over a long buyer decision process is important, and a singular branding message must be delivered through multiple tactics. Here are a few:
1. A blog
According to HubSpot—the SaaS company that popularized the term “inbound marketing” circa 2006—marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to get a positive ROI. It pays to be consistent, too: those who publish blog content at least 16 times a month generate 3.5x more website traffic and 4.5x more leads compared to companies that only update their blogs a few times a month.
A blog is also a terrific way to answer your prospects’ pressing questions (e.g., How should I structure my Google Ads account?) in accessible long-form content.
2: An infographic
As awesome as written content can be, people don’t always have the time (or the desire) to sit down and consume 2,000 words about long-tail keywords, for example. Sometimes, your prospect just wants a quick snapshot of insightful data, ideally presented in an aesthetically pleasing format.
Plus, if the information you’re sharing is especially valuable, there’s a good chance it will generate considerable buzz – retweets, follower sharing, and so on.
3. A whitepaper
The definition and purpose of a whitepaper depends on who you ask. The industry you’re in and the goals you pursue certainly influence the final product.
For our purposes, we’ll define a whitepaper as an in-depth, well-researched piece of educational content that adopts a somewhat more formal tone than your average blog post. As a rule, assume that the prospects who download your whitepaper are expecting higher degrees of rigor, depth, originality, and value.
The key advantage of a whitepaper over a blog post or an infographic is that—in addition to providing value to the people who qualify for your product or service—you can require contact information in exchange. That way, after readers have downloaded your content, you can use email marketing to nurture them closer to conversion.
4: eBook
An eBook may be seen as an extended white paper with the same benefits, namely, an opportunity to develop your brand as an authoritative resource of actionable, insightful information.
5: Case History
Possibly even more effective than a white paper, a case history (or, case study) relates a success story of a company that purchased the service or product and achieved quantifiable results. A case history, especially closely related to solving the reader’s pain points, overcomes skepticism and reinforces a planned purchase.
6: Webinar
A webinar that features a member (or a few members) of your content team, along with industry “influentials” who can support the user need underpinnings of the sales proposition can be both engaging and effective. Webinars in 2020 are easy to arrange and control; however, be sure to promote the program well in advance to draw a crowd.
7: Social Media Posts
A continuous campaign of posts on social media is effective in gaining share of mind and building the number of interested followers. Mix information with promotion, however. Sales messaging alone will wear followers’ patience thin. Use infographics, video and animation to capture attention. Finally, repost the corporate posts through your sales, client service, and account management employees’ accounts rather than just the corporate account. This helps strengthen your brand at the relationship level.
8. SEO – Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization work entails on-page programming directly on your website to make your content more visible on a search engine like Google Chrome. Off-page SEO encompasses all the work that must be done to acquire links to your content from reputable websites. Each link indicates to search engines that your content is good and, therefore, worthy of moving up the organic ranks.
If you have other suggested inbound marketing tactics or success stories you’d like to share, feel free to drop me a note at wepierceiv@outlook.com.
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