Keep Up With Inbound Marketing Trends
Inbound marketing is necessary as the eCommerce industry continues to grow and evolve. You don't want to be left in the dust, so make sure you consider applying these essential inbound marketing trends to your eCommerce store.
1. Content Marketing
It is now easier than ever to personally communicate with consumers. Social media allows us to use content marketing to reach a specific target audience. The goal of content marketing is not to generate sales, but to gain consumer interest and build a relationship with them- which eventually leads to increased sales. Sharing articles, such as white papers, with your audience can garner interest and discussion. This will lead to networking, social media “shares”, and positive word of mouth. Basically, content marketing appeases your audience while expanding upon it.
2. Guest Blogging
One of the most effective inbound marketing trends is guest blogging. Guest blogging allows you to publish your work on another company's blog. This means your content will be visible to a whole new audience, generating awareness to your brand. Guest blogging also helps your search engine optimization (SEO) by scoring your page higher in search engine results.
3. Search Engines and Google Authorship
Google now places the photo of an article’s author next to their web page when it is found as a search engine result. Make sure your photo looks presentable and is representative of your blog and company. This is very crucial, since it may affect whether or not someone decides to view your article.
4. Longer Content
Longer content is seen as being more insightful and will generate more discussion and interest. Longer content is also ideal for search engine results. Having longer articles with quality content will help you when it comes to keywords, and we all know how important keywords are for SEO. Creating thorough, well-written content is crucial for inbound marketing.
5. Responsive Content
Companies need to accommodate mobile phone and tablet users. Their popularity is ever growing, so companies must take advantage of marketing and web design trends, such as responsive web design and text message marketing. In fact, we have a white paper that explains how to correctly implement responsive web design to your eCommerce store. Download it at the bottom of this article!
6. Social Media
Most companies have social media marketing efforts of some sort, but are they being used to their full potential? There are many different ways to optimize social media, but you must figure out what strategies work best for your company. Social media is here to stay, so learn how to use it to your advantage.
As we talked about in point #5 above, responsive web design is a technique that's becoming increasingly critical for online businesses:
