Whether you’re a digital marketer or a small business owner you understand the business case for inbound marketing.
However, if you’re like me, you get bogged down by all the fluff-marketing articles promising quick wins.
I don’t want to do that here. So let’s cut the B.S. and talk actionable tried-and-true tactics.
Here are 6 inbound marketing techniques that aren’t going out of style:
1. Create Ego Bait Content
We can’t talk about inbound marketing techniques without link building. And a classic link building strategy that’ll never go out of style is creating ego bait content.
What makes ego bait content a timeless strategy? It’s based on human behavior. It uses psychology to build mutually beneficial relationships with influencers.
The basic idea is you identify an influencer in your niche and build a relationship with them by stroking their ego with content that features their accomplishments.
Whether you’re targeting a small business owner or a blogger, every influencer wants to recognized for their knowledge, services, and skills.
When you share ego bait content featuring these achievements, it gives you the perfect foot in the door to reach out to those influencers and build a reciprocal relationship. A relationship that could lead to them sharing your content with their own audience and even linking to it from their website.
What are some examples of ego bait content?
Any content that commends influencers for their work.
Examples include:
- Round-up posts
- Best-of listicles
- Interviews
- Awards
Basically anything that says, “you’re great and here’s why”.
Ego bait content is one of the best PR hacks you can use to start a relationship with influencers whether you’re looking to build backlinks, generate leads, or reach new audiences.
2. Write About KPIs
What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) your main persona is looking for? Find out what they are (if you don’t already know) and then write about them.
If you’re on target with your persona, you’ll likely rank for this topic.
Why?
KPIs are something almost everyone—in any industry—searches for, yet they aren’t written about frequently. This is a proven, non-competitive strategy that can quickly boost your results.
3. Create Combination Posts
To create a combination post, simply combine several existing blog posts on a common subject into one large post.
If your current blog has several smaller posts on the same subject they could be cannibalizing each other and not ranking well in Google as individual pieces of content.
Instead, combine these posts into one in-depth, insanely useful post and, you will increase your ranking.
Make sure to 301 redirect the combined posts to one URL.
4. Write Comparison Posts
Comparison posts are a favorite strategy of ours. Anytime you can do a “this vs. that” comparison for a topic, you have excellent fodder for a high-ranking blog post. Why? Lots of people—including your audience probably—use Google to compare things in their decision-making process.
From a marketing standpoint, it can be difficult to rank for these comparison topics separately, but by putting them together in a comparison post, you provide an answer to a question your persona is looking for and give yourself an excellent chance to rank for a keyword.
Comparison posts work because they’re useful to personas, there’s high search volume for keywords, and there’s usually not a lot of competition for them.
We’ve done comparison posts for our clients and they’ve ranked on page one almost every time.
5. Create Content Upgrades
What is a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is a digital asset that marketers offer to visitors in exchange for their email address or other contact information.
These digital assets are usually some kind of downloadable content, such as an ebook, checklist, report, whitepaper, video, etc.
Go back and identify your best performing posts and add a relevant lead magnet to each post. Here are some great examples to help you get started.
Remember inbound marketing is not just about driving traffic to your site, it’s also about converting that traffic into leads.
6. Rewrite Old Posts
Part of the marketer’s challenge of reporting is that we often look at holistic results that can’t/don’t show us the individual stories of blog posts.
While we can see general trends that may paint a pretty good picture, what we can’t see without doing some digging is that old, previously high-performing posts are now tanking while new posts are doing well (making up for the tanking posts).
There’s so much going that you need to look at your results on a page-by-page basis to see the important details.
Compare time periods for the old posts. How many views was the post getting in 2021 vs. 2022?
Google likes new content, so after about 1.5-2 years, the post will start slipping on its rankings—even though nothing has changed. Keep tabs on your archives to make sure you’re not losing ground because your old posts are slipping.
The good news?
You can easily start getting results again for the same post. Refresh the posts, add new content where necessary, and republish them, and almost without fail, your post will regain its former rankings, visits, and leads.
To see this in action, take a look at the arc of a high-performing post for one of our clients over a three-year period. You can see that in phase three, the post lost 38% of views.
Rewriting it helped the article to grow to its peak.
Try These Tactics For Yourself
These six inbound marketing techniques can help you quickly and effectively boost the content you already have. They center around improving your content and user experience.
And that is something that isn’t going out of style any time soon with site visitors or search engines.
Editor’s Note: The article is part of the blog series Grow Your Business, brought to you by the marketing team at UniTel Voice, the virtual phone system priced and designed for startups and small business owners.
