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The internet today is bustling with businesses scrambling to obtain their share in the ever expanding online community. Every day, new advertisements, newsletters, social media posts, and blogs get published to reach out to the billions of internet users. Amidst all the noise, growing your audience for your advertising campaigns is as challenging as ever.
But what if the key to growing your business is not to reach out to more people, but to nurture the connections that you already have? By focusing more on building relationships with your audience, you could even make future prospects find you instead. Here are the five known methods that will help you grow your audience and forge stronger relationships with your leads:
Use the Best Inbound Marketing Practices
Producing and promoting content on various channels such as social media has been effective, until everyone else started doing it. This has made reaching out to new audiences a lot more costly especially for new advertisers. So instead of launching expensive ad campaigns and purchasing email lists, a lot of digital startups fared better by providing content that attracted people towards their brand. This is the main idea behind inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing focuses on one of the primary building blocks of an online business – quality content. Blogging should be the first in your inbound marketing checklist. Not only can it attract the right people to your brand, it will also develop your authority as an expert in your niche.
Remember that a remarkably-written content must aim to educate and focus on the problems of your target audience. Do not focus on your brand or try to sell to your readers too early. They must first receive value, which is the information they’re after, before they’ll be willing to do business with you.
Use Social Listening Tools
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If you want to craft the most effective content for inbound marketing, the needs of your audience should serve as your focal point. Social listening tools help advertisers observe how the social community interacts with their content. Using these tools, you can refine your content strategy to cater to your target audience.
There are plenty of social listening tools that will provide you with crucial data to optimize your content. BuzzSumo and BuzzBundle are among the most popular ones. These tools will also enable you to study the interactions between your potential audience and competing brands, making them a very effective weapon for a brutal competition.
Using social listening tools, you can also review the strongest influencers in your inbound strategy. These are the profiles that send the most traffic through backlinks or with social shares.
Tap into Existing Communities
Internet users tend to seek out communities aligned to their interests. This will allow them to have meaningful and enjoyable interactions with other individuals as well as professionals and companies that offer valuable information. Through existing online communities, you can freely advertise your brand by showcasing your expertise on particular subject matters. This will allow new relationships to form naturally between you and your target audience.
To reach the most people, you should prioritize first on establishing your profile (for your company or yourself) in major platforms such as Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Subreddits, and Google+ Communities. Keep in mind that instead of promoting your brand, focus on contributing to the community by providing relevant content.
There is nothing wrong with mentioning your brand every once in a while, but it’s better to let other members discover your site on their own. Retain your focus on forming personal connections with your audience through these channels and you’ll soon be generating strong leads.
Reach Out to Influencers
Influencer marketing is a recent trend that enables online businesses leverage the connections of established and reputable influencers. It focuses more on the credibility of experts or thought leaders that hold more influence among their peers. Influencers may also be identified from social media networks where engagement is most abundant. To learn how much these influencers affect the buying behaviour of consumers, you can refer to the following infographic:
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A social listening tool can help you find potential influencers you can work with. Aside from the aforementioned tools above (BuzzSumo and BuzzBundle), Followerwonk by Moz is also a great option. Also try to reach out to popular blogs in your niche and discuss the possibility guest posting.
Launch Ad Campaigns
Launching ad campaigns for your products may not be as effective as before, but it is a great way to incorporate in your inbound marketing strategy. Instead of promoting a product, use ads to increase the visibility and exposure to your most engaging content. Don’t forget to have a conversion strategy that will turn your visitors into leads or potential buyers.
Once you turn visitors into leads, you can employ an on-going content strategy to nurture them as they move down the sales funnel. Again, focus on developing connections that foster trust and advocacy to your brand. You can rely on a proven advertising agency to improve your success with this strategy.