Anyone who is invested in inbound marketing has at least a basic understanding of search engine optimization (SEO). However, few marketers have even heard of Smart inbound Optimization (SiO), despite it being equally important. This ultimate technique will take your business presence and profitability to the next level.
SiO allows you to make your inbound marketing strategy smarter by involving math marketing. It combines all the essential elements of the inbound methodology in a precise formula that results in business success. In other words, Smart inbound Optimization is where marketing meets math.
SMART iNBOUND OPTIMIZATION INGREDIENTS
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing consists of seven pillars. Rather than just focusing on one or even a couple, SiO takes all seven of them into consideration. Enabling collaboration allows you to create a comprehensive strategy.

1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the cornerstone for SEO, PPC, SMM, and web design. SiO brings all these elements together to meet your unique objectives while ensuring the content you create is what users want at each stage of the funnel. This way, you can nurture more prospects into customers. Smart inbound Optimization in content marketing also involves understanding customers and prospects —never working on assumptions but always turning to the data.
Read: 10 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Content Marketing Strategy
2. Marketing Strategy
A failing point for many businesses is believing that it is unnecessary to have a cohesive marketing strategy. However, your short-term goals are insufficient to guide your digital marketing efforts in the right direction. You need to develop a marketing strategy from the beginning if you want to know your goals and understand your brand. A marketing strategy allows every aspect of your marketing to run better, therefore optimizing your conversion rate.
3. Analytics
It is impossible to create a strategy without analytics. You need to see where you stand today with your efforts to determine how you could improve. In fact, you should never launch any campaign without first turning to the analytics to ensure your plan will result in positive ROI. A good marketing strategy is one that is always changing to reflect new findings in the data. This also means you will need to constantly adapt your marketing tactics.
4. SEO
A favorite pillar among marketers for good reason, SEO is key to forming a digital presence. SiO takes changes in SEO best practices into consideration, as search engines roll out new algorithms, and applies them to other facets of your inbound marketing strategy.
Read: Why You Should Drive SEO with an Inbound Marketing Strategy
5. Paid Advertising
Marketers who are responsible for achieving organic results with their content may look upon paid advertising with disdain, but this is actually an important way to bring traffic to your site. Smart inbound Optimization allows you to reconcile SEO and PPC to enhance the effectiveness of your keyword campaigns and increase visibility. It also aligns ad content with the rest of your strategy to create top-performing ads for Adwords and social media.
6. Social Media Marketing
To create an online presence, you need more than just a website promoted through SEO. Your prospects and customers expect to find you on social media, meaning you need to maintain a consistent activity on all the major platforms. SMM will also allow you to promote content to a wider range of users and generate inbound traffic.
7. Web Design
Web design is directly related to SEO — search engines monitor the time visitors spend on your site to determine your ranking in search results. SiO combines best practices with analytics to improve user experience, present businesses in the best light, and help search engines understand your content to ensure you appear high in the results for your desired search terms.
Read: 7 Amazing Tips to Increase Website Conversion Rates
Math Marketing

SiO takes digital marketing to the next level by incorporating math marketing into each of the inbound pillars. This helps with several areas:
1. Intelligent Customer Acquisition
It is expensive and often challenging to acquire new customers. Math marketing for intelligent customer acquisition ensures that all your inbound marketing efforts play a role and that you spend less per customer than the value of each customer. SiO focuses on signals of intent, targeting, and messages to turn a maximum number of prospects into long-term customers.
2. Segmentation of Data
Collecting data is simple, but without some system of organization, there is no way of finding what you need to make good decisions. Math marketing involves segmenting data according to your unique objectives. As a key aspect of SiO is promoting cohesion between different areas of your business, various departments will be involved in the segmentation process to prevent silos.
3. Statistics and Probabilities
Once you have segmented data, you can start arriving at conclusions and make predictions. Math marketing offers various formulas and calculations to determine the probabilities of different outcomes, allowing you to better plan for the future.
4. Integration
The final stage in math marketing is to integrate various elements to create a single strategy. To best make use of your available resources, you need to keep everyone on the same page. This means your strategy needs to align sales and operations with marketing.
Predictive Marketing Strategy
Smart inbound Optimization also allows you to resolve problems as soon as they occur by implementing a predictive marketing strategy. Predictive analytics will assist you in every stage of the problem resolution:
- Report. First, you need to define the problem.
- Analytics. Next, you can start hypothesizing about why the problem occurred.
- Monitor. It is also important to check what is happening now by turning to real-time data.
- Predict. Bearing in mind the previous information, you can make predictions as to the same or a similar problem happening in the future.
- Simulate. Finally, you can run predictions through model scenarios to arrive at a probability for the issue reoccurring.
An inbound strategy without SiO is actually several separate strategies with little to hold them together. When you utilize Smart inbound Optimization, you are able to include math marketing in the mix, optimizing results.
Read: 10 Best Lead Nurturing Strategies to Increase Sales Revenue