The blog in inbound marketing is a FUNDAMENTAL tool for attracting the right people to your website by creating engaging content.

Whether it's to generate conversions or to attract new potential customers, this marketing strategy is not so much about advertising and public relations, it's all about providing value on the web. 

Inbound marketing offers you the advantage that, compared to traditional marketing, you don't need to invest so much money in advertising, if you create the right content the users will come to you on their own.

Do you want to add a blog to your inbound marketing strategy? Here we explain why you should do it and what are the four recommended steps you need to take to implement it.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on providing the right people with real value that helps them to improve their practices in a specific area, making a positive impact on them. 

It’s a win-win for both customers and businesses, which is fundamental to achieving higher quality results in the long term.

What are the stages of the inbound methodology?

Inbound marketing strategies work for all types of businesses, regardless of size. 

They are the most effective and reliable way to sell as you give your customers the experience they deserve. 

There are different stages of inbound marketing that your blog must go through in order for you to get good results.

Thus, you will increase your chances of achieving conversions, i.e. increasing sales and requests for products and/or services if your company or business applies these processes.

Thus, these stages are as follows: 

1. Attraction

At this stage, you need to focus on attracting potential customers who want to do business with you.

That's why you have to work on creating a solid inbound marketing strategy for your blog based on your ideal buyer.

Depending on the characteristics of your target audience, you will define the best alternatives to achieve conversions. You can publish valuable content on your company or business blog or even do email marketing.

Make sure that your content not only talks about specific problems, but also offers answers that are real solutions for your potential customers.

Beyond the prices of your products and/or services, you have to show what the differentiating values of your brand are, as well as what it can do for your potential customers.

This way, as you highlight your value by providing value, you will consolidate your brand and, at the same time, you will attract more customers.

2. Conversion

This is a stage in which you have to turn those people who are interested in your website into potential customers.

To achieve this goal, you can ask them for contact information in exchange for valuable content such as an eBook, guide, practical case, template to facilitate a task, among others.

There are two tools you can use to turn your website visitors into potential customers: calls to action and landing pages.

You have to create a link or call-to-action button to get visitors to click on a particular offer.

After they click on the call to action, the user will be taken to a landing page where they can get more information about the offer and sign up with contact details that you can use when implementing an email marketing strategy.

3. Selling

The purpose of this phase is to bring potential customers closer to a sale, which you can achieve by applying inbound marketing techniques such as marketing automation and lead nurturing to convert leads into prospects. 

To achieve this, you have to educate your potential customers so that they can move towards the end of the marketing funnel.

4. Loyalty

In addition to making a sale, inbound marketing aims to provide customers with an experience that makes them remember the brand after they make a purchase. 

Two alternatives that can be very effective are social media marketing, as well as email marketing, because, in addition to offering customers the support they need, you can have greater contact with them. 

As you delight your existing customers, you can increase word of mouth because they will become brand ambassadors and will talk more about your products or services. 

In addition, the application of SMART objectives can greatly facilitate the implementation of inbound marketing strategies, so the following recommendations will help you to improve the profitability of your business or company through this methodology:

• Each of the objectives you set need to be precise.

• These objectives need to be achievable.

• Act realistically when setting objectives.

An example of such a goal might be: "Produce a series of blog posts and attract 1,000 visitors through social media in the first month".

While there are ideas that work very well for a particular company, they may not necessarily be effective for another, so the application of the blog inbound marketing methodology has to be customised to the requirements of the organisation where it is applied. 

How to create an inbound marketing strategy with the blog?

Customers expect to obtain viable solutions to solve the various problems they may experience in their daily lives. 

In this regard, the contents of a website are one of the essential pillars through which you can get these users to carry out the conversions proposed in the digital marketing strategies of businesses and companies. 

Thus, to plan and implement an inbound marketing strategy for your blog, you have to apply the following steps:

1. Do keyword research

The main step you need to take to create an effective blog inbound marketing strategy is to do keyword research.

This work is essential, because by finding the keywords according to the searches made by an organisation's target audience, it will be possible to generate adequate organic traffic to the website. To do this, it's vital to choose topics with which they identify.

It's very important to plan the keywords and the editorial content of the business or company, taking into account the information regarding the products and/or services offered by the organisation.

During this task you can make use of various tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest or Keywordtool.io, as well as the Google Ads keyword planner... 

If you want to find out what the search trends are on Google in a certain country or location, you can use Google Trends.

2. Create attractive content

When you're going to create content, it's crucial that you make sure that in addition to being attractive to Google search engines and other Internet search engines such as Bing or Yahoo, it can be attractive to the organisation's target audience.

The most common way to create a blog under the inbound marketing methodology is to write articles in which a topic is developed in depth in a detailed way, making sure that the topic is related to the niche.

It's important to make sure that this content provides answers to the search intention of users who are customers or potential customers of the business or company.

The depth in the contents of a blog is an aspect that is usually liked by readers, because, if these publications respond to the queries of users, it will lead them to share the information on their social networks.

3. Make them share your content

The ideal thing when creating content according to the basics of inbound marketing, is that users who make up the target audience can share them through social actions or the creation of backlinks.

Social actions are carried out when users, for example, publish tweets or include content on Facebook, as well as carrying out LinkedIn actions, among other practices through which they make these publications known on different social networks.

On the other hand, the creation of backlinks occurs when users link on their website to content that is published on your website.

Adding social media icons is one way in which you can encourage users to share the content of your articles.

Similarly, showing social proof that a piece of content has already been shared many times can encourage more people to do so. 

4. Turn visitors into potential customers

Make sure that your website visitors turn into leads.

The best potential customers tend to be email subscribers rather than social media followers.

For this reason, capturing an email address is one of the most effective ways to generate leads because it has a good return on investment and you can keep track of the relationship you have with your subscribers.

5. Use a sales funnel

By this stage, you need to have defined precisely what you want to achieve with those potential customers you have captured through your content creation efforts, so that the sales funnel can be very effective.

A sales funnel is a set of steps that each potential customer must go through once they subscribe to your mailing list. 

Also, the nature of your sales funnel will depend largely on the niche of your company or business.

That's why at this stage of the funnel, you need to plan a path for subscribers to go from being cold members of the mailing list to potential customers, even acting as ambassadors for your brand.

6. Analyse, optimise and repeat

After you have implemented inbound marketing for your blog, you have to analyse what worked and what didn't during the implementation of the various processes executed.

Knowing what happened and being aware of it will allow you to plan improvement actions and to repeat the various processes with their respective improvements.

In this new era of highly personalised marketing, today's customers want to feel that they are being prioritised and educated about their own problems.  

That's why they are more likely to choose to do business with organisations they feel familiar with.

That's why creating inbound marketing strategies can be very cost-effective compared to other methods, allowing a company or business to capture leads, build an audience and most importantly, have a considerable increase in sales.

Are you as fascinated by inbound marketing as we are? Let us know which inbound marketing blogs are your favourite!