Your key methods that can make your strategy shine. From audience analysis to social media, we want to set you up for inbound marketing success before you ever launch your strategy.

Making cold calls and sending out promotions have their place in marketing—but how much better would it be if people just came to you instead?

This is where building an inbound marketing strategy comes into play. It involves getting people to engage and interact with your brand on their own. Consumers who take this initiative already have some interest in your brand, so they’re more likely to sign up for a demo or make a purchase than a completely cold lead.

Never leave your inbound marketing strategy up to chance, though. It needs to include tried and true methods that will help get more people to engage with your brand on a consistent basis. On that note, we’ve put together a list of five ways to help make your inbound marketing strategy a runaway success.

1. Conduct Audience Analysis

Audience analysis is the foundation of any successful inbound marketing strategy. If you want prospects to engage with your brand and come to your website, you need to understand their core qualities.

Start by nailing down who your ideal customers are. If you’re an enterprise design agency, your target customers might be marketing and creative leads who are decision-makers at their companies. The more specific you can get with who these customers are, the better you can tailor your inbound marketing strategy and set yourself up for success.

Create in-depth buyer personas to record the details of each customer profile. B2B buyer personas should cover things like the customer’s job title, industry, salary, and whether they’re a decision-maker at their company. Here’s an example from HubSpot of a buyer persona:

Creating three to five of these unique buyer personas will give you a solid idea of who your inbound marketing strategy should be targeted toward. Equipped with this information, all your subsequent inbound marketing efforts will be clear and easier to execute.

2. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

If people struggle to find your business anywhere online, your inbound marketing strategy might be in need of a search engine optimization (SEO) overhaul. SEO helps potential customers find your business on different search engines—including Google.

Create SEO-friendly site content that focuses on keywords that your target customer is likely to search. The goal is for your content to show up as one of the top search engine results pages (SERPs) for these keywords on Google and other search engines. If you have a CRM software, you might want your company to rank for “best CRM software.”

To find keyword opportunities for your business, use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool. This tool can give you detailed insights into how hard it will be to rank for a specific keyword and how many people are actually looking it up.

Other things you can do to optimize your site for search include:

• Creating a mobile-friendly site design
• Maintaining a fast-loading site
• Setting up an SEO-friendly site architecture with a clear hierarchy of content

These actions will help Google crawl through your site with ease, properly index your web pages, and direct people to them via search. If you don’t meet Google’s webmaster standards, the search engine may penalize your site by lowering its SERP rankings.

Focus on SEO, and you’ll help make your website—the central hub of your inbound marketing strategy—visible to the right people. To learn more about SEO, check out alexa guide, which gives you all the information you need to get started.

3. Produce Quality Content

Once you get people in the door with your inbound marketing strategy, how do you get them to stay there? SEO is critical, but it isn’t enough if the content you’re producing isn’t keeping your audience engaged.

Create a blog that offers resources that engage potential customers throughout your sales funnel. A mix of non-salesy, industry content—like listicles or how-to posts—and product content—like product comparison sheets and case studies—is key. You should also create relevant, helpful content for your core audience of existing customers.

The content you create for your site can take on many different forms, too. You don’t have to stick to writing—create videos and podcasts for a varied content approach. The key is that your content marketing efforts always keep your customers top of mind. Think about what type of content you should produce to retain customers and what kind you should deploy to gain new ones.

Think about what type of content you should produce to retain customers and what kind you should deploy to gain new ones.

Quality content plays a key role in any inbound marketing strategy. Once you have someone on your website, offer enough value so that they stick around a while and see everything you have to offer.

4. Invest in Conversational Experiences

Chatbots are quickly becoming one of the best ways to boost your inbound marketing strategy. They hold distinct value as tools that people can quickly access on their own time. When a person gets on your website or reaches out to your company via social media, a chatbot can be there to greet them with the information they need—and the information you want them to see.

Along with resolving customer issues, chatbots can also be built to offer multiple types of content—product or service information, tutorials, you name it. Whatever marketing information you want someone to see, your chatbot can provide it to guide leads in the right direction. Users don’t have to leave the chat to find the help they need.