by Francois Muscat | Aug 24, 2020 | Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing
Content marketing and inbound marketing are often terms used interchangeably amongst marketers. Neither method is better than the other, and both approaches, when used together, can create fantastic results. In this blog, we go into detail below to examine the differences between them:
Content marketing
Content marketing provides valuable information that will attract and retain customers through social media, Search Engine Optimisation, and PPC. Here are some reasons why businesses should focus on content marketing as part of their digital marketing strategy:
- Almost 30% of all internet users use ad blockers, which means that your organic and paid content needs to be specific and target your audience to be effective.
- Content marketing drives six times higher conversion rates.
- Content marketing costs 62% less compared to traditional marketing plans, while the return is almost three times as high.
Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing refers to the methods used to convert customers by using content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and branding. This methodology is applied in three ways:
- Attract: Draw in the target audience with content that establishes you as trustworthy.
- Engage: The goal of inbound marketing is to convert visitors into customers by using tools like landing pages, calls to action, etc.
- Delight: Support your customers that have purchased to retain them.
There is tremendous value when combining inbound and content marketing tactics. Inbound marketing is needed because it will make your website great by using methods to compel visitors to take action and convert into customers. Meanwhile, content marketing will make your site attractive to visitors and provide valuable content that optimises SEO for better ranking. By using both, your brand is more likely to succeed online.
WSIOMS offers content marketing and website design services. Contact us today!
by Marelise da Silva | Jun 8, 2020 | Inbound Marketing
There are so many reasons why all businesses need to adopt a solid inbound marketing strategy. Firstly, this manner of marketing helps to ensure a more targeted approach to drawing in new clients because it focuses on the buyer’s journey by tailoring content to edge the consumer ever closer to making a conversion. Secondly, it ensures that you cover all bases from a digital perspective, making certain that you fully embrace all opportunities to make a lasting impression. Sound interesting? Here are the five elements that go into creating a strong, successful inbound marketing strategy.
Search engine optimisation
SEO is arguably the most vital aspect of this kind of strategy purely because it is responsible for attracting more visitors to your website. By optimising your site for search, as well as for improved user experience, your chances of gaining a higher number of leads are vastly increased.
Social media marketing
Social media provides you with the chance to interact with your customers and potential customers directly. It is also a tool that allows you to extend your reach and brand influence, all the while moulding a positive online reputation.
PPC
Fast-track your way to the top (literally) by dedicating a decent amount of your marketing budget to PPC, otherwise known as Pay Per Click, advertising. This advertising will push more customers onto your website and further boost your chances of them making a conversion. Maximize this opportunity by making doubly sure that your landing page and website design is easy to navigate and appealing to your specific target market. Do not forget to go beyond Google Ads and investigate remarketing and display advertising opportunities, too.
Content marketing
By creating quality, relevant content, you actively engage your customers in your brand while setting yourself apart as an industry thought leader. Content marketing should extend from blogs and videos all the way through to beautiful images, podcasts, and more.
Email marketing
It is a proven fact that email marketing can encourage customer loyalty and retention. It is a wonderful tactic for keeping customers interested in your offering, ensuring a constant flow of traffic to your website, and putting up-sell ideas and tactics into practice.
Are you in search of a full-service inbound marketing partner? Look no further than WSI OMS. We will help you to bring all of these elements together for a seamless strategy that will generate the results that you deserve. Contact us now to learn more.
by Marelise da Silva | Mar 9, 2020 | Inbound Marketing
It’s 2020. Guests don’t want to have information pushed in their faces. They want to be drawn to a hotel because it’s the right fit for them. But in a heavily saturated industry, how do you simultaneously increase brand visibility while advertising your services to people who actually want to stay at your hotel? With inbound marketing.
Tactics to include in your Inbound marketing strategy
Understand SEO
88% of guests prefer to book a hotel online. If guests can’t find you there, your hotel won’t get booked. SEO strategies can help improve brand visibility and Google ranking.
Create a social media presence
One in every three people are active on a social media platform. What better way to advertise your hotel than with a strong social media presence? A social media presence helps potential guests understand your brand and determine your trustworthiness based on your engagement.
Blog
Contentis king. It can come in many forms, but blog posts are a fantastic way to show off industry knowledge, exhibit social proof and increase brand engagement. On top of that, SEO optimised blog posts can help you generate new leads for months- even years- to come.
Social proof
Guests don’t care what you have to say about your hotel because- of course- you’re biased. They want to hear what other people have to say about their experience at your hotel. Collect social proof in the form of social media likes, customer reviews, video testimonials and celebrity and influencer endorsements.
If you want to create a seamless inbound marketing strategy for your hotel using proven techniques to drive results, then you should work with a digital marketing agency. Let us worry about your inbound marketing so you can focus all of your time on your guests. And with the right strategy, they’ll be booking in droves! Contact us today.
by Francois Muscat | Feb 24, 2020 | Articles, Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is different from the old ways of disruptive marketing (or outbound marketing). The reason is that instead of bashing the audience over the head with what you want to tell them, inbound marketing focuses on understanding what your audience needs as well as when the best time would be to give it to them.
6 Tips for Creating Great Inbound Marketing Content
1. Know Your Audience
You can’t get away with not understanding your audience when it comes to inbound marketing. Knowing your audience will help you to approach them with both the content and solutions they need at a time when they will be most receptive to it, which will give you better returns on your content creation efforts.
If you create content for an audience you don’t know and understand, you might as well be looking for a needle in a very big haystack, hoping that someone who sees your content will react positively to it. Instead, you should focus on getting to know your audience through research. Your research should cover aspects such as:
- Their likes and dislikes,
- What they need,
- How and where they interact, and
- What your competitors are doing for the audience.
This will give you valuable and time-saving insights to create content your audience will love.
Tip: Get to know your audience
2. Building Trust
Now that you know your audience, you’ll have a good grip not only on what makes them tick, but also about what will be likely to build trust for your brand. When you build trust with your audience, they will be more inclined to share your content and recommend your service or product to their loved ones, thereby reaching a wider audience and potential client pool.
Content that builds trust is authoritative, well-researched, relevant and updated regularly. Good, authoritative content gets shared and linked back too. All this serves to show Google that you are trustworthy and, as a result, will help you to climb the search engine rankings, leading to wider exposure and better brand reputation.
Tip: Earn trust with authoritative content
3. Don’t Fake It Because You Won’t Make It
Inbound marketing content relies on making connections with your audience through your online presence and, therefore, authenticity is the key to making lasting connections. It is easy to see through the spammy, fake interactions that try to force engagement with some scheme. Besides, most people don’t fall for it in the long run. The key is to balance professionalism with letting the human side of the business shine through. You can be real and fun and professional all at once, and that is something your audience will respond to.
Tip: Be real
4. Plan Ahead
The worst content plan is the one that doesn’t exist. If you don’t have a clear strategy or if you don’t plan out your content ahead, you’ll most likely end up with awful, half-baked ideas in your online presence. That is, if you actually get around to posting anything.
Creating batches of content at once will not only save valuable time, but it will also give you continuity throughout the messaging process. And, with Facebook and Instagram Creator Studio, as well as the scheduling functions on most blog platforms, you won’t have to manually post any of the content you’ve created.
Tip: Plan and schedule your content
5. Be Spontaneous
Yes, this goes against what we just said, but hear us out. Great content can be spontaneous and, therefore, you need to leave room for spontaneous moments that occur so you can benefit from those unexpected events. Adding some spontaneous content to your online presence can break up the monotony of perfectly planned out content. It will also go a long way in helping you to connect with your audience, especially on social media.
Uncomfortable with the idea of making spontaneous moments permanent? Post this kind of content to Instagram stories or Snapchat, and it will disappear from your feed in time. This option also leaves you with more room to experiment with new content and to gauge your audience’s reaction to something outside of your usual messaging.
Tip: Live in the momen
6. Experiment and Measure Results
Great inbound marketing content comes from experimenting with different types of content, different platforms and different approaches. Don’t be scared to test out new ideas and plans. They can pay off for your content strategy – if you remember to measure the results. While it is important to always measure the performance of your content, it is vital to measure results when you’re trying something new to understand how successful your efforts are and to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Tip: Test and measure
WSI OMS is a digital marketing firm specialising in search engine optimisation, website design, link building and PPC strategies. Contact us to find out more about our inbound marketing offerings.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 13, 2020 | Inbound Marketing, SEO
Because inbound marketing is all about creating connections that provide your audience with valuable content that solves their problems, it makes sense that local SEO plays a large role in inbound marketing. When businesses can reach local audiences, they create valuable interactions that benefit both the client and business equally.
Why Local SEO Should Be Your Inbound Marketing Focus for 2020:
It is more important than ever to be within reach of local audiences, and the key to visibility is local SEO. Different studies estimate the percentage of searches for local businesses to be around 46%, and since 2018, searches containing the words “near me” have more than doubled. Here are four reasons why local SEO should be a major focus for your business in 2020:
Local Is the New Global
There has been a significant shift towards sustainable consumerism in the last decade, bringing local businesses to the forefront. As audiences are becoming more aware of the environmental impact of their purchases, businesses are seeing an upswing in support from local communities. Instead of desiring globally produced items, consumers are seeking local alternatives to alleviate their impact on the environment while satisfying their buying needs.
Google’s Algorithm
Instead of driving traffic to websites based purely on their ad spend, Google will rank businesses based on a blended algorithm. This algorithm looks at your web results (including content, website design and link building), reviews from customers and proximity to the search query. Businesses with good quality content, higher engagement rates and better reviews get higher rankings in localised searches. This means that building authentic connections with local audiences should be taking precedence over massive budgets spent on pushing PPC ads towards audiences.
Local Is Valuable
Your business needs to feature on local directory sites because directory listings are ranked second only to Map Pack results in search engine rankings. This means that Google will firstly show results on the local map, and then feature directories like TripAdvisor, Snupit and Yellow Pages that include businesses related to a specific keyword.
Best SEO practices are still very relevant for local SEO with some SEO experts estimating that 92% of customers will pick a business to support from the first page of local results. In order to benefit from local directories, you will need to appear fairly high in the organic results to attract their attention.
Different Types of Searches
Search engines are allowing people to search in different ways. Google now allows longer search terms for voice searches and completes geo modifiers for their customers. This means that customers can merely type in what they are looking for instead of adding a location. Benign terms are also being used more frequently, and Google will connect these terms (like coffee or dog walker) to highly-rated local businesses without users asking for these products and services in a specific location.
Don’t get left behind in the local SEO rankings, contact WSIOMS today for help with your SEO and inbound marketing strategy.
by Marelise da Silva | Dec 9, 2019 | Inbound Marketing
As a real estate agent, you are missing out on an incredible opportunity to maximise your sales if you are not yet harnessing the power of both inbound marketing and digital marketing in general. The question is, what is inbound marketing and how can it benefit you going forward? We share the facts below.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is an approach to marketing in that it encourages potential clients to find you as opposed to you finding them. This marketing practice is focused on establishing your brand and creating an authoritative reputation for it through the creation of interesting, helpful content. The main idea is to assure your potential clients that you are both a thought leader in the industry and that you really know what you are talking about.
How to Go About It
Your greatest inbound marketing tool is the internet. Start off with a functional and beautiful website design and a decent amount of search engine optimisation to improve your rankings on Google. From there, you will need to create and post content regularly, avoiding anything too salesy or promotional. The key is to supply potential clients with the information that they are looking for without pushing too hard for them to utilise your services.
Once you have created a fair amount of content, you may want to use PPC, as well as your various social media pages, to promote it.
Why Is Inbound Marketing and Real Estate a Great Fit?
The market in South Africa has taken a dip in recent times, leaving many estate agents scrambling for new leads. This often takes way too much time out of your day when you could be focusing on nurturing the leads that you already have. Inbound marketing takes care of lead acquisition so that you can focus on providing your clients with the level of service that they deserve.
Furthermore, recent studies have shown that prospective home buyers, regardless of their age, are using the internet to look for houses. However, despite the fact that they are finding houses that they love online, they still consider estate agents beneficial when it comes to negotiating and closing a deal. You want to be the first estate agent they contact when they decide they want to sell or view a property! Inbound marketing can help you to achieve that.
Need assistance when it comes to inbound marketing, search engine optimisation, website design or PPC? Then be sure to get in touch with WSI OMS today!
