Inbound Marketing Presentation for Brainerd Web Design

Ben is about to start his talk on Inbound Marketing for Web Developers. To get the slides, click here.

Inbound marketing is a hot topic in SEO at the moment, but how is it relevant for web designers and developers?

What exactly is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is the marketing practise of “earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easy to be found and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value.” This can be achieved in many ways such as publishing killer content that people will be drawn to your site to read and interacting with influencers socially.

The inbound marketing cycle

• Attracting traffic to their sites
• Convert visitors into LEADS
• Convert LEADS into SALES
• Increase Customer Margins
• Can improve their website on a continuous basis

So which of these phases are relevant to web designers?

• Convert visitors into LEADS
• Convert LEADS into SALES
• Increase Customer Margins

It is an SEO’s job to attract traffic to the website through optimizing for the right keywords. However, a website must be designed efficiently to convert visitors into leads, leads into sales and increase customer margins. Number one rankings across golden keywords will not convert a visitor if they cannot find the call-to-action or the webpage takes too long to load. There are many needed skills and disciplines needed for inbound marketing to be a success. Web designers and developers can increase their clients’ websites conversions by using certain inbound strategy techniques.

Strategy & Planning

The first thing a web designer should do when receiving a new client is…plan! Setting goals and an overall strategy will help define the aim of the website design and build. Planning a project correctly will save time in the long-run as you will have a set of tactics to complete to achieve you aim.

It is critical that the web designer communicates regularly with the client to find out the audience’s needs. Knowing the target audience and their needs will greatly impact the site’s conversion rate. You can design a website that complements the target audience’s preferences so the usability of the site is improved.

Great site usability & content = conversions!

Tips for Web Designers

1. Include a blog and social integration: Easy to update, share and enjoy!
   
2. Improve the website’s speed: A website’s speed can greatly affect bounce rates, conversions and ranking positions.   Try using Google Page Speed for an analysis on how you can improve your website’s page speed.
3. Do not change URLs if changing a website’s structure: if you change the URL then all the links that were pointing at the old URL disappear, meaning the rankings can fall dramatically. Even 301 redirects are not ideal as they take time to take effect.
4. Integrate social media: To help a user share the site content it must be built into the website. Use Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards and link to their Google Plus page for increased social signals-critical for search rankings. Use a brand image to customize your social sharing icons.
5. Promote & publish your content: You should be publishing your content across all social media channels. There are many other tools such as Google AdWords and remarketing to expose your site to your target audience.

Content marketing will increase your site’s trust, likeability and awareness. So, before you release site content ask; is it likable? Is it trustworthy? And, am I engaging with the right audience?

Inbound marketing is a collaborative effort and with many types of expertise needed SEO’s, web designers and developers should work together to increase their clients conversions and sales.

Update: Here are the slides

Download PDF (from slideshare)