Learning About Inbound Marketing On Work Experience, By Nicole Nagle

We recently welcomed Nicole, a local A Level student, into the office on a week long work experience spell with us. She was completely new to inbound marketing, but keen to explore digital marketing and international business, in preparation for university and entering the world of employment. She did a great job and has written about what she learned, despite being a complete inbound novice.

What Nicole Learned

"When entering the office on Monday, I came in with the idea that advertising was all about businesses selling their products and services. However, inbound marketing has taught me that businesses can simply offer advice or information to a consumer and this can have a bigger impact over a potential customer's decision to buy compared to straight forward advertising.

I learnt a lot about inbound marketing!

I have learned that customers need to feel like they can trust a business before buying from it.

To earn this trust, they can read blogs on the company's website, to gain knowledge and learn about the products and services the business has to offer, before they decide to buy.

As well as customers learning from blogs and other forms of information, such as, videos and newsletters, these help to expand the brand image and help the company gain more awareness across the internet and attract more visitors to their website.

Writing My First Blog

During my time at Digital 22, I wrote my first blog.

I had to target managers of companies that work outside (such as builders) and inform them on the benefits of wearing thermal clothing to work. I learned that the style of writing is dependent upon the buyer persona. This is an example of the type of audience you are writing to, such as their demographics, their job, their age and estimated times they will be searching the internet. 

I also learnt the importance of keyword research. This helps you find relatable keywords that are most likely to be searched in Google. 

When writing blogs, the buyer's journey also needs to be considered. This is a three stage process and dependent on where the consumer is on their journey, as to how you style and shape your blog.

For my blog, I directed it at people who are in the "consideration" stage. These are people who haven't decided if they want to buy or not yet, so I simply offered them advice and explained that buying thermal clothing would be the best option.

Understanding SEO

I think that the most difficult part of the week for me was learning the concept of SEO. From not knowing anything at all about it, I can now summarise that SEO is used to help websites achieve higher rankings on Google and increase their domain authority so that their website can rank higher than their competitors'.

As this is a gradual process, websites need to be continually improving to make sure they provide the most relevant answers so they can grow in popularity and then increase the traffic coming to their website.

Keywords play an important role on website pages, as well as, blogs. By including relevant keywords on your website, you can attract the right customers. You can also learn what certain words or phrases brought people to your website and therefore gain more knowledge about your consumers as a whole.

The main aim of a website is to satisfy the targeted customer's needs and this can be done by including high-quality writing, adding images and linking to similar pages. This then helps to build up the profile of the website and customers are likely to re-visit it.

Nicole picked a good week to join us, as we celebrated our 5th birthday whilst she was here by having a kids fancy dress party.

Outreaching

Another area of inbound marketing I didn't know about was Outreaching. This is the process of raising awareness of your business via other websites. It's a useful way of connecting with your target audience. 

Thoughts

Even though I still don't know everything about inbound marketing, this week has taught me a whole new side of advertising that I wasn't aware of.

I now realise that businesses do more than just try to sell their products, they want customers to be satisfied, re-visit their website regularly and trust their brand."

Well Done, Nicole!

Well done on what sounds like a very productive week, Nicole. And we all wish you the best of luck in your studies.

Do You Want To Learn More About Inbound Marketing Too?

Then we suggest taking a look at one of our resources that we have put together, to help you find out more about one of the most important areas of marketing. Make sure you gain the trust of your potential customers and market to them in a way which isn't ignored or skipped. Read about the process further in our free ebook.