A business spends on average 1% of its revenue on advertising. This number has been steady across the board, but inbound marketing increases the ROI businesses can expect when putting out money to bring in customers.
What is inbound marketing? Understanding what inbound marketing is and how it can help your business is necessary. Continue reading this article to find out what to expect in 2019 and how you can benefit from inbound marketing.
What is Inbound Marketing in 2019?
Implementing inbound marketing has changed the way many businesses bring in new customers. Even if you currently use inbound marketing strategies likes a blog currently, 2019 will bring changes. Below are some of the top changes you need to pay attention to maintain and increase the results you get from inbound marketing.
1. Further Personalization
As more information becomes available to marketers, users expect further personalization. Vague ads, website visits without a welcoming message and other generalities no longer offer the expected user experience in 2019.
If your company isn’t using methods to personalize email marketing, ads, promotions and other communications with customers, now is the time to start by gathering the necessary information from analytics.
2. Voice Search Takes Over
More people are talking to their smartphones and home devices to get the information they need. If your website isn’t optimized for voice search, you will miss out on a lot of traffic. Voice search doesn’t give users a top ten results either so you need to make sure you rank number one.
If you want to optimize for voice search, you need to answer questions easily, so Google knows your website is the best result for its users.
3. Images
We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but users are more demanding when it comes to images. Images need to be big, bright and beautiful. If you have a website with few images or if your images are low-quality, you won’t retain visitors as well as websites with these elements.
Adding images will attract more visitors, retain them and even cause people to share your content on social more than plain text.
4. Video Marketing Is Vital
If your company isn’t using video marketing yet, you haven’t missed the boat. While you haven’t missed the boat, you need to get on right away if you want to make it in 2019.
People have so many options for video content that your video has to be high-quality. High-quality resolution and high-quality content are vital if you want to get attention online.
If you upload your videos on video sharing sites like YouTube, you need to have clean, catchy thumbnail images that make people want to click. One of the no-nos to long-term inbound marketing success with video is click bait. Your video thumbnails should line up with the topic and quality of your video.
5. Marketing & Sales Working Together
Most marketing and sales teams do not work together. When marketing and sales do not work together to give feedback, and in-depth information on the leads, both the sales and marketing process suffers.
Companies now see how important it is to have sales and marketing teams that work together. Marketing teams set sales teams up for success by letting them know what actions the lead takes on the website and what their interest level looks like. Marketing teams help the sales teams by giving them feedback on how the sales process went and how to be more effective in the marketing processes.
6. Chatbots
If you’ve tried to get support from most large companies these days, it is likely you’ve been greeted by chatbots. Some chatbots are smart enough to carry on a human-like conversation.
When you use chatbots for your inbound marketing efforts, you are able to have support available around the clock. Hiring a human to sit and monitor the computer for long periods of time can get expensive.
You can use chatbots for different parts of your business’ communications process from lead generation, support, sales and more. Chatbots aren’t a replacement for humans in your inbound marketing process, but they can be available when humans aren’t able to be available.
7. Conversational Marketing
People want to get answers to their questions, and while they do their own research online, they want to be able to have a conversation with your company. You can use social media to have conversations with your potential customers.
Facebook and Twitter allow you to comment back and forth to your customers. Whether the comments are negative or positive, you need to respond and help your potential clients. Never be adversarial when people interact with you online and try to take them to the next step in the communication process.
Think about ways you can implement conversational marketing in your business. Will it be on Facebook, Twitter or another social media platform?
Prepare for New Inbound Marketing Trends
Look at the new trends and see which areas you want to work on first. While you might not be able to focus on all of these areas at once, you need to pick one or two to get started on so you can stay in the game.
All businesses either live or die by leads. You should feed your sales team leads as much as possible since outbound marketing tactics are becoming less and less effective.
You know cold calling is a thing of the past and non-effective, but you should also know that content marketing is becoming a standard. While content marketing may have been enough to get attention in the past, 2019 is the year you’ll have to go above and beyond putting out high-quality content.
All top businesses are putting out great content, so you need to use the new trends to get ahead of the pack.
Make 2019 a Marketing Year to Remember
Now that you have the answer to the question, “What is inbound marketing?” you can continue your business education. Read our blog about lowering business overhead today.
