Do you want to increase sales for your online business? Your small business marketing strategy needs to focus on marketing tactics bringing your business new customers.

Doing online marketing the right way means you'll need to understand the formula for an inbound strategy. The leads come to you with inbound, instead of spending your day's cold calling or spam emailing potential customers.

This post unpacks everything you need to know about how to market your business using an inbound strategy.

Identify your target audience

The first step for marketers involves identifying your ideal customer. Without a "buyer persona," your marketing plan has no direction.

A buyer persona includes demographics and customer information like their age, average income, location, and interests.

When you understand your buyer persona, you can identify what these people are searching for online. That lets you see what issues they encounter that your product or service can solve.

Design a website

The next step in the inbound process is to build a website. Your site is the hub of your digital marketing strategy.

With inbound, your website becomes more than a space on the internet. You'll turn it into a lead-generating machine for your business.

Ensuring you have a clean and effective design for your website makes it look professional. As a result, it increases your credibility with your target market.

Please avoid using free web-builders; they produce websites that look terrible and come littered with SEO problems.

Related: Definitive guide on how to design a website

Develop a content strategy

Your content strategy is critical to drawing traffic to your site. Think about the top websites you visit all the time. We bet all of them have top-quality content that you love to read and view.

From infographics to blogs and press releases, your content strategy needs to cover every aspect of communications with your market.

Make sure you do your keyword research and target those keywords and long-tail keyword phrases in your blog content, product descriptions, and meta-tags.

If you have trouble writing, consider hiring a freelancer from a site like Fiverr or Upwork. There are thousands of talented freelancers on these platforms looking for work.

Create backlinks

Now that you have a website and a content strategy, it's time to start linking your website to authority domains. Authority domains are sites with a higher ranking than yours.

Your backlinking strategy involves reaching out to these authority domains' marketing departments, asking them if you can pay to leave a link on their site.

The domain will either publish your logo on their site or a guest post for their blog containing high-quality content.

When the Google search bots see that your site has dozens or hundreds of links to authority domains, it starts increasing your ranking in search results.

Build an SEO strategy

Backlinking is an important part of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. SEO involves a set of best practices concerning the on-page and off-page optimization of your site.

On-page SEO involves

• cleaning up 404-error pages on your site,
• fixing broken links, and
• optimizing your sales copy to include your keywords.

Off-page SEO involves activities like link building and guest posting. SEO strategies take time to show results, but it's still the best way to get your business and website ranking in search.

Unless you want to do everything yourself and spend hours learning SEO best practices, you'll need to hire an SEO specialist. A professional SEO firm can assist you with the technical aspects of managing your SEO strategy and maintaining your website.

Create a lead magnet and value proposition

As mentioned, inbound marketing is about getting the leads to come to you, but how do you do that? It's easy; you create attractive landing pages and lead magnets to get prospects to leave you their email details.

When prospects visit your landing pages, they read your sales copy. At the end of the copy is a CTA (call-to-action) button, which they can click if they want to learn more.

After clicking, a pop-up window appears asking the prospect for their contact information to access the value offer on your site. Using this strategy, you build your email list.

Your value offer is a freebie you give away to the prospect that entices them to leave you their details. A lead magnet is a vital part of the marketing tools you need to turn your website into a lead-generating machine.

Build Sales Funnels and Integrate CRM

After the prospect leaves their information, your CRM system (customer relationship management) and your sales funnels receive that data.

The prospect receives an email marketing campaign designed to convert from a potential customer into a paying client. Your sales funnel lets you see every stage of the process as your prospects move through each follow-up email.

With that data, you can see what's working and where you need to improve your content strategy. A sales funnel describes automated software designed to push your prospects through the sales process without your need to manage the process.

Integrating this with a CRM solution gives you a powerful customer management tool. Capture all of your client's information, notes, and automate workflows relating to your marketing campaigns.

Start a blog, host a webinar or launch a podcast

Blogging is a great way to produce top-quality content your audience wants to read. Your blog acts as an informational resource to your prospective customers and a digital marketing tool for your website.

You can talk about your target market's problems on your blog and present useful solutions through your content.

Webinars and podcasts also offer you similar opportunities to reach out to your target market with top-quality content they'll enjoy.

You can host podcasts and webinars yourself or make guest appearances on other people's shows. Webinars are especially useful, and you can use them for your value offer with your lead magnets.

Advertise your webinar, and leave an opt-in lead magnet to collect the email addresses of your attendees.

Get on social media platforms

Social media marketing on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is the way marketers are moving. Social offers your business an effective, targeted form of marketing to a qualified audience.

Using Facebook Ads lets you create targeted campaigns designed to build brand awareness and increase conversion, boosting your marketing efforts.

Influencer marketing is another popular advertising and brand building strategy to add to your digital marketing plan for social media.

Hire influencers to promote your website and products to their audience. Using social media strategies to grow your business is far more cost-effective than targeting expensive keywords on AdSense.

Your Facebook page gives your business access to your entire target market. With the FB Ads Manager, you can create targeted campaigns for local audiences for your brick-and-mortar business.

Social media is all about engaging with your audience. To create more engagement, spread your content to your social platforms. If you're a layer looking to bring more business to your website, try marketing on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the most visited social media platform for professionals. It also has the best sharing ratio for your content. By publishing your blog and sharing it through your LinkedIn page and LinkedIn groups, you create plenty of engagement with your target audience.

Set a marketing budget for your Facebook Ads, and test multiple adverts before settling on a final ad for your campaign. As a final tip for marketing on Facebook, we recommend looking into using the Facebook Pixel.

Facebook Pixel lets you push ads directly into your prospect's FB feed when they are searching for your product or related products. It's a fantastic way to supercharge your Facebook marketing results and drive qualified traffic to your offer.

Post in forums

Forums like Reddit have millions of monthly unique visitors to the website. If you can get your content onto the front page of Reddit, it means a flood of traffic coming to your site for your lead magnets.

Marketing on forums is similar to social media. You're relying on word-of-mouth marketing to drive interest in your content and products or services.

Find four or five forums in your niche, create an account, and start posting. It takes time to build a reputation, so make sure you're regularly posting to the platform every other day.

It's better to choose forums that allow you to post links. That way, you have the opportunity to link to content on your blog, driving traffic to your site.

Share testimonials and social proof

When people purchase something online, they want to know other people are using it. Providing your prospects with social proof helps you build rapport and credibility with them.

Social proof comes in many forms, with testimonials being the most coveted for your digital strategy. Create a Trustpilot and a Google reviews account for your business, and use them to build positive reviews about your company.

Google reviews and Trustpilot only allow verified reviews on their platforms. Therefore, after you build a substantial number of reviews, the search bots start recommending your website.

Think about ways you can incentivize your customers to leave you a Google review. You'll have to develop a strong value proposition to get them to take action.

When your social proof reaches a level where you dominate your niche, you'll start receiving a flood of referral traffic.

List in Directories

Another great top for brick-and-mortar retailers and small business owners is to list in online directories. Yelp and other online directories increase your backlinking strategy's efficacy, giving your business more credibility with the Google search bots.

Local business directories receive plenty of traffic, and you can leverage that traffic while creating backlinks for your website.

Think of an online directory as a place to house your digital business cards, and you never have to reprint them again.

Install Google analytics

Now that you have the framework for your digital marketing strategy, it's time to learn how to track all your data.

Data lets you see what's going on with your website. Google Analytics provides you with a free web tool to understand your traffic sources and what the visitors do on your website.

If you decide to run PPC campaigns or use Google AdWords, Google Analytics gives you useful reports on your metrics.

Without tracking every aspect of your online business, you'll never understand how you can improve. Google Analytics gives you the best platform to keep track of your digital marketing strategy.

Related: How to use Google Analytics

Register with Google Maps

This tip is for business owners with brick-and-mortar establishments. Whether you run a law firm or a retail store, you can attract more traffic to your website and local business by registering your business name and premises with Google Maps.

Build a profile on Google Maps, and watch your organic traffic increase. Your target customers can easily find your business, and the Google search bots use Google Maps information for their search results.

Use B12 for your website design

Digital marketing revolves around inbound marketing strategies designed to bring leads to your business.

Whether you work online or own a brick-and-mortar establishment, inbound can bring your business a steady flow of qualified leads looking for your products and services.

B12 is a full-service design and website management company offering you an unbelievable deal to start your digital marketing plan.

B12 websites integrate with all the marketing tools we mentioned in this post, and you get all this value for a monthly subscription instead of thousands of dollars upfront.

Visit the B12 website and request your AI-assisted template draft right now. B12 utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to help them build your website faster than another development service.

With affordable pricing and access to a talented design team, your business will dominate your niche. Visit B12 and see the difference for yourself.