Our goal in life is to see you succeed. At Xingley, we truly believe that if you are going to take your business to the next level, you have to start practicing inbound marketing. If you're reading this and scratching your head, or you'd benefit from a refresher course on the basics, here's a breakdown for you.

Inbound Marketing

Traditional outbound marketing has marketers going out and getting leads through advertising, buying emails, and other stuff no one asked for. Basically hunting people down. Inbound marketing focuses on bringing high-quality leads to you by offering valuable content, nurturing leads, and delighting customers.

Content

This is the way in which inbound marketers offer leads value. It can exist in many forms: website pages, blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, slideshows, and social media posts. Content is created with the reader in mind, so it must be relevant and remarkable.

Context

You can create the most valuable content in the world, but if you aren’t getting context right, then you lose. Everything that you produce needs to be highly relevant to your audience.

Blogging

This is essential for top-notch inbound marketing. The content you deliver via your blog helps with search engine optimization, lead generation, and thought leadership. Blogs are typically made up of article-type posts accompanied by stellar, intriguing photos. 79% of companies that had a blog, reported a positive ROI for inbound marketing in 2013. 

Search Engine Optimization

Blogging would be nothing without search engine optimization or SEO. How would the Google find you? If everyone loves you already, then you rock, but if you still have some lead generation to do, good SEO work will help you rank with search engines. The basic, BASIC elements of SEO include keywords, inbound links, outbound links, ALT image tags, and in-depth, high-quality content.

Landing Pages

These are pages on your website where visitors “land”. Inbound marketers use landing pages to attract leads with best SEO practices and guide these leads toward the ultimate goal.

Conversion Path

Sometimes your leads need a little help to get where you need them to go. Start with an intriguing call-to-action that leads to a thank you page where you can deliver an offer to your lead.

Call-To-Action

A call-to-action is typically a button, link, or photo accompanied by text that “calls” the lead over in a way they can’t refuse. Inbound marketers use these to lure the lead in. No hunting required!

Lead Nurturing

We want not just to delight our leads, but to move them down the sales funnel, yes? Through a combination of email marketing and social media marketing, we can provide our leads with valuable, contextually relevant content to help them reach our goal. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. (Forrester Research)

Email Marketing

If a lead has given you their email address, you’re in. Don’t blow it. Inbound marketers use email marketing to nurture leads by offering them value directly. And not every 30 seconds. (Here are some tips on how to excel at your email marketing, and here are some email marketing mistakes you can't afford to make.)

Social Media Marketing

If you love to connect with people, then there are about a zillion platforms you can join, but for inbound marketing purposes, you need to engage on the big four: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Use social media to increase your reach and distribute your remarkable content.

Responsive Design

The world is going mobile and marketing must follow suit. Ensuring that your website has responsive design makes it easily viewable on any device—computer, tablet, or smartphone—which is now crucial, as the number of people researching and making purchases via mobile is increasing by leaps and bounds. 37% of consumers are more likely to purchase on a mobile-optimized site. (ExactTarget, 2014 Mobile Behavior Report) 

Analytics

You can just go about your day, marketing as you wish, but your successes will start to dwindle over time. Analytics is the discovery of meaningful patterns of data. The short version: analytics are the statistics from your inbound marketing efforts which will help you determine what areas to concentrate on, develop actionable insights around, and make better decisions with going forward.

Buyer Persona

As inbound marketers, we do everything we do for the buyer persona! He or she is simply a semi-fictional representation of who your actual buyers might be, based off of market research and information from your actual customers. The more detailed the buyer persona, the easier it will be to cater content to them and, in turn, attract the highest quality leads.

You Should Be An Inbound Marketer

Are you sold yet? Inbound marketing is made up of lots of moving parts, but each one works in sync with the others to bring the right leads to your doorstep. You may think that switching your processes to inbound can be a costly task, however Search Engine Journal reports that inbound leads cost 60% less than outbound leads. The bottom line: inbound marketing gets results, so you should consider changing your marketing strategy today.