If you want to grow your company and boost your conversion rates, you need to stop marketing to your customers and start marketing with them. Inbound marketing is the process of attracting the right prospects to your marketing funnel by providing them with educational content, which they can consume at their own pace.

It’s a strategy that’s very effective for getting prospects to buy your product. How do you get started with inbound marketing? Here are five simple steps to get you started on the path to increased conversion rates.

If you’re looking to improve the leads you get from your website, here are six sure-fire ways to improve your conversion rates with inbound marketing.

Create a unique experience for every persona

If you’re using your website to get leads, make sure you create a lead-generating piece of webspace and not showing visitors an cluttered, disorienting online brochure. A self-initiated website audit is a good start in the right direction. Take a closer look at your website and ask yourself these questions:

• Does it have useful, relevant information about your business?
• Can site visitors navigate the site with ease?
• Does it have a list of your products and services?
• Does it inspire, motivate, and / or convince visitors to buy

If you answered ‘yes’ to these questions, there’s a good chance that your website is designed with users and buyers in mind. If you answered ‘no’ to most of these questions, chances are you have an online brochure and not a website. If that’s the case, we strongly suggest you rework your site as soon as possible.

If you’re rebuilding your site from the ground up or if you’re doing some extensive reorganising, it’s best you approach it with the same mindset as you would if you’re building a theme park. Consider these: what kind of experience will my site provide to first-time visitors? Will they get an immersive experience? Will returning visitors still feel immersed in their subsequent visits?

This is how you should be thinking about your website! This isn’t so much about designing a site with eye-popping visuals, some fancy widgets, and other cool website features. Rather, this is about understanding what your personas and prospects need when they visit your site and giving it to them quickly and easily.

Try to include every step of the buyer journey

If you’re not sure where to begin,the buyer journey is a useful jumping-off point. There’s a high likelihood that people who know little to nothing about you are going to your website at some point. Then, there’ll also be people who know enough about you and your industry and what options are available to them.

In addition to these people, there’ll also be visitors who’ve already made up their mind about their purchase and just need a piece of information or two to complete their purchase. Whichever the case, your website should be able to move these people to where they need to be, relative to where they are in their buyer journey.

The more you align the options you offer to where they are in their journey, the more personal you get. And when things get more personal, the likelihood of these anonymous visitors becoming paying customers also increases. Be advised though: this isn’t as easy as taking a look at your website. This is a high-end strategy that requires thinking, planning, and meticulous implementation to get it right.

This also entails a website strategy that clearly defines and outlines the connections between pages in your site so that you can  strategically map out where we want our visitors to go on the site and when we want them to go there.

If you’re not careful and if you don’t spend the necessary time to plan your strategy, you run the risk of losing high-quality prospects who’ll leave as soon as they get impatient with the experience.

Ask the questions your prospects are asking

You won’t have the right content on the right page for the right persona at the right time in their buyer journey unless you ask the same questions your prospects are asking in their journey from visit to purchase.

That said, map the questions your prospects are asking themselves and make sure the pages in your site that provide answers to these questions. Once you have these down, delivering content in context to your prospects’ specific challenges becomes easier.

This is a highly effective application of inbound marketing and content marketing, but it’s one that constantly gets ignored in favor of putting up a website pronto or cutting costs.

In case you’re thinking of skipping this step, don’t. If you do, there’s a good chance you’ll just end up with another electronic brochure that offers little value to visitors. Understanding content in context of your buyer’s journey doesn’t just affect website design, it also impacts conversion strategy, content marketing, email marketing and lead nurturing. 

Pay attention to post-visit conversion 

Sometimes, people just can’t make up their minds and they’ll need to keep coming back to decide. There’ll be highly qualified people who visit your website who’ll leave just as quickly as they visit your site. And just when you think they’re gone for good, they’re right at your doorstep again.

Then there are highly qualified prospects that feel like they’re in for a fling rather than a long-term commitment. They’ll visit your site and convert once. After which, you’ll never hear from them again. What’s up with that? 

If you’re able to do a good job at attracting these people, you’ll have to do just as well in nurturing and keeping them. This is where lead nurturing comes in. Lead nurturing is a highly complex effort and takes time, testing and a very deliberate skill set to set it up, implement it, manage it and optimize it over time.

Regardless of its complexities, it’s not really difficult to grasp the operating principle here: prospects want to make sure in their purchases and so, the more we help them by giving them relevant, useful information, the more we ease them to that important decision.

Over time, all these leads in the nurture phase of your inbound program also fill up the sales pipeline, but most of these come in at the bottom of the funnel, which is why this phase is so critical to impacting revenue in the short term. 

Use multi-media channels to cater to different types of consumers

Some people are fine with static images, others prefer something with motion. Others like it plain and quiet, some love it loud and noisy. It’s a simple truth of media consumption: to each his own.

If that’s the case, you should be ready to engage prospects through different multi-media channels. For instance, people who rely more on logic than emotion would prefer whitepapers over emotionally-packed web shorts. Similarly, people who are more visually inclined would prefer an infographic over a case study.

Some are comfortable with the written word, others prefer pictures and sound in the content they consume.

Understanding your persona helps you focus your content creation efforts and tailor them to the intended audience. This means you’ll always need a variety of content formats and content options to appeal to as many different types of people as possible.

The better you are at this, the more leads you’ll get from your inbound marketing and from your website and content marketing efforts. 

Remember: it’s an on-going effort, not a one and done

Perhaps one of the costliest mistakes in inbound marketing is thinking that it’s a one and done deal. Far from a faustian bargain, inbound marketing requires continuous effort, realignment, and recalibration. You’ll need to continuously be publishing new content to keep up with your prospects and returning visitors.

This ongoing website and conversion optimization work is one of the most important and often-overlooked aspects of inbound marketing. Instead of simply launching the site and sitting back waiting for the new customers to come in, you’ll need to be always on your toes in making sure everything is optimised for conversion. By looking at conversion rate by pages you can target highly trafficked pages with low conversion rates and make a big impact on results with just a few minor adjustments.

Successful experiments that produce positive results provide best practices that get leveraged across the entire site. 

The goal of any marketing campaign is to drive the right prospects to your site and convert them into customers. Inbound marketing is one of the best ways to do this. It’s not as simple as getting more traffic to your site, however. In order to convert visitors into customers, you need to create a well-defined inbound marketing strategy.