Secrets to Building Your Brand Through Inbound Marketing

A strong brand identity and the philosophy behind inbound marketing are perfectly matched to create marketing growth that is greater than the sum of the two parts.

Both are focused on bringing your story to the right people at the right time to increase website traffic, generate online leads, and develop those leads into customers. (Find more on creating your brand identity in Six Steps to Creating Enviable Brands.)

If you are implementing inbound marketing through a marketing automation and content management program such as HubSpot, it is the perfect time to strengthen your brand identity and carve out your place in your industry.

How to Incorporate Your Brand in Your Inbound Strategy

1. Know your target audience

The first step is the same in both developing a brand identity and in preparing to tackle inbound marketing with an automated solution such as HubSpot. Research.

Through research and discovery, you will learn about how your brand is viewed, who your customers are, and what they want in a solution. Knowing your target audience is to creating strong customer personas that spell out precisely who you are trying to reach.

Personas are also a key element in segmenting your marketing efforts, allowing you to focus in on the specifics of each persona and create the content that speaks to that persona’s interests, pain points and perspectives.

2. Create messaging and content that addresses their pain points

Use what you learned about your various personas or target audiences to create the messaging and content that address their pain points.

Your messaging should include the benefits of your product or service that are pertinent to each persona, plus the specific keywords and terms that each persona would search in finding your brand.

You will return to this messaging time and again as you implement your inbound marketing campaigns, to maintain a consistent brand identity through all steps of the campaign.

With your personas and messaging in mind, you will create the content that prospects are seeking that kicks off the inbound marketing methodology, building each piece of content as a reflection of your brand. The content you create not only attracts visitors to your website, but also reinforces your brand identity by focusing on your core values and benefits.

3. Focus on filling the sales funnel

The content you create for your inbound marketing campaigns can, and should, take many different forms.

From blog posts and infographics to templates, calculators, case studies, video and product comparisons, your content needs to fill the sales funnel from top to bottom. That means creating awareness, consideration and decision stage content that reaches each of your personas.

Awareness stage materials are quite often the meat and potatoes of a business blog, introducing new visitors to precisely who and what you are. The blog is also a key starting point for inbound marketing, so much so that you may even want to think of it this way: Why Your Blog Should Be the Center of Your Marketing Universe.

The most often overlooked stage of the sales funnel, but one of the most essential to effective inbound marketing, is the consideration stage. Find tips on reach consideration stage leads in this blog post: Consideration Stage Marketing Content Sets the Stage for a Sales Win.

When leads access the content you create for the bottom of the funnel—pricing sheets, sales presentations, customer references—it may be a sign they are ready to shift sales. Consider using content-driven criteria as part of your process for identifying qualified leads.

Plan your content as complete campaigns, with a natural progression through the sales funnel of relevant content. You’ll find step-by-step instructions here: How to Turn Your Content Ideas Into Complete Marketing Campaigns.

4. Promote content to attract visitors

All of that content can’t showcase your brand or drive inbound marketing, though, if you aren’t promoting it. While you will get an SEO boost from the added blog posts and landing pages involved when you ramp up content creation for inbound marketing, to truly drive increased traffic and lead generation, you need to promote your content.

That means using tactics such as social media, paid promotion, and email marketing to expand your blog readership and your overall reach.

More about the problem of not promoting content, and the ways to solve that problem are in this white paper: Blogging Mistake: Not Promoting Your Blog.

As with content creation, keep your content promotion focused on carrying out your brand identity and key messages, to maximize the impact of a comprehensive content and inbound marketing strategy.

5. Nurture leads with targeted emails

The ability of inbound marketing’s content to go beyond increasing website traffic and leads to driving additional sales is reliant on the lead nurturing process. Lead nurturing is a series of automated emails offering leads relevant content or other offers to move them to the next level of the sales funnel.

It is lead nurturing that develops an ongoing relationship with the 75 percent of leads who aren’t yet ready to buy.

Each of these emails, targeted with the messaging that addresses a specific persona and topic, is yet another opportunity to reinforce your primary brand message and build an image of your company in the minds of your contacts.

A strong brand identity provides an anchor for your inbound marketing strategy, while inbound marketing has the potential to amplify your brand’s message and grow its presence in the market. It’s a march made in marketing heaven.

For a real life look at how JONES brings together a strong brand identity and the inbound marketing philosophy in a comprehensive strategy, download our Case Study: Brand Identity.