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Fishing With A Different Rod | Using Inbound Marketing for LOYAL Followers

Part 1 of 2: Attracting NEW Followers

In business, your brand lives or dies by the support of your follower. From “don’t miss” viewers of your show, to those who eat, sleep, and breathe your products, creating an army of loyal followers pump energy into your thriving business. As important as it will be to keep your current loyal followers engaged (Part 2 of this Series), it to create incredible compelling content that is supremely optimized for prospective brand followers.

Fishing With A Different Rod | Using Inbound Marketing for LOYAL Followers

The fact is that for many well-established outdoor brands, appealing to and obtaining new loyal followers requires being different. If you haven’t got someone to become part of your brand family in the last 5 years using traditional outbound marketing methods, then odds are it isn’t going to work over the next 5 years. Whether it’s because they just don’t feel like you offer what they want, or most likely they don’t know what you actually offer, they need to be tended to in a different manner.

This is why inbound marketing has been shown to have a huge return on investment (ROI) for business choosing to think outside the traditional marketing box. Whether increasing viewers of a show or eCommerce purchases, inbound marketing uses the approach of giving the consumer what they want and engaging them with your brand simultaneously. For instance, let’s say you own and operate www.largemouthlunkers.com (it’s a fictitious site), a premier bass fishing website for tips, tactics, and top bass lures. A particular bass fisherman may have no desire come to your site because they think it focuses too much on the size of the bass rather than the experience, even though your site is much more than that. Typical outbound marketing has built a loyal following, but there are millions of bass fishermen that are not following your brand. Using inbound marketing, you create a series of videos teaching kids how to use lures for catching largemouth bass. Using video transcribing, strategic keywords, and social media optimization, the fisherman above stumbles onto one of your videos when searching in Google “teaching grandkids to fish.” After viewing your videos, the fisherman is intrigued with what else you have to offer and begin to cruise the website finding much more relevant content than they thought. You have now created a NEW loyal follower.

Inbound marketing uses existing and new compelling content and puts it in places that NEW followers are coming too. It then strategically guides the visitor through your website, using techniques like funnels and squeeze pages, to get them to the “destination” you desire such as a subscribe list or eCommerce store. Think of it as a very effective and targeted soft sell. You already are giving them what they want (remember they found you!) and now you are giving them more, without irrelevant content or marketing schemes getting in the way.

Not only is it very effective because the content supplied is usually what they were looking for in the first place, because of excellent inbound marketing implementation you sat atop Google for that keyword phrase, but you are also able to measure the effectiveness of the content through analytics. This insight will help guide you as you develop more content for visitors in the same target niche.

Cost –effective, inbound marketing is changing the way businesses operate. The outdoor industry is no different. Ask yourself, are you giving the consumer what they are looking for?