What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the methodology that puts your customers at the heart of your business goals and campaigns. It combines several strategies to attract potential new customers, nurture them into leads, and convert those leads into paying customers.
Inbound marketing aims not to find customers through advertising directly but to provide useful content that customers will find through search engines, blogs, social media, or other channels.
Outbound marketing is a one-size-fits-all approach to reaching customers that isn't as effective anymore because it's not as relevant. Today's consumer's value information that is relevant to them and their lives. Unlike the traditional marketing approaches that interrupt potential customers with promotions when they are not actively seeking them out, inbound marketing brings marketing strategies into the hands of your audience through content that draws people in and solves their problems.
Inbound marketing provides solutions to your customers by delivering personalised, meaningful content and marketing messages that inspire and engage them throughout their buying journey.
Identifying Your Audience
Your audience is your target market. But before you do anything, you need to identify who you're targeting.
A great way to do this is to create buyer personas of the potential customers you want to talk to. Build a persona for each of your target audiences.
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How old are they?
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What are their interests?
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What are their challenges?
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What problems do they have?
The more you know about your persona, the better you'll be able to create a message that resonates with them. You'll also be able to tailor your marketing message and offers to those individuals.
When you build content-driven marketing campaigns like inbound and content marketing, you build long-lasting relationships with your prospects and customers. By creating the right type of content for your audience, you give them value. You can then use that value to convert them from an interested visitor into a loyal lead or customer. And that's how you get sustainable growth for your business over the long term.
Image from hubspot.com*
The three stages of Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, Delight!
While the inbound methodology consists of a comprehensive process, it can be broken down into three stages.:
Attract
If your product is the solution they're looking for, then you have to build a case in the Attract stage that says just that. Create buyer personas based on your Ideal Customer so you can publish content that speaks to their specific needs and wants.
The prospect wants to see the value that they will get from your product or service. They need to know how it will help them achieve their goals and meet their needs. An effective way of conveying this is by providing them with relevant, valuable content that relates to their situation, challenges and needs. This could be in the form of free case studies, white papers, ebooks, live demos, infographics, video or webinars.
Engage
You can transform a cold lead into a warm one by creating a long-lasting relationship with your customers. Lead nurturing is the process of building trust and familiarity with prospective customers to create brand advocates and boost sales.
The engage stage refers to when consumers are interested in a product: they might be discovering it and learning about it, but they're not ready to make a purchase. Businesses should try to build an email list during this stage and encourage users to sign up through webinars and giveaways or a compelling brand story.
Gartner, a market research company, found that B2B companies that have an active social media presence see 3X higher lead conversion rates than B2B companies with inactive or disengaged social media profiles. That's because when prospects follow your brand's social media accounts, they begin to expect valuable and tailored content from you. When you consistently deliver this kind of content, your influence over their purchasing decision grows.
Your customers are on your site for one reason: to check out your products. A perfectly made product page is a must, but you also need to add some value to the page by providing engaging content and offers as well as product recommendations based on previous purchase history. Some engaging techniques that we've found work very well in e-commerce include live chat, signup forms for email marketing, gated content, and gated product pages.
Delight
Once customers have purchased your product, they are already established as a loyal consumer. This is the time to show them how much they mean to you, and why they should continue doing business with you. In order to retain your customers and make them evangelists of your brand, you need to develop a strategy that provides post-purchase value. Nobody wants to feel like they're only valued when they're spending money.
Long-term relationships are formed when customers feel supported and valued over time, so it's essential to maintain communication with them even after the initial purchase. Adding on a post-purchase video series that showcases how to use your product is one way that you can communicate with customers beyond the first transaction.
Once a customer has purchased from you, continue interacting with them. How? By sending them surveys and asking for feedback, by helping them if they have any issues or questions about your product, and by continuing to engage with them via social media. Businesses can then incorporate this feedback in their internal business processes to be used across a company as a whole to continually improve offerings and customer experiences.
A few other examples of how you can delight your customers include:
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Customer support surveys
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Updates on product enhancements to help users get the most from a product or feature update
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Automated marketing & CRM integrations that help get the word out about new features or products
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Step by step guides for getting the most from specific features and functionality.
What's next?
Inbound marketing is a powerful way to turn visitors into leads, then leads into sales, and finally customers into repeat buyers with a dedication to your brand. Inbound marketing gets results through a process of growing traffic to your site, nurturing that traffic to potential customers, and ensuring that you convert those potential customers into happy, paying customers who come back for more.
Want to get started with inbound marketing? Get in touch with us today and we will:
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Review your current strategy and marketing efforts, and put together a plan that matches your budget.
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Set up specific goals for your business growth using the latest frameworks in SEO, conversion rate optimisation, digital marketing, social media, content marketing and more.
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Find the biggest issues that are preventing your business from growing.