Perfect Pizza’s Inbound Marketing Strategy – A Fictional Case Study

Remember when you’d use a phone book to find a business or phone number, or go to the library to find facts or information? Ask any teenager today what a phone book is and they’d probably give you a blank stare because phone books have been made obsolete. People use the internet to find information now, more often than not on their smartphones. How many times have you been talking to someone when a question comes up, such as when is that cool movie coming out or when are the Broncos playing the Packers this year, so you just reach for your phone to find the answer to it? It happens quite often, right?

Two Different Online Marketing Strategies

People do the same thing when they have a question about a business, such as finding a local pizza place. Let’s look at two different business approaches to online marketing:

1. Passive Pizza – They don’t spend much time developing new content for their website, even though they know they should, because they don’t have time, and frankly, they don’t really like doing it. So their website sits stagnant. And social media? Forget it – it takes too much time.
2. Perfect Pizza – They update the content on their website on a regular basis and they even write a blog post once a week. They then promote the content across their social media channels and engage their audience with promotions and events. As a result, Perfect Pizza comes up as the first organic search engine result, so you look at their menu and off you go for dinner. Meanwhile, Passive Pizza appears at the bottom of the search engine results, so you never see it. Perfect Pizza wins.

Inbound Marketing Can Help

Is your business at the bottom of search engine results? This is not a place you want to be if you want to grow your business. Inbound marketing, which is a strategic marketing approach to attract customers to you, can help you. Inbound marketing is comprised of three major components:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – The process of applying different techniques to increase a website or content’s ranking in search engine results.
2. Content marketing – A strategic approach to creating and promoting high-quality, relevant content to attract and retain customers.
3. Social media marketing – Using social media channels to promote a business.

Perfect Pizza’s Inbound Marketing Strategy

If you develop an inbound marketing strategy and execute it well, you’ll have a real chance to move up in search engine results in order to get more clicks and sales. Let’s take a look at what Perfect Pizza does for inbound marketing:

1. SEO – As a local small business, Perfect Pizza decided to outsource a portion of their inbound marketing to an SEO agency since they don’t have the resources to manage it themselves. The agency researched the business and industry using a variety of paid and free tools such as Google Search Console to get market information about how people are searching for pizza restaurants. Based on the research, they came up with a set of SEO keywords to use in their marketing strategy. They started by optimizing the website for these keywords, meaning they added these keywords to meta tags, updated the website copy to include these keywords, created an internal and external hyperlinking strategy and much more.  
2. Content marketing – The agency helped Perfect Pizza develop a systematic content marketing strategy by brainstorming ideas for blog posts and articles, timelines, responsibilities and more until they had a solid content roadmap. As the agency then worked together with the marketing manager at Perfect Pizza to develop the content, they used the appropriate keywords and properly optimized each piece of content for online search.
3. Social media marketing – After each piece of content from the content marketing strategy was developed, the agency worked with Perfect Pizza’s marketing manager to develop a social media marketing strategy in order to promote the content. The agency researched Perfect Pizza’s audience initially and found that they were using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as their main social media channels, so the agency recommended using these three social media channels to promote content. The agency used Hashtagify to find trending #hashtags and then trained Perfect Pizza’s marketing manager on how to use Hootsuite to easily schedule and publish the social media messages.

You can see how each of these components of inbound marketing work together. Perfect Pizza and the agency use keywords from the research to develop high-quality content and then promote that content through social media channels. As a result, Perfect Pizza ranks high in organic search engine results, and ultimately, they get the pizza sale. The agency and Perfect Pizza also meet on a regular basis to review inbound marketing metrics to adjust its strategy as needed.

The First Three Organic (Non-paid) Search Listings Are Getting 50% Of All Clicks  

Over 50% of all clicks are going to the first three organic (non-paid) search results in Google. After position three, the click-through-rate then dramatically drops and if you’re on page number two or even lower, the chance that your business is getting found in online searches is extremely low.

If you want to increase your visibility and sales, applying inbound marketing techniques can work. It does take time and patience to work though but it’s well worth it. Someone will get the click and potentially make the sale.

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