Inbound Marketing brings attention to your website and can strengthen your visibility in search through useful content. It helps your business begin a relationship with prospective customers before the sale and demonstrate industry expertise.
"Useful content" can include how-to videos, calculators, podcasts, blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, and e-newsletters.
Many websites are not designed with inbound marketing in mind. Below are five ways to benefit from inbound marketing during a website redesign.
A website redesign is the right time to inventory existing pages, map important URLs to their new destinations, and make sure key pages have descriptive titles, meta descriptions, accessible text, and useful internal links. Pages should be designed and coded simply to improve page speed and load time. Search performance depends on many factors, so build the redesign around helpful, reliable, people-first content rather than tactics intended only to influence rankings. A website redesign plan should include these search and content requirements before development begins.
Publishing useful content on a sustainable schedule gives prospective customers more ways to find answers to their questions and evaluate your company's expertise at solving their challenges. Frequency alone is not a search strategy. Plan blog posts, ebooks, whitepapers, and spec sheets around the problems your best-fit buyers need to solve, then connect each resource to a clear next step. A content marketing strategy can help align those topics, formats, and conversion paths with business goals.
Promote useful new content through the channels where your audience is active, including relevant social media platforms and email. Make it easy for readers to share resources they find valuable, but focus first on creating material that is genuinely useful to the people you want to reach.
When embracing an inbound marketing strategy, you first want prospects to find your website. But what happens after someone reads a few pages? If there is an action your company wants customers to take, don't leave it to guesswork. Design each page around an appropriate next step.
For example, do you want prospects to sign up for a product demo? The website should make that path clear. Calls-to-action should speak to the target audience and connect a relevant offer to the page a visitor is viewing. Start by developing relevant offers (or "next steps") for your most important pages. Not sure what to offer? Take a series of blogs related to a particular subject and repackage them together as a guide.
As alluded to above, calls-to-action grab a visitor's attention, but how will you turn contacts that interact with your website into a sales conversation?
Guides, calculators, checklists, and case studies can offer value in exchange for information. Place short forms in front of the resources that matter most to your buyers, request only the information your team needs to follow up, and make sure the promised resource is delivered. Putting contact forms on key pages and designing landing pages should be priorities for an inbound website redesign.
You can also use website visitor identification tools, like RB2B, to uncover a portion of your anonymous traffic and see which organizations are engaging with your content. This insight gives your sales team a targeted, warm lead list for thoughtful, timely follow-up instead of cold outreach.
A business's website redesign should be more than an art project -- it should be a strategic marketing project that considers how prospective customers find information, evaluate your expertise, and take the next step.
If you'd like to discuss an inbound marketing-focused website redesign with our team, we invite you to contact us for a no-cost consultation.