Angelfish Marketing Blog

Over the years, outbound marketing methods such as cold calling and print advertising have gradually fallen to the wayside as inbound marketing methods have risen in popularity. But what is it about inbound that makes it so popular - and therefore so essential for your 2020 digital strategy?

What is a target audience?

Whatever product or service you and your business provide - whether you’re a recruitment agency, shop owner, travel company, or something else entirely - you will have an ideal target audience of consumers. By definition, a target audience is “a group of people defined by certain demographics and behaviour.” These demographics could include anything from age, gender, where they live, what they do for a job, interests, relationships and so on - and it’s really important for the success and future of your business to ensure you know your target audience inside out.

It is so important to include precise, optimised content to avoid losing out on potential conversions. But, with long-form content proving to be highly effective when it comes to getting strong results, how can you provide useful information without producing ‘waffle-y’ content? And, does Google really prefer longer pieces? 

It seems like everyone and their mum is on Facebook these days, constantly scrolling through endless status updates and videos of dogs doing daft things. Everywhere you go, you see people staring at their phone screens – on trains, tubes, buses, and even as they walk down the street. With 2.27 billion monthly active Facebook users globally, and 32.6 million active users in the UK alone (yes, that’s 50% of the UK’s entire population!), it’s fairly likely that the majority of these people are on Facebook.

The right message to the right people at the right time and in the right place... isn’t that every marketer’s dream? As mobile continues to grow, location-based SEO is a great opportunity for your business and (less happily) to your competitors. But what exactly is location-based SEO? And how do you make sure you’re grabbing people’s attention first?

At the Inbound 2018 conference earlier this year, Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, announced that the inbound marketing methodology is changing. As marketers, we have become very accustomed to using the marketing ‘funnel’ model when devising and managing our marketing strategies. We know how it works; the process is simple: attract, convert, close, delight. The focus in recent years has been on the attract stage; creating valuable content to pull customers in has been the best way to generate new leads and grow your business. But now, 'cracks' are starting to appear in this funnel.

Inbound marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. While some inbound marketing services can manifest quickly into tangible business benefits, others can take time to plant the right seeds, build your brand reputation and get more users to your website.

It all depends on your approach. It may take just a few months for your initial inbound marketing strategies to kick in and for your website to start rising up the search engine rankings. And you may not reap the initial rewards of creating great content for many months as you build your long term digital assets.

However, in our experience, it is possible to accelerate your inbound marketing efforts so you can start to realise real results faster. Here are a handful of inbound marketing services that could help you to see such results more quickly:

When it comes to how to measure marketing performance, you may not know where to start. There are a vast range of marketing metrics and it can, sometimes, be difficult to understand which one you should use for specific scenarios and campaigns.

But we all know how valuable data is - just look at the hundreds of data and marketing analytics tools that have emerged over the last few years - and yet marketers can struggle with measuring performance and ROI.

Link building is a vital weapon in your SEO digital solutions arsenal. In basic terms, link building is where you get other websites to link back to your website. If a lot (more than your competitors) of high authority websites link direct users to a specific page, then that page will rank highly for related keywords.. This drives traffic to your site and its content, helping you to increase your website domain authority, which is a prediction of your website’s performance in Google Search. If your website is linked to by powerful sites, then this is like a positive vote for your site. It increases your kudos with the likes of Google search.

In other words, getting other sites to link back to your website will boost your SEO. The power of link building is well established with Google announcing backlinks as one of its top three ranking signals in 2016. What’s more, SEMRush added five more backlink-related factors to its second Ranking Factors Study 2017.

It’s pretty simple: if you want your website to be found, you have to engage in SEO. Google gets over 100 billion searches a month - so if you want your website to rank highly on search engines and ultimately end up with more visitors, you need to optimise your site so that search engines fall in love with it.