12 Days of an Inbound Marketing Christmas [Part 1]

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inbound marketing tips for christmas

It’s December 5 - how many times have you heard your favorite (or most-hated) holiday song?

While a partridge in a pear tree sounds romantic as a gift, and I don’t know of many people who would turn down five gold rings, some of other gifts bestowed in those infamous 12 days are more than little over-the-top.

I’d rather have someone give me my next inbound marketing campaign, all wrapped up with a bow on top, ready to launch. It would look something like this:

12 Social Media Updates

With more than 1.3 billion users logging on each day worldwide, Facebook is a force in digital marketing, with Twitter, LinkedIn and others also creating a communication web ready to reach your customers where they spend their online time (nearly 2 hours a day on average for Americans).

Social media posts should inspire, educate, entertain and engage your audience—and direct them to your website as often as possible.

More details from our blog: Using Social Media to Drive Traffic, Leads & Sales.

11 Blog Posts

A business blog is the center of the inbound marketing strategy. It is the primary content engine on your business website, providing opportunities for placement of calls-to-action that lead to landing pages and lead capture.

Businesses that publish 11 blog posts a month generate 4 times as many leads as those that blog 4 or fewer times monthly. But all that blogging takes time, so a few quality posts dropped into a Christmas stocking should put a smile on any marketer’s face.

More about blogging from our own blog:

10 Nurturing Emails

Only about a fourth of new leads are ready to buy when they first convert on your website. They are still in the awareness or comparison stages of the sales funnel. Warm up these cool leads with an automated series of nurturing emails offering additional content, relevant to their initial interaction on your site, that provides the information they need to make a purchase decision.

Many business buyers say they have completed 80 percent of the decision process before ever talking to a sales person. That means lead nurturing emails are essential to develop a connection during those days or weeks of research.

More lead nurturing tips from our blog:

9 Calls-to-Action

Calls-to-action, or CTAs, are the buttons, the phrases, the invitations to your website visitors (or social media followers) to click, join, download or try an offer. They should appear throughout your website, blog and social media in ways both obvious and subtle, encouraging visitors to click them and be taken to a landing page where they access the offer and are converted into leads.

If only making the holidays perfect could be as simple as, "click here for a magical Christmas!"

More CTA insights:

8 Longtail Keywords

When companies like SemRush analyze millions of keywords and searches and compile the data (like in this report) it becomes instantly obvious that getting a top search ranking for less-specific, high-volume keywords is going to be nearly impossible for smaller websites and businesses. That’s why it is essential to focus on developing the longtail keywords or phrases that are more specifically relevant to your business.

Rather than focus on a broad keyword like “accounting” use specifics such as “small business income tax preparation for contractors.” Instead of “cataracts” think “minimally-invasive cataract surgery in St. Louis.”

More tips on keywords and SEO:

7 Infographics

When business decision makers are asked what they want from marketing content, their answers revolve around a few things: reliable information, visual presentation, and quick. (See more results here: Content B2B Buyers Want Most.) Infographics fit that description.

Quick to read, visually-engaging, and offering up complex statistics in an easy-to-understand format, infographics are liked and shared 3 times more often on social media than text-based content.

Ready to start?

How to Create Your Own Awesome Infographics

You can see our own complete collection of inbound marketing infographics on our Pinterest page here: JONES Inbound Marketing Infographics.

That only gets me halfway through my marketing wish list! But, it’s a busy time of year, so I’ll finish it later this week and let you get back to your own lists of gifts to buy, events to attend, and inbound marketing campaigns to wrap up before the end of the year.

In the meantime, if you are curious about how all of these elements fit together, download Creating a Winning Inbound Marketing Program. It shows the pieces of one of the most successful campaigns we helped Primaris craft for its inbound marketing strategy, which took the healthcare consulting firm from a nearly nonexistent online presence to generating more than a thousand leads through its website in the first year of inbound.