Inbound marketing is the hot term in the online world today.
It’s for good reason.
Inbound gets better results than outbound and for less money.
What is inbound marketing?
It’s anything your business does to be there when your ideal customers are ready to information.
That might be a little vague and broad.
Inbound marketing is when your ideal customers discover your brand (and its content) through search and sharing.
If you create a piece of content your ideal customers will find it via search when they’re looking for it. They’ll also come across it when their friends or colleagues share it with them.
As you can imagine, this is much better than interrupting the person with advertisements, which is a form of outbound marketing.
So that’s what inbound marketing is and why it works.
Now let’s get down to the meat of this article, which is providing a free inbound marketing strategy for a hosting company.
Hosting Company Inbound Marketing Strategy
Your inbound marketing strategy consists of content (including design), promotion, discovery, and new customer acquisition (low cost).
You probably recognize these steps as pretty basic. Low cost customer acquisition is something successfully businesses are able to master.
The content part includes text, video and in some case images. Your content strategy could include all the different forms of content that you can create both on and off the web, but for a hosting company it’s good to focus only on the type of content your customer most wants to read.
This is kind of their preferred channels.
I would recommend starting with a blog. It’s a biased answer, but lots of people are reading blogs.
The one to watch for in the future is video. People are watching online video at an increasing rate. It will become necessary to have online video as part of your online marketing strategy in the future if you want to attract new customers.
Blog Content For Search and Social Discovery
The great thing about blogging is you can create the type of content that your ideal customers are searching for online. You’ll naturally optimize your posts for search, which means including the keywords your customers are looking for on search engines.
You can also tweak the titles of your posts to be social media share bait. People are using social media networks more than ever. They need content to share and if your blog posts are really good you’ll find that your readers will share your content exposing you to more readers.
Here are 10 blog post titles I would recommend for a hosting company blog:
- How Design and Development Affect Your Page Speed
- Common Mistakes Businesses Make With Cheap Website Hosting
- Little-Known Facts About Your Website Hosting Options
- How Page Speed Affects SEO, Social Sharing and Conversion
- Website Security: 7 Ways Your Host Should Protect You
- 11 Secrets To Getting More Website Traffic
- How To Manage Your Website Analytics
- How To Setup Testing On Your Website
- 9 Mistakes Businesses Make With Their Websites
- How Big Brands Find Success With Social Media
You’ll notice that some of these titles are about hosting directly and that some are more broad.
The idea of blogging is to attract people that are in every stage of your sales cycle.
Potential hosting customers are looking for things regarding hosting, but they’re also looking for information about online marketing, business management, etc.
If they discover your content you can earn their trust and when they realize they need web hosting they’ll come to you.
Frequency and Consistency
The more often you can blog the better, but I always tell people that your blogging should be consistent both in quality and in when you publish. If that’s once per week then that is fine.
What you’re attempting to do with your blogging is create a routine for your readers. You want people to come back to your site regularly to consume your new content (and to look through your archives).
Many of our clients at GBW start out with one blog post per week. Stick to that for a year and you’ll have about 50 posts all of which work for you into eternity to bring new visitors to your site that could turn into customers.
That’s how you can get started with your inbound marketing strategy if you’re a hosting company.
You can adapt this for other industries as well.
Image: Philip Schatz