How to Integrate Inbound Marketing With Your Current Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential student prospects to your Registered Training Organisation (RTO). Instead of fighting for their attention amongst the plethora of advertising and marketing messages in the educational space, you create and share content they will find engaging and interesting. Today 85% of all shoppers use the Internet to research products and services. By attracting their attention online with content that’s designed to personally appeal to each of your RTO’s personas, you draw qualified prospects to your business. You also keep them coming back for more content and hope that they, in turn, share your content far and wide.

But the question most RTO’s face is: How do we synchronise a successful inbound marketing strategy with our current marketing plan? Here are some points for you to consider:

• Digital brand alignment

For your inbound marketing strategy to be successful, you need to ensure the goals of both your sales and marketing departments are aligned. Share your goal-based data between your departments and use the combined insights to strengthen your inbound marketing campaigns. You can track metrics including how efficiently the marketing department is in handing leads over to your sales department and the quality of your customer reviews or comments across your social channels. These will help determine how effectively your campaigns are doing.

• Maintain consistency across your personas

In order for any marketing campaign, whether it’s inbound or outbound, to be a success, you need to have clearly defined personas for each of your target markets. These personas need to be consistent irrespective of whether you are using inbound or outbound marketing tools. Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets 2015 report shows that 77% of companies surveyed either agree or strongly agree that they are working towards delivering cohesive customer experiences, rather than standalone campaigns or interactions. If you have consistent, cohesive messages aimed at engaging each of these personas, your marketing strategy is already well on its way to becoming successfully integrated.

• Create an engaging content strategy

Your content strategy is the foundation of any successful inbound marketing strategy. In fact, DemandMetric reports that 78% of CMO’s believe that custom content is the future of marketing. Your content strategy defines how you are going to attract your prospects attention, nurture them throughout the sales process and ultimately convert them from prospects to customers.

To create an engaging content strategy, focus on pain points and challenges your prospective students may face. They will be searching for answers, so if you have your keywords optimised, and the content to answer their questions, you’ll be positioning yourself as a thought leader in this space.

• Optimise your website

In order to optimise your top pages for leads, you need to create calls-to-action (CTAs) that stand out from the page and they need to be placed where people naturally look. An eye tracking study has found this to be the upper left-hand corner of a website and then it moves on from there.

• SEO and multi-channel integration

Creating and maintaining a high rank on search engines should always be a priority when your RTO is writing new content. The vast majority of your student prospects will come from search engines. Keep this in mind when you are creating content and use SEO to optimise your content for search engines.

When creating your inbound marketing strategy, it’s important you integrate all aspects of your marketing. If you have a YouTube channel, link to it from your blog and Facebook, and vice-versa. When writing your blog articles, make sure your meta tags are correct so your content can be shared correctly on Facebook with all links and images in place.

Lupo Digital is an inbound marketing agency that specialises in successfully integrating inbound marketing with every RTO’s current marketing strategy in order to run and measure effective inbound marketing campaigns appropriate to every student’s stage in the admission cycle.

For more information about which digital marketing channels work for RTOs, download our executive guide to inbound marketing for RTOs.