Inbound Marketing

Inbound
Marketing 101
eBook
Inbound Marketing, is synonymous with the concept of permission marketing,
term coined by Seth Godin. It is also loosely interchangeable with content
marketing. But whereas content marketing includes offline content, such as
custom magazines and conferences, inbound marketing is 100% web-based.
What is Inbound Marketing?
“Inbound Marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world.
Inbound Marketing takes advantage of this dynamic by tapping into what our
customers are naturally looking for on the web: high quality content. Inbound
marketing uses this to pull them into a value-laden marketing process.”

2013. www.landerapp.com. All Rights Reserved.

We Y Landing Pages |

2

The eBook
Chapters
1. The End of Interruption Marketing

04

3. How to Use Social Media to Start Conversations

17

2. How to Use Blogs to Create Customers
4. Why do You Need Email Marketing
5. Why do You Need Landing Pages
6. Special Gift for You!


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23
28
34


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1
THE END OF
INTERRUPTION
MARKETING



4

THE END OF INTERRUPTION MARKETING

Inbound Marketing 101

We Can No Longer Interrupt
Our Customers
The traditional “interruption marketing” of the last century no longer works.
Now our customers and prospects look to achieve their own goals, not the
goals of a monolithic media monopoly. They use the web as their personal
library, encyclopedia and research database all rolled into one.

The Inbound Marketing Process
Hubspot breaks down the inbound marketing process into four stages:
Attract, convert, close and delight.

You take customers from know, to like and to trust. You convince them to try out your
product or service and then buy from you. Finally, you provide such excellent service they
become repeat customers and finally become brand supporters and start to refer customers
to you.

We like to define the inbound marketing process as follows:
• Answer your customer’s questions
• Start a conversation with your customer
• Establish a deeper engagement with your customer
• Partner with your customer
• Your customer becomes your advocate



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ATTRACT

STRANGER

CONVERT

CLOSE

LEADS

VISITORS

Blogs
Social Media
Keyword
Pages


Call to Actions
Landing Pages
Forms
Contacts

DELIGHT

CUSTOMERS

Email
Workflow
Lead Scoring
CRM Integrations

PROMOTER

Social Media
Smart CTA
Email
Workflows

Answer Questions
Customers who are browsing the web are there to get answers to questions.
How do I bake an apple pie? Where can I take my child to the specialist?
We anticipate these questions and provide answers to their questions by way of blog
posts, our web pages, optimizing our content to the keywords that our customers are
typing into Google/Bing/Yahoo. When we answer our customers’ questions, we satisfy
their mission when they went on to the web. They are looking for answers, and we give
them answers. We also begin having a conversation with our customers.

Start Conversations
Our web pages should not be filing cabinets. Every word on every page should be part
of a conversation our customer is already having in her head. We do the same thing
on social media, but this time the conversation is real. We do this through our blog, our
videos and our podcasts as well. This is where we start interacting with our customers,
getting them to like us and to trust us.The conversation helps us understand them,
and helps them understand us. It also leads us into a deeper engagement with our
customers.



6



Deeper Engagement
By convincing our customers to subscribe to our newsletters, become members of our
“members-only” websites, follow-us on social media, or call us, we establish a deeper
engagement with our customers. This is the point where they start to trust us and
believe that we are looking out for their best interests. They become our fans, start to
share our content, and start to look for ways to start a commercial relationship with us.

Commercial Relationship
Saying that our customers become buyers is to minimize this part of the inbound
marketing process. Our customers enter into a commercial relationship with us by
purchasing our product or contracting our services. But this is where the relationship
begins. We use tools such as CRM, surveys, customer newsletters and customer
appreciation gestures to turn them into regular buyers of our products or services
instead of one-time buyers. We also want to turn them into advocates.



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Become Advocates
By delighting our customers, we turn our customers into advocates. This is when they
refer us to their friends and family. We help them by establishing formal processes
that enable them to do that while gaining a reward for doing this. We also continue to
provide value by providing them with educational content that helps them get the most
out of our product or service. We use our newsletters, social media, blog, events and
webinars to provide more value to our customers, and help them become advocates
for our services with their network.



8



The Tools of Inbound
Marketing
Let’s learn how to use each one of the following tools and how they fit into
your Inbound Marketing Strategy:

Chapter 2: Blogs
Blogs are a common entry point for your prospects: you can answer their
questions, start the conversation, and drive a deeper relationship by gently
leading them to subscribe to your email newsletter.

Chapter 3: Social Media
Social Media is where many conversations start, and how you can use
social media to start answering your prospects’ questions, and leverage
those conversations into a deeper relationship.

Chapter 4: Email Newsletters
When they are ready to let us into their inner sanctum (their inbox) and have
a deeper, more engaging relationship with them, we’re ready with our email
newsletters. This is where we drive that deeper engagement.

Chapter 5: Landing Pages
Our landing pages serve to move the relationship from one stage to
the other. We often use landing pages to answer questions and start
conversations by offering special reports or free eBooks for download.



9

2
HOW TO USE
BLOGS TO
CREATE
CUSTOMERS



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How to Use Blogs to Create
Customers
Inbound marketing starts with the questions that your customers are asking.
Your goal is to answer their questions and become a valuable resource
for them. Then you enter into a conversation with your customers, which
eventually leads to deeper engagement, a commercial relationship, and then
you finally create advocates. But you’ve got to get to the first step.

7 Steps for Answering your Customers Questions
Blogging can be either a big waste of time or the most effective marketing tactic on the planet. It
all depends on how you approach it.
These seven steps are not a comprehensive list, but based on our experience we believe it can
provide you with a pretty solid foundation to get your inbound marketing process started.



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1. Find Out What Your Customers Are Asking
The internet has enabled us to search for the answers to our eternal questions. And we, you,
your customers, always have questions. All the time.
• How can I become more successful?
• How can I lose 10 pounds?
• How can I make more money?
• How can I start my own company?
• How can I market myself on the internet?
You’ve probably identified at least one question you’ve asked yourself and Mr. Google in the
last month or so. We all have similar questions.
If you’ve done your homework and created the personas that represent your ideal customers,
this part will be a little easier. If you haven’t developed your personas yet, We would suggest
you do that first, because each type of customers will have a different set of questions.
For example, if one of your personas is a new mom, some of her questions would be:
• When can I start feeding my baby solid foods?
• When will my baby start focusing her eyes on my eyes?
• How can I cure her colic?
• Do I need to feed my baby anything else in addition to breast milk?



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You can probably come up with a list of 100 questions for a new mom, or whoever your
persona is. But how do you find out what questions they’re asking? Interview somebody who
is representative of your ideal customer.

Find out the answer to some of these questions:
• What are their fears?
• What are their secret hopes and dreams?
• What frustrates them?
• What keeps them up at night?
These words are really important. Write them down to use in your blog posts.
Take those words and feed them into a keyword tool, such as Google AdWords Planner tool,
(and there are other tools you can use as well). Keyword tools will let you know the terms that
people are actually searching on Google.

2. Answer Your Customers’ Questions

The keywords you just researched are the words your customers use to ask the fundamental
questions that are driving their activity on the internet right now.
Your challenge is to answer the questions they’re asking.
Many bloggers make the mistake of writing articles that talk all about themselves, their
products, their company, or their opinions about the world. That’s a mistake that can kill your
chances of succeeding.
The most successful blogs focus on their customers, and in helping their customers solve the
problems and challenges that are weighing them down every day.
Answer their questions without selling them your product or service as a solution. Your
customers are not in the mood for a pitch at the moment. They’re in the mood for scratching
an itch. Give them the scratch to calm that itch.



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3. Write Really Valuable Blog Posts or Articles
But it’s more than just writing blog posts that answer your customers’ questions. Don’t dial it
in. In other words, don’t just write a half-hearted article that looks like it should go on
About.com.
Your goal is to write blog posts that answer your customers’ questions so thoroughly, so well,
so entertainingly, that your customers will love you for it.
Your content should be fantastic. Your content should be epic. It should be remarkable. I can
hear your objection now: why should I give away such valuable content for free? Answer:
because the competition is already doing it.



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4. Use Your Customers’ Keywords
The keyword research you did in step one will come in handy for this step too. Our customers
are on auto-pilot. When they get to a page they’re in a hurry, looking around for evidence that
their “scent” is taking them to the right place.
Their behavior is often not very logical. If they don’t quickly see the keywords that are on their
mind they will leave quickly. Even if they were to slow down and realize that your blog post
really does answer their fundamental questions, they won’t do that. They’re on auto-pilot.
Tiles

Sub-headlines

First Paragraph

5. Use Your Customers’ Language
In addition to using your customers’ keywords, if you’ve done your persona research
correctly, you also know the language your customers use.
What do I mean by language? Each industry, tribe or interest group has its own vocabulary.
Your challenge is to find out what that vocabulary is and use it in your blog posts.
Researching personas is one day to do this. It also helps if you’re in the same group as the
tribe you’re writing for.
Why is this important? Success with blogging comes not only by answering your customers’
questions, but by connecting with your customers on a deeper level. You want them to
know that you understand them. When you use their language, they realize you get it. It’s
emotional. It’s visceral.



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6. Maintain a Schedule
Part of becoming your customers’ friend and confidant is being reliable. You’ve answered
their questions, now you’re getting them involved in a conversation. Your next step is to keep
the conversation going by becoming a habit for them. Maintaining a schedule is the way to
do that.
You can blog every day, or every other day, or you can blog twice a week, or even once a
week.The frequency doesn’t matter – the regularity does. This is important as you start to
build trust with your customers. Regularity builds trust, but the flip side is probably more
important: irregularity destroys trust.
When you’re unreliable you damage the trust you’ve built.

7. Share Your Content Where Your Customers Are
Sharing your content on social media is a box you have to check off. You need to do it. It’s
a minimum requirement these days.The best way to share your content and gain exposure
to more potential customers than you could possibly do on your own is to contribute guest
articles.
Take out and dust off the valuable persona research you did, and identify where your ideal
customers hang out on the web. They usually have their favorite blogs, online publications,
magazines, podcasts or video channels.
If you’re absolutely confident you have high-quality content to share with these sites,
approach them and offer to share valuable content their audience might like (no selling, and
don’t dial it in). n



16

3
HOW TO USE
SOCIAL MEDIA
TO START
CONVERSATIONS



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3. How to Use Social Media to
Start Conversations
Social Media is the place where so many people go to ask questions of
their friends, family and acquaintances. We are starting to go to our social
networks before going to Google to ask the fundamental questions about
what we should be buying, or to find solutions to our problems.
The admonition “Let me Google That for You” is becoming a less effective
come-back as people prefer to trust their friends and connections for
information rather than Google.
The obvious social networks are Facebook and Twitter. But LinkedIn Answers is a
functionality within LinkedIn specifically designed for this. And Quora was created solely for
this purpose.
In his brand new book “Youtility,” Jay Baer talks about the rise of “Friend-of-Mind
Awareness,” which has surpassed “Top-of-Mind Awareness” and “Frame-of-Mind
Awareness.”



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“…companies are competing against real people for the
attention of other real people. To succeed, your prospective
customers must consider you a friend.”
How can you succeed in this environment? How can you become your customers’ friend
and compete against their other real-life friends and family?

You need to become valuable!



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1. Use Social Media to Listen to What Your Market is Asking
The beauty of the explosive growth of social media is the proliferation of social listening tools.
Google Alerts was one of the earlier entrants into this space. While not really a social listening
tool, it provided us the ability to “listen” to blog posts, web pages, and tweets according to
pre-determined keywords you wish to track.
Then tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck and others appeared. They let you to monitor, in
near real-time, conversations on Twitter, and then expanded to the most common social
networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
By setting up alerts for keywords or questions related to your industry or product category,
you could find out what is on your target audience’s mind.
The mistake companies make, however, is when they answer questions with an invitation to
come “try us out.” That’s just a sales solicitation to prospective customers, and will get
you blocked.



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2. Bring the Conversation on to your Blog
We discussed the importance of blogging as a way to generate leads. But the question is:
why bring them on to your blog if you’re already doing such a great job of answering their
questions on social media?
Because in this new world of ubiquitous content, your customers want to find out as much
as they can about the topics that are interesting to them.
Answering questions on Twitter or Facebook is limited, because the nature of social networks
is transitory. We log on to Facebook or visit our Twitter stream because we want to quickly
see what our friends are saying and doing. It’s not the place to provide detailed, in-depth
answers to your questions.
But if your prospects want comprehensive information that answers all the questions
they have about a topic they’re interested in, they will go to your website. Gently ask your
prospects to visit your blog to learn more.
And please, don’t invite them to visit your product sales page. Your prospects are still in
“question mode.” They are looking for information. They want to start a conversation about
their problems and goals, not about your product or service.



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3. Social Media and Your Blog
Social Media listening tools provide you with an unprecedented inside view into your
prospects’ thought patterns. Use them to learn about your customers’ wants, desires, and
problems.
Then use social media to be friendly, helpful and provide them with valuable information.
Become their friend, and do what friends do: help them.
Once you’ve answered your customers’ questions, don’t push it. Don’t try to sell to them,
don’t push your product down their throat. But do provide them with an opportunity to
find out more. Lead them to your blog – your blog should be an in-depth, information-rich
resource that helps answers your customers questions.
Again, don’t use your blog to push your products. Use it to start your conversation.
One last word of advice: you need to adopt the value mindset.
The value mindset is the attitude that you’re here to provide value to your prospective
customers before they even become customers. Try to help them, don’t sell them.
When you approach your customers with the value mindset, everything else will fall
into place. n



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4
WHY DO YOU
NEED EMAIL
MARKETING



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4. Why do you need Email
Marketing
With the explosive growth of social media and smartphones, it’s surprising
that email marketing is still such a popular choice for marketers. In

fact, Jay Baer of Convince and Convert cites this statistic about email
marketing:

“People who buy products marketed through email spend
138% more than people that do not receive email offers.”
Email is where you want to lead your customers if you want to create a profitable relationship
with your customers. It’s where you can ask your prospects to become customers.
We’ve put together five steps to help you implement a successful email marketing program
as part of your inbound marketing cycle.

The five steps are...



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1. Choose the right Email Marketing tool

Choosing the right email marketing tool can be a daunting task. There are many companies
who can provide the automated tools you need to personalize emails, guarantee
deliverability, provide tracking, ensure CAN-SPAM compliance, and others.
Here are a few must have features for your checklist:
A. Email list segmentation
You probably have more than one type of target persona. By segmenting your
lists to based on these personas you can deliver personalized content that is
relevant and timely to the right people at the right time.
B. Easy template design
The continued evolution of user experience design has made drag-and-drop
template editing a must-have feature. Launch different campaign types. Would
you like to send a traditional weekly or monthly email newsletter, or would
you prefer a social media / email hybrid campaign? Your email marketing tool
should allow you the option to send different types of campaigns based on your
audience and your needs.



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C. Comprehensive reporting
Your email marketing tool should provide you with a full-range of reporting
options so you can optimize your campaigns and improve conversions. These
are some of the essential features you should look for in an email marketing
tool. It bears repeating: there are many email marketing tools on the market –
one that we recommend is Doppler.

2. Encourage subscriptions by offering something of value
Our customers can block us or send us to the spam folder at the simple click of a button
– and lately consumers have been sending commercial emails to their spam folders with
alarming frequency. The only way to send emails today is to get your prospects to subscribe.
And the best way to do that is to give your prospects an incentive like special reports, case
studies, eBooks, white papers and free apps are some of the popular offers to convince
prospects to subscribe.

3. Keep a regular schedule of valuable and promotional content
Frequency is one of the keys to establishing a successful commercial relationship, because
you can only establish that relationship over time.Finally, email is the best way to offer
promotional content, so make sure to invite your prospects to try your product, your special
offer or your free trial with dedicated promotional emails.



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4. Send your email subscribers to a Landing Page
Our customers can block us or send us to the spam folder at the simple click of a button and
lately consumers have been sending commercial emails to their spam folders with alarming
frequency. The only way to send emails today is to get your prospects to subscribe. And the
best way to do that is to give your prospects an incentive like special reports, case studies,
eBooks, white papers and free apps are some of the popular offers to convince prospects to
subscribe.

5. Test your Emails
If you chose the right email marketing tool, you’ll have immediate access to statistics about
how effective your emails are. Test anything that can possibly affect the open rate and clickthrough rate of your emails: Subject line, Offer, Body copy, From line, Day of week delivered,
Hour of the day delivered.

Email Marketing, The Wave of the Future.
Despite the proliferation of social media, email marketing is and will continue to be the most
effective online sales tool available to marketers. it is the perfect delivery mechanism for
valuable content that is precisely targeted to your customers.
It’s also the perfect vehicle for asking for the sale. Prospects expect an offer from you via
email, whereas they’re a lot less forgiving of offers they see on social media or on your blog.
But remember: email marketing is part of your integrated Inbound Marketing cycle, and
should be complemented by your blog and social media outposts. n



27

5
WHY YOU NEED
LANDING PAGES



28



Why You Need Landing Pages
In this very informative Ebook on Inbound Marketing, we’ve given you a

virtual truckload full of practical, useful tools you can deploy. Tools that can
catapult the results of your marketing campaigns through the roof, if used
properly.

And for this final channel we are going to talk about landing pages – what

they are, how they can benefit you and your company and some great tips
that will help you gain more value from your landing pages.
1. What is a Landing Page?

“A Landing Page is any page on a website where traffic is sent
specifically to prompt a certain action or result.”
Source: Copyblogger



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You use a landing page to push a specific offer: You can use a landing page to prompt page
visitors to download your latest White Paper or special report in return for their email address
and other contact info. Or you could use a landing page in an online e-commerce situation to
make a sale right there.
The action you prompt your landing page visitors to take will be a very specific one. It will
affect the way you set up your landing page – the content and headline you use, the images
you select, etc.

2. A Highly Targeted Approach
Often, marketers think in terms of driving traffic back to their websites, and this is important.
But there are times when it’s much more advantageous to drive traffic to a highly targeted,
customized landing page instead.
Consider this scenario as an example: You own an online store that sells vitamins and other
health supplements. You set up a series of PPC ads that talk about special organic vitamins
for middle aged men.
Your goal is to drive traffic back to your website where you hope they will then find your
“online store” page, find the specific product you mentioned in the PPC ad, and make the
purchase.



30



The problem is that there’s a very good chance the people who clicked on your PPC ad will
go to your site, get distracted and give up trying to locate the vitamins they were hoping to
find. This is a “double whammy” for you. You have to pay for the click, and you miss out on
the sale. Ouch!
Instead of driving the traffic from this PPC ad back to your very generalized health and
nutrition website homepage, why not drive it to a clean, simple, hyper-focused landing page
that has only one product – the one they are interested in buying?!
Based on this example, do you see how a landing page could help you increase your
conversion rates in your PPC campaigns? Do you see how it could decrease the number of
times people click on your ad and end up not buying anything?

3. More Landing Page Benefits
Here are some additional benefits you can enjoy when you leverage the power of landing
pages in your inbound marketing campaigns:
• Compared to the typical homepage, where it’s common for the reader’s attention to wander,
properly executed landing pages help you focus your prospect’s (usually very limited and
scattered) attention on your offer much more effectively
• Do you have multiple products you sell and multiple audiences you want to reach? You can
employ multiple highly customized landing pages with specifically targeted content
• Increased conversion rate (not just for PPC, but for organic search, email and social media
marketing also)



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• In order to increase your conversion rate, you’ll want to engage in conversion optimization.
A big part of this is testing the different elements on your landing page – content, headlines,
images, etc. Cutting-edge landing page software makes testing very easy for you.

4. Best tips to create ultra-effective Landing Pages
Your content is one of the most critical parts of your landing page and your marketing in
general. You want content that is brief and to-the-point. You want content that grabs and
holds your reader’s attention.

• Keep your sentences and paragraphs brief.
• Use bullet points – a great place to list the benefits of your offering.
• Have a specific call to action – tell the reader exactly what you want him to do while he is on
your landing page
• Have a strong, eye-catching image that is relevant to your message
• Keep your landing pages uncluttered and focused only on persuading your reader to accept
your offer.
• Don’t add anything that would distract him from doing what you want him to do.
• DO NOT add your website navigation buttons to your landing page
• On every landing page you set up, include a form that allows you to capture the reader’s
contact information



32

“Tactics without strategy is the noise
before defeat.”

Sun Tzu

Permission Marketing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_marketing
Inbound Marketing
http://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
Marketing Process
http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/2009/09/28/the-easiest-way-to-explain-the-marketing-process/
Email Marketing Tool
http://sales.fromdoppler.com/lander
Landing Page Ultimate Guide
http://promos.landerapp.com/ebook
Landing Page Templates
http://landerapp.com/new-templates/
Copyblogger
http://www.copyblogger.com/landing-pages/
Seth Godin Site:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
Convince and convert
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/email-marketing-advice/5-rules-for-safely-using-the-awesome-power-of-email-marketing/
The Inbound Marketing Company
http://theinboundmarketingcompany.com.au/inbound-marketing-plan-free-ebook/

Special Gift for you:
Give an extra power to your Inbound
Marketing Strategy
Now you have everything you need to improve your Inbound Marketing

Strategy. But we know sometimes it’s hard getting started, that’s why we
want to give you some help for your first steps.

Try out all Lander’s Features with this huge discount we’re giving you.

Use this promo code and get 20% discount in any plan for three months!
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READING
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