All digital marketers want to grow their business. To do that, you need a solid digital marketing strategy B2B. One of the best and proven methodology strategies is called inbound.
In the following article, we’ll charm your freelance business with explanations on how to reach your target audience business niche faster and better. Hence, you will know step by step, what you should do to find and sell your digital marketing services.
1. What is a strategy in digital marketing
2. What is unique about referring to businesses in digital marketing
3. What is inbound marketing
4. How to build a winning inbound marketing strategy and tactics
5. What kind of tools you can use to develop inbound marketing
6. Examples of using inbound marketing in profitable niches
7. Conclusion
The first question you probably ask yourself is what is a strategy and how to implement it in digital marketing.
So strategy is the framework of every action you take in your business. It is a lighthouse that guides and directs your action plan and milestones. For instance: your strategy is to promote your business through videos. Your action plan would be to upload short videos on TikTok, Instagram, longer versions on LinkedIn, YouTube etc.
You determine the social presence strategy. From there, you create your own action plan. In digital marketing point of view, it can be:
1. Exposing and engaging on social platforms.
2. Concentrating on lead generation alone.
3. Focusing on sharing, reacting and liking other users posts.
4. Building relations with your target audience.
5. Opening distribution channels for selling your digital marketing services.
6. Connecting with influencers to sell your services.
Each strategy mentioned above is a digital marketing strategy. Be aware that strategy should be general and amorphic.
Business owners have different states of mind rather than private customers. Their main goal is to earn more money. It can be with becoming more efficient, productive, effective, etc. Business owners will always look at the bottom line: does it increase my income or save me money.
As a digital marketer, you should constantly search how you address one of those needs. When you touch entrepreneurs’ pain points, you close more deals. Every time you sell your digital services concentrate on:
1. How do you bring more traffic to the website.
2. How do you improve conversion rate.
3. How do you bring more leads.
4. How do you improve social presence.
5. How do you strengthen companies’ brand.
Each business has its own unique need. You should ask power sales questions, characterize business owners’ profiles and invent the best solution for them.
One of the strategies you should consider and commit is inbound.
It places the customers in the center. Contrary to outbound which places the firm in the middle.
When you select this strategy, think over business owners needs, dreams, routine, hobbies, interests and demographic situation. Every aspect would lead to better understanding your customers’ behavior, motivation, inspiration and eventually buying.
HubSpot separates inbound marketing to 3 parts: attract, engage and delighting stage.
Pulling your target audience to being exposed, follow and react to your publications. Your main mission is to collect their contacts like: email and telephone numbers. Alternatively, is to engage with you.
In order to become more attractive, you should be out there, present. Publish posts on a regular basis, videos, write blogs, articles, improve SEO, give checklists, worksheets or guides. Eventually, grant your target audience with real added value. Hence, you will become more trustworthy, and they will follow you.
In this phase, you will want to convert prospects into paying customers. This will be done by giving the customers solutions to their problems or helping them to reach their goals.
Here, you will start building long-term relationships by having Zoom meetings, face to face meetings, sales calls, emails sequences, private messages, WhatsApp, SMS and any other means of communication with your customers. In the end, you want them to purchase one of your services.
The last phase where you want customers to become ambassadors. Meaning they will refer other prospects to buy your product.
This will be done by giving excellent customer service, checking customer satisfaction, initiated service, availability, swift solutions for customers complaints and giving more value to customers by adding more products.
You can improve your service by utilizing bots, surveys, calling to random customers and asking for reviews, sending them unique content and even selling better, other or complementary products.
Before we start elaborating, think: what will make your prospects purchase your product? It is a simple question but it directs to the road you should walk through.
Create 2 customer profiles. Write about two average customers: what is their pain in the business, their job and life routine, dreams, goals, hobbies, interest, demographic situation and anything else that will help you get inside their heads.
You can do that by simply sending surveys, asking for reviews, analyzing who responds to your posts or videos, who reacts to your post replies, scraping prosepcts’ contact information throughout social platforms and wanting to connect to you.
After you can determine who your target audience is, now think about what they are looking for. It is a game of trail and error. Publish posts, videos, checklists, worksheets, reports, guides, webinars, podcasts, templates and more. Analyze what actions you have taken that have given the best outcome.
The answers will lead you to build a better inbound strategy. You will know what solutions your target audience are looking for. Then, how you should differentiate your digital marketing services.
In this stage, you will brand yourself as an expert in what your prospects are looking for.
You will start with inventing the best and most suitable product. Then, portraying one or more differentiation. Try to be unique as possible, to develop a competitive advantage.
Third, set a primary target to acquire X customers as a pilot.
In the end, decide what will be the inbound strategy, milestones and action plan to reach the target.
Starting with exposing yourself by using the right process to attract your prospects. Find in which platforms you want to publish, in which hours of the day, how many times a week and what would be the content. Don’t forget to measure the parameters below by using A/B testing.
1. In which publishing platforms you get the most traffic and best leads.
2. When and how many times, you should publish, to get the best results.
3. What is the content that is most engaging and gives the best leads?
Whenever you know the answers, think about how to engage with your customers.
Probably, you will have to sell on the phone or face to face. You ought to write a script and control it.
It means that you will need to introduce yourself, ask the right questions, present the product regarding prospects’ needs, move forward to close the deal and know how to handle objections. At the end, it all comes down to characterizing the prospects’ needs and raising them.
During the sales process, publish and send other customers’ reviews. It will encourage other prospects to start working with you.
Additionally, build a portfolio of jobs you have made before. You can use it to convince other prospects to close faster in the sales process.
Whenever you acquire the customers, move on to the delight stage.
Remember that remaining customers cost five times less than new customers.
Foster the relations with them by coordinating expectations, mirroring exactly what they will be given throughout the service and stand in your promises. Trust is the key here to have a long-term relationship.
Whenever customers are satisfied, try to sell other products (cross-sales) or upgrade an exciting package (up-sales). Also, asking for reviews leads to close more customers and faster. These actions will improve customers’ satisfaction.
Walk through the steps above. Then, you will have your own unique and working inbound freelance digital marketing strategy.
In order to execute inbound strategy and tactics, you need tools. For each phase there are other tools that highlight each phase separately.
In the attracting phase you should know how to manage ads, video, blogging, social media and content strategy.
In the engaging stage you should know how to use softwares in lead generation, email marketing, conversational bots and marketing automation.
In delight stage you should operate softwares that control email marketing, conversational bots, attribution reports, marketing automation
These are the paid campaigns through social network and search engines such as: Facebook ads manager, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and more.
You will have to prepare a video, sometimes edit it or use a professional and publish it.
You can prepare an animated video through Toonly.
Second, you can create and edit a video using Viddyoze. You can animate the video, use texts and more.
Third, you can form animated shorts GIFs utilizing Crello.
Fourth, you can create webinars or podcasts with Be.Live. Software that assists with making the video and editing it.
Most of the time it means writing articles on your website or other websites. What is common to both of them is the need for organic exposure. Hence, you will need applications that help you manage your SEO.
You can use Long tail pro. This cloud software lets you apprehend what is the volume of a keyword search, suggestions to other related keywords, competitors backlinks analysis and more.
If you built your website with WordPress, you could use Squirrly SEO. This application shows keywords ranking, increasing and decreasing in Google ranking, social sharing, page authority, etc.
These tools concentrate on managing your social presence. You can use applications that help you reveal what content is better to share and assist with uploading automatically posts.
One of the recommended applications for posts automation uploading is content studio. You can share your posts through the main social platforms in one place like: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Google my business and more.
A great other software to research which content shares the most is social animal. Its features are content tracking, headline analyzer, influencers, most shared content on Facebook and Twitter, most shared blogs on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Reddit.
These applications assist you with comprehending which content you should upload.
One recommended software you can use is Copysmith. The software will generate various titles, snippets, blog ideas, blog outline, blog post and even content ideas.
These tools can be utilized both on an engaging and delighting stage.
These are applications which you can send email to automatically. In case of engaging, your purpose will be to pull prospects to ask you to return to them or to purchase a service. Whenever we discuss delighting, you want the customers to feel you didn’t forget them.
For email marketing you can operate the application named SendFox. It will send emails automatically from different campaigns, many integrations, HTML forms, landing pages, adding contacts from Excel charts you have created, etc.
Utilize these kinds of applications for taking prospects contacts, message automation and even up-selling or cross-selling. You can examine it in an engaging and delightful stage.
One of the best applications for marketing automation is Texau. You can scrap your contacts and reveal their phone numbers and emails. You can also send automatic messages through LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter to your followers or connections.
Another great software is called OptinMonster. You can use it to pop-up messages for prospects who want to abandon your website, retarget prospects, use limited time offers to push customers to close or upgrade their existing service.
This tool can be managed in an engaging and delightful stage.
When engaging, its main purpose is to connect with the visitor. Try to start a conversation that leads prospects to buy or leave their contacts.
In the delighting stage, you want to give the fastest solution and available service. Hence, customers will be more satisfied.
One of the tools to do that is Botsify. It is an auto that responds to visitors’ websites. You can add phrases and words that you think customers would use. The bot will respond automatically regarding each word.
These are softwares which their main purpose is to collect prospects, contacts for engaging.
One of the ways to push potential customers to leave their contacts is by giving away. You can award prospects who write their email address with worksheets, checklists, reports and more.
For that particular outcome you can purchase Beacon. This is an application that lets you write worksheets, checklists, videolooks and more. Then, you can edit a contact form inside the Beacon to take their emails, phone numbers and more.
These are applications that generate and send reports on what services have been given and its results. It is being used in the delighting stage.
You can generate and send automatic reports with the free tool Google Data Studio. You decide what data you want to collect from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Hence, you can analyze visitors behavior, SEO and even add tables, graphs and charts.
Until now, you should have a clue what kind of inbound strategy and tactics you can implement in your digital freelance business. Furthermore, what tools can help you achieve your goals?
In the last section, we’ll enchant you with implementation of inbound marketing. It will be done in ne of the most profitable weight loss niches.
First categorize who is your potential customer:
It can be dietitian, institutes for weight loss, private physical coaches, etc.
Second, think about one prospect who can be a common customer
Let’s take a male, 35 year old, and have two children. He is a freelance dietitian. He likes to travel and do yoga. He arrives at work at 9 o’clock, and receives patients until 12. He eats lunch. 12:30 moves over the dietitian plan of his patients until 14. Then, he promotes himself through sales phone calls, meetings and marketing. At 16:30 he receives more patients until 19:30. He goes back home to take his children to sleep. At 21:00 he is with his wife and goes to sleep at 22:30.
When you know who your customer is, you can start attracting the prospects to engage.
You want to reach revenues of $4000 a month at the end of the year
Your milestones can be $500 in the first 3 months.
In the first 6 months it can be $1500.
In the first 9 months $2500.
You have to be aware of the amount of dietitian you need to close, to reach these milestones and main targets.
Then, your action plan can be publishing 3 posts and 1 video each week. Also, you will publish 3 more checklists and worksheets a month. Its main purpose is to guide the dietitian on how to lose weight for his patients. Hence, he will receive more leads.
You will write posts on how to use digital marketing to bring prospects for weight lost like:
- 5 ways to write an attractive title to catch the eyes of weight lost customers at 14:00
- How to write the right tips for weight lost customers when you market your dietitian freelance business
- The 90% system to bring more traffic for weight lost customers to dedicate more time for patients
You will upload videos about demonstrating on tools for lead generation, how to upload ad campaigns on Facebook targeting weight lost customers and how to write checklists for weight lost customers.
When dietitian freelancers start leaving their contacts or react to your messages. Now you can start selling to them.
Whenever you catch leads, you should work, call them or have Zoom meeting with them within a business day. Work with a sales script to raise dietitian needs, address their needs, ask them to close and deal with hesitations.
After you close the deals, you should strengthen the relations with the dietitian freelancers. You will ought to ask for reviews to publish on your website. Initiate contacts with exciting customers to examine their satisfaction. Meanwhile, try to up-sell, cross-sell and take leads from them.
Inbound marketing is the future of sales and marketing. As a digital marketer, this is probably one of the best strategies to become successful.
It consists of an attractive stage. You should comprehend what your prospects want and need. Then, publish content that addresses these issues. Last, Strive to collect their contacts: emails or phone numbers.
Next, engage with the prospects. Sell them your services on the phone, face to face, on zoom or through marketing (Fiverr, Up-work, etc). You should apprehend how to meet their needs and solve their problems.
In the end, keep good relations with your existing customers, upgrade the deals and ask for leads.
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