Unlocking the Power of Inbound Marketing: Discover Why Social Media Is a Vital Component!

Introduction to inbound marketing 

In today’s digital landscape, businesses constantly seek new ways to reach and engage with their target audience. Traditional outbound marketing tactics are becoming less effective, and a new approach is needed. This is where inbound marketing comes into play. But what exactly is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting customers through relevant and helpful content rather than interrupting them with intrusive advertisements. By providing valuable information and building trust, businesses can establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry and convert leads into loyal customers. 

What is inbound marketing? 

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that aims to attract, engage, and delight customers by providing valuable content at every stage of their buyer’s journey. Unlike outbound marketing, which relies on interruptive techniques such as cold calling and direct mail, inbound marketing focuses on creating content tailored to your target audience’s needs and interests. This content can take many forms, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, and social media updates. You can attract qualified leads and nurture them through the sales funnel by providing valuable content that addresses your audience’s pain points and challenges. 

The Role of social media in inbound marketing 

Now that we understand the basics of inbound marketing let’s explore the role of social media in this strategy. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have become integral parts of our daily lives. They provide a unique opportunity for businesses to connect and personally engage with their target audience. By leveraging the power of social media, businesses can increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, and ultimately generate leads and conversions. 

Power of Inbound Marketing

Benefits of incorporating social media into your inbound marketing strategy 

There are several benefits of incorporating social media into your inbound marketing strategy: 

  1. Social media allows you to reach a wider audience. With billions of people using social media platforms, you have the potential to connect with customers from all over the world. 
  2. Social media helps to build brand awareness. By consistently posting valuable content and engaging with your audience, you can establish your brand as a trusted authority in your industry. 
  3. Social media enhances customer engagement. 

Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide a direct line of communication between businesses and their customers, allowing for real-time feedback and interaction. 

How social media enhances customer engagement and brand awareness 

Social media is a powerful tool for enhancing customer engagement and brand awareness. By actively engaging with your audience through comments, likes, and shares, you can build a community of loyal followers more likely to become customers. Additionally, social media allows you to humanize your brand and showcase its personality. By sharing behind-the-scenes content, employee stories, and customer testimonials, you can connect emotionally with your audience and differentiate yourself from competitors. Lastly, social media provides an opportunity for viral marketing. When your content resonates with your audience, they are more likely to share it with their networks, increasing your reach and visibility. 

Utilizing social media for lead generation and conversion 

One of the key benefits of incorporating social media into your inbound marketing strategy is its ability to generate leads and drive conversions. Social media platforms provide several opportunities for lead generation, such as lead capture forms, gated content, and social media ads. By strategically placing these lead-generation tools throughout your social media profiles, you can capture valuable information from your audience and nurture them through the sales funnel. Additionally, social media platforms provide a platform for showcasing your products or services and driving traffic to your website. By posting engaging content that directs users to your website, you can increase the likelihood of conversions. 

Best practices for integrating social media into your inbound marketing plan 

Let’s explore some best practices for integrating social media into your inbound marketing plan: 

  1. It’s essential to identify your target audience and choose  
  2. Choose social media platforms that are most relevant to your audience.  
  3. Different platforms attract different demographics 
  4. Consistency is vital. Establishing a consistent posting schedule and maintaining a consistent brand voice across all social media platforms is crucial. This helps to build trust and credibility with your audience. 
  5. Don’t be afraid, just experiment, keep trying new things 

This industry is constantly evolving, so don’t forget to keep up with the trends.

Role of social media in inbound marketing 

Tools and Resources 

  • For Scheduling Posts – Hootsuite and Buffer 

In addition to scheduling and automated posting, analytics and reporting features are also a part of these tools’ arsenal 

  • For social media Listening Tools – Brandwatch & Mention 

These tools help you listen what people are sharing about your Brand 

  • Social media advertising platforms – Facebook, Linkedin 

No need any introduction here. 

Measuring your Success 

Some key metrics that you can track to measure below 

  1. Engagement Example likes, comments, and shares  
  2. Reach and impressions metrics provide insights into the number of people who have seen your content. 
  3. Click-through rates and website traffic metrics help you understand how effectively your social media posts drive traffic to your website. 
  4. Conversion metrics like lead generation, sales etc help you measure the return on investment  

Conclusion:  

  • By focusing on providing valuable and relevant content, businesses can attract and engage customers throughout their buyer’s journey.  
  • With a customer-centric approach, inbound marketing can convert leads into loyal customers. 

Ready to take your inbound marketing strategy to the next level? Contact us today to learn how we can help you incorporate social media into your marketing plan. 

Five-Star Marketing for the Tri-Star

It is only recently that automobile dealers have been trying to reach their customers directly through digital channels. However, getting an in-house team can be resource-intensive, time-consuming, and may not yield significant results. This is where a brand management company like BLeap comes into the picture, with its vast experience and expertise in implementing strategies and writing success stories.

The authorized dealer Sundaram Motors of the luxury car brand – Mercedes Benz, had approached us in the first quarter of 2020 to revamp their digital marketing strategy. They wanted to engage with potential customers directly over the web. But who are these customers, and where are they likely to come from? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google search are a place for growing the consumer market digitally. But how exactly are we going to engage with them? We had a brainstorming session with the client and chalked out a customized plan for them.

Customer engagements would include high-quality video content, creatives for special days, WhatsApp adaptations, accessories, and service. Other creative content was to be made around referrals, extended warranty programs, and micro-targeting. Sending out carefully crafted customized SMSs to current customers was another way in which we planned to build and maintain brand loyalty. A Facebook shop would be set up for easier checkout and enhanced visibility of their products. A landing page was created for the purpose of running SEM campaigns which we would regularly update in accordance with changes in the scheme. With all this in place, we were ready to get started. We did have our fair share of success initially but we also did face some challenges which we met and overcame through our nimble and dynamic approach of adapting quickly.

We launched a campaign surrounding the New Car – Roadster. Over the first three quarters, we saw steady growth in visibility (measured in terms of Impressions, Link Clicks, and Reach). But we experienced an 87% bounce rate from social and 70% from paid search. We immediately took note of this and reallocated the budget to Google Ads. Facebook page likes also decreased over the time period. There was a decrease of over 700 from Jan 2020 to Dec 2020. A regular page-like campaign with a minimum budget of 5000 INR/month was suggested to be used to increase/maintain followers. The average cost per lead on Q2 from Facebook was around 100 INR and the cost per lead from Google was over 1000 INR. So, we suggested increasing the budget for lead generation ads of Facebook in the 3rd and 4th Quarters.

There were some extremely positive results too. The number of people who viewed Sundaram Motors’ posts on social media increased considerably over time after our engagement with them. 273 (in ‘19’) to 676 (in’20). Paid posts also garnered increased attention from 2,320 (in ’19) to 13,553 (in ’20). Average reactions had increased from 16 (’19) to 52 (’20). In total, 1400+ leads were sent from FB at an average CPL of 350 INR.

Our content for Sundaram motors was well-received by netizens. Quarter-wise popular content formats are given below:

  • Customer car inauguration
  • Photo Montage
  • Parking lawns, Beachside view
  • Customer servicing, EMI

We also suggested the use of influencers, based on popularity and the type of videos they should create. Customer testimonials and experiences were also captured to drive popularity.

We consistently ran Google ads campaigns and successfully in Q4, we increased the CTR by 3.87% and reduced the Avg. CPC by Rs. 3.4. Also, the Benz-related keywords had an impression share of 90% in Dec ’20 when it was 86% in Jun ’20. Over 95% of the traffic came from mobile. Paid Search, Display, and Social Media drove 72% of the total traffic. New users accounted for over 88%. On YouTube, 204 new subscribers joined us in 2020.

Through our consistent efforts, we were able to drive traffic to the client’s website, social media pages and drive potential business. Overall, the campaigns have been a massive success and they continue to be a valuable client to this day.

One step towards 320000 smiles!

Dental businesses are ubiquitous these days in our cities and towns. But there are only a few that provide high-quality treatment and more importantly, at affordable prices. One such is Dr.Smilez Dental Center which is a chain of clinics across Chennai & Pondicherry. They have a team of over 100 experienced dental surgeons and award-winning doctors. Being an established business, they wanted to expand further, connect to more customers and drive growth. The tried and tested ways like newspaper ads, TV commercials, referrals, word of mouth, etc., were not matching up to the lofty goal they had set for themselves – Their mission is to reach out to 320000 smiles every year! Their mission became BLeap’s mission when they approached us in December 2020.

We got started with smart social media campaigns. Starting a Facebook ad campaign is fairly simple but it has to serve its intended purpose. Firstly, we had to draw up a plan that was cost-effective and at the same time delivering maximum value. We had a clear focus and went ahead with a simple strategy. Targeting outside of the focus market could be wasteful so we carefully debated and considered specific variables – Our target market would be persons living in and around Chennai & Pondicherry, within specific age groups depending on the creativity being used, speaking Tamil or English (languages are widely spoken in the region) and interests in dental care, cosmetics, tooth fixes, etc.,

We started the campaign in December ’20 with a minimal budget of 1000 INR and we were able to reach 87,000 users immediately. Unfortunately, it did not generate any solid leads. We knew we had to revamp our approach to see some good numbers and we did just that and saw positive results. By January 2021 we only had to increase our budget to around 6000 INR but the reach was an astounding 3,00,000. At the end of the period, 15 customers traveled through the funnel. Also, an estimated 70,000 users would have remembered seeing the ad within 2 days. So there is still a possibility that they might recollect sometime in the future the brand of Dr.Smilez and therefore convert into a potential customer. We also engaged regularly with Facebook users through posts, videos, and informative content which garnered attention among them.

Simultaneously, we ran Search Engine Marketing campaigns to further boost Dr.Smilez’s customer base. We set out to market the business using paid advertisements that would appear on search engine results pages (SERP) such as Google. We began with comprehensive research as part of our keyword management strategy. We identified keywords that are relevant to Dr. Smilez’s business and that prospective customers are likely to use when searching for their services such as “Dental”, ”Tooth”, ”Clinic”, ”Chennai” etc. We also developed necessary negative keywords and high commercial intent. Subsequently, text ads and visual ads were designed. We positioned our CPC Bid accordingly. Finally, we were all ready to go live.

The costs incurred in December 2020 were around 11,000 INR and the ads were displayed (impressions) in the SERP over 10,000 times. 750 users clicked through the ad and the final conversions stood at 8. We probably needed a boost so, in January 2021, we increased the budget to around 22000 INR and the impressions were around 12,000 which was good to see. Finally, we took it up a notch and allocated 24000 INR in February which generated some great numbers – around 50,000 impressions, over 2000 interactions, and 40 conversions. Which meant 40 dental appointments at Dr.Smilez were almost guaranteed. Also, the cost per click reduced from 14.6 in December ’20 to 10.6 in February ’21.

Paid advertising on Social media platforms or on Search engines can be quite tricky. Maximum spending on ads doesn’t guarantee maximum visibility and conversions. We at Bleap don’t go all guns blazing and shell out a lot of money not knowing if it will yield the expected returns. We take a calculated step-by-step approach. We test the waters first in the initial stages of the campaign and if needed, develop an alternate strategy. Dr.Smilez is one among many clients who keep us smiling.

Robust website solutions for elite businesses

Web development companies can unfortunately be all over the place when it comes to executing quality development work for clients – be it in terms of graphics, features, functionality, and overall look and feel of sites. Clients are often pushed to their wit’s end when their vision for the site is not being realized. The constant back and forth communication about fixes and changes are not only stressful but also push deadlines and costs for implementation. Clients just wish they had a magic wand to create interactive sites out of thin air. Web development doesn’t require magic wands but needs a development team that is proactive, industrious, and agile. Bleap boasts of having one such industry-leading web development team. So when a US-based IT solutions company approached us in January ’21 to develop a website for them, we were looking forward to an exciting journey.

Founded in 2013, Jazz Solutions, Inc. (JSL) is an economically disadvantaged, woman-owned, SBA certified 8(a) program participant small business delivering customer-centric IT solutions built to further the mission and goals of Federal, State, and local governments. Jazz Solutions is based out of Ashburn VA, USA.

Right from the word go, it was an absolute pleasure to work with JSL. They were thorough professionals and gave the BLeap development team a detailed presentation of their business, ideals, and vision. Their existing website was to be taken down as they wanted to revamp it following their renewed objectives, goals, and acquisitions. The website we were to develop would be brand new yet retain key elements of the old site. We had a big challenge ahead of us. The key to any successful project lies in how well Project requirements, considerations, and limitations are understood and we knew that well. So we initially had multiple requirements gathering sessions with them consisting of meetings, questionnaires, interviews, etc. asking them what specifically their ideal site should look like. We prepared a business requirement document, established the functional and non-functional requirements of the system. With that our development phase was ready to start.

JSL wanted the site to go live within a couple of weeks. We dint have much time and we quickly put our experienced resource to the task – the senior developer in our team. It was a one-man-show from start to finish. The site was to be developed in a WordPress framework and styled using CSS. The themes and Images were shortlisted and selected after the client’s approval. The transition effects in the collapsible home page banner image were done by the developer himself and the expertise of a separate designer to do this was not sought. The developer even applied his creativity and came up with an interesting transition from black & white to color for Image profiles of senior leadership in the ‘About Us Page. When we demonstrated it to the client, they were ecstatic about it and gave their approval. The pop-up window for ‘Read more in the ‘About us’ page was efficiently written as a single script. The development was complete by Day 9 and one day was spent on end-to-end testing. On day 10 we went live and got the client sign-off! After the deployment, the client came back to us a couple of times to add more content to the site and we were more than happy to help. Typically, the duration of the other Development projects we undertook was measured in months. But due to our unwavering diligence and client support, we went live with the JSL site in such a small timeframe. The site was also designed to be mobile responsive.

The success of this project can be attributed to the fact that Jazz solutions already had a clear-cut picture of what their website should look like even before they came to us. Often clients fail to acknowledge that the basic idea for the project which is handed to developers should be as elaborate and accurate as possible. Else, things go haywire quickly with the developers implementing something and clients expecting something diametrically opposite. We were fortunate enough to have amazing control over the progress of the project and deliver successfully. We only wish we had many more such mutually empathetic and gainful engagements with our clients.

Leapfrogging over competitors through smart SEO strategies

Modern-day internet users are not quite known for their patience. They want to search, retrieve and use the information at lightning speed. This is evident from the fact that as per a study, the first page of Google search results captures 71% of search traffic clicks and has been reported to be as high as 92% in recent years. Second-page results are far from a close second coming in at below 6% of all website clicks. Owing to their established brand value, large businesses more often than not, turn up on the first page while low and medium-sized businesses are left languishing on the second page and beyond. Every business wants to climb up this ladder of pages and increase its visibility to customers. One such business that approached us was Clinevo

Clinevo is a Software Development Company specialized in developing and implementing robust technology solutions for Life Sciences R&D. They help Pharma, Biotech, and CROs in reducing their time and cost in Clinical trials by implementing innovative technologies that involve Data warehousing, Analytics, Collaboration, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence. Though their team consists of well-experienced business and technical leaders, IT experts, etc., they were having trouble getting traction among customers to reach their website, let alone have conversions.

We gained considerable exposure to Clinevo’s processes, systems, and operations to identify the nature of customers that would benefit from their services, and prepared a potential list of keywords that a customer would probably search for. We refined this list over several iterations. When we began in 2019, these keywords when searched on Google did not retrieve Clinevo’s website but over a period of 2 years and our constant relentless hard work, we achieved massive success. In 2021, the keywords “eTMF software”, “Cloud-based pharmacovigilance database” and ” Cloud-based drug safety software” resulted in Ranking position 1 for Clinevo in Google search results. Similarly, the keyword “OneClinical” was placed at number 3 and “ISF Software” placed at number 4. All 10 keywords selected for our target customers were placed at rankings below 8.

Subsequently, the victory of our digital marketing strategies was evident from the fact that in 2020, 4282 users accounted for Organic search-driven traffic source to the website. This number was considerably low at 1553 users in 2019 – A whopping 176% increase in users from 2019 to 2020. Users also started visiting the website directly. 1338 users visited Clinevo’s site directly in 2019 which jumped to 3181 in 2020 which was again a significant 138% increase. These results earned us the trust and appreciation of the client.

We achieved these results with a combination of the following activities by our digital marketing experts. We have enabled SEO on-page activity tasks such as Meta title tags, Meta description, Content Optimization, H1 Tags, Alt tags, Google Analytics, Google webmaster, site speed optimize, XML sitemap, and Robots txt. To refine and provide more valuable results to the client, we are currently working on Off-page Activities such as Search Engine Submission, Directory submission, Social bookmarking submission, Local business listings, Local Classifieds, Blog comments, and articles submission.

Search engines like Google see backlinks as votes of confidence. Generally speaking, the more votes your web pages have, the more likely they are to rank for relevant search queries. Bleap was quick to find that these numbers were quite low for Clinevo – only 100 in 2019. We made sure that these numbers grew about 20 times in less than a year. Another concerning fact for Clinevo in 2019 was

that the Page and Domain Authority scores were low. Page Authority is a metric devised which measures the relative authoritativeness of a single website page and how it will perform on a Search engine results page (SERP). While domain authority is also a similar metric measured on a scale of 0-100 for an entire domain or subdomain. These scores for Clinevo were 5 and 7 respectively in 2019. We pushed these up to 15 and 29 in 2020.

Overall, the engagement with Clinevotech was a fruitful and successful journey for both parties. We experienced a fair share of bottlenecks but we were able to push through and deliver top-quality digital marketing services and uncompromised results.

Key benefits for businesses using React JS Framework

The React JS or simply React is famously known as one of the best JavaScript libraries for developing front-end or GUI of web applications. As React software is backed by Facebook, React JS, also known as just React has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years and has become the de-facto library for component-based GUI development. We can build modern, fast Single Page Applications or websites using React.

Though there exists other various front-end frameworks like Angular and Vue.js available, what sets React apart from others could maybe the fact that it just focuses on component-based GUI development and doesn’t invade on other areas.

Today, there are over 220,000 live websites using React. Not only that, but industry giants like Apple, Netflix, Paypal, and many others have also already started using React JS in their software productions.

With so many companies using React JS including some of the top brands in the whole world, React must be offering some extraordinary benefits, right?

Of course, it does. The React JS offers tons of benefits.

The Key benefactor of React JS for front-end development

Let’s see the key benefits of React JS to understand why it is considered to stand out from other front-end development frameworks.

Speed

React Js basically allows developers to utilize individual parts of their application on both client-side and the server-side, which ultimately boosts the speed of the development process.

In simple terms, different developers can write individual parts and all changes made won’t cause the logic of the application.

Usability

Deploying React is fairly easy to accomplish if you have some basic knowledge of JavaScript. In fact, an expert JavaScript developer can easily learn all ins and outs of the React framework in a matter of a day or two.

Flexibility

Compared to other frontend frameworks, the React code is easier to maintain and is flexible due to its modular structure. This flexibility, in turn, saves huge amount of time and cost to businesses.

Performance

React JS was designed to provide high performance in mind. The core of the framework offers a virtual DOM program and server-side rendering, which makes complex apps run extremely fast.

Mobile app development

If you thought React is for web development only, you could not be more wrong! Facebook has already upgraded the framework for developing mobile native applications for both Android & iOS platforms.

Business Benefits of React JS Framework for Modern Web & App Development

  • Offers integration by utilizing the lightweight DOM (Document, Object, Model) – React JS flawlessly implements the DOM to enhance the app performance automatically by allowing the developers to control the existing DOM available in the memory.
  • The Java Library – The amalgamation of JavaScript and HTML syntax simplifies the code writing process for the proposed project. The React JS library offers distinct functions which help convert the HTML components into the required features by making the whole project easy to interpret.
  • Enhanced Data Binding – React.JS offers an excellent option of one-way data binding to help track the changes made in the data segment. Further, it also makes JS coding easier and is extremely efficient while providing tremendous cross-platform support.
  • Exceptional Component Support – The React JS framework has much to offer with combination to JS and HTML tags, which makes it easy to deal with the vast data set of DOM. It acts as the intermediary representing of the DOM and helps generate the exact results by identifying the required changes for the specific component.
  • SEO Friendly Features – Though traditionally the projects developed in JavaScript were not SEO compatible but with extensive research and improvements suggested by Facebook the new phase of JS development now offers better compatibility with the search engines.

Today, enterprises are on the look-out for a front-end development company that can help them power their business, with a hassle-free engagement through a robust UI. They insist feature-rich mobile web software products which require a complicated and strict process of software development. ReactJS easily adapts to any app development projects and helps to acquire the results that surpass the client expectations.

We prefer to use React because we prefer a single reliable stack which makes it easy for anyone to kick start their digital business. We believe that React is the most approachable technology available today. When we deliver projects to our partners we also want to make sure the transition is as smooth as possible, and React has served us well in doing so.

Seeking a Front-end Development Partner? Our team can serve your most complex application and software development needs.