What These 4 Memes Can Teach You About Inbound Marketing

Are you engaging with your audience at the right time? Are you effectively attracting and educating your website visitors and leads?

Are you seeing an ROI from inbound marketing?

If your answer is no to all of those questions, the main cause could be that you're not effectively utilizing inbound marketing.

Maybe you just need to take your inbound marketing to the next level or there are a few practices you aren't utilizing.

The way that your audience is engaging with you has evolved.

They are no longer paying attention to your flashy ads or loud advertisements. Therefore, the world of marketing has changed.

You now have to attract your prospects with quality and premium content to convert them from website visitors to leads.  You have to make your inbound marketing campaign lovable.

Here are 4 memes to help you identify four important elements of inbound marketing that will help you generate more leads and improve the overall success of your inbound marketing campaign.

4 Inbound Marketing Memes that will Help Improve Your Campaign

1. Stop Using Banner Ads

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Raise your hand if you've ever clicked on a banner ad? Is it me or is the room just really dark? Unfortunately, not a lot of people feel the need to click a banner ad.

The average click through rate of display ads is 0.1%. And about 50% of those clicks are actually accidental. Now wonder you aren't generating any contacts and leads from them.

Also, Recent studies have found that as much as 60% of people suffer from banner blindness; a condition where they have become so used to seeing banner ads on websites that they ignore them subconsciously.

Don't spend your time creating banner ads. There are more effective and engaging ways to educate your audience. Like being social. Which leads us into our next lesson.

2. Develop a Social Media Strategy

I honestly couldn't choose, so here's two memes that hopefully get the point across.

You shouldn't jump right in. Social media is not a trend that is here today and won't be here next month. I think we can all agree that social media is here to stay. It's the best way for companies to develop relationships with their target audience.

However, not every social network might be beneficial for your company. It's important to know where your audience hangs out. You might notice that you'll need to spend more time on the platforms where your audience is.

Also, consider developing a social media calendar. Keep your posting consistent. You might want to identify the best times your audience is engaging on those social networks and post your content during those times.

Not sure when you should post? Here are the best times to engage:

Facebook: The timing of Facebook posts is key. The most engagement occurs on Monday through Thursday between the hours of 10AM and 4PM. When developing your strategy for Facebook, the ideal post frequency is around 1 a day.

Twitter: The timing of tweets on Twitter get the most engagement Monday through Thursday between the hours of 1PM and 3PM. Even though that time increment has the most engagement tweets posted at 5PM have the highest percentage of retweets. Another question people inquire about is how often they should be posting on Twitter. The best frequency is between 1 and 4 tweets per hour.

LinkedIn: Engagement will be a little different on LinkedIn because you’re trying to grab the attention of company executives. The most effective times for posting are before and after business hours between 7AM and 9AM and then around 5PM and 6PM from Tuesday to Thursday.

3. Routinely Develop Marketing Content

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Are you blogging? Are you routinely publishing fresh content? If not you should be. Blog articles and ebooks are great for attracting and educating your website visitors.

Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic. The more pages you have and the more frequently you update your content, the more pages Google has to index. More index pages mean more inbound links. Which will help you improve your search engine ranking. And, who doesn't want to be number one?

Content marketing encompasses developing blog articles, ebooks, webinars, and infographics that cater to the needs and wants of your audience and buyer personas. Use your knowledge and expertise to help push your leads down the sales funnel.

Content marketing tips:

• Define your buyer personas.

• Don't write about what everyone else is. Make your content remarkable.

• Don't forget about formatting. Remember to use bullet points, bold keywords and break your content up into smaller paragraphs that are easier to digest.

• Let your content tell a story.

4. Utilize Marketing Automation

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When you think of marketing automation what is the first thing that pops into your head? The most common answer is email marketing. But that is not your only option.

If you're using HubSpot's marketing software there are a number of features you can utilize such as; progressive profiling, smart lists, smart CTAs, and lead scoring.

Unfortunately, marketing automation is flagged with the terms of cold and robotic. Expect that's not always true. There is also the misconception that marketing automation is just for generating leads and customers. In fact, marketing automation is a great tool for nurturing your leads.