Turn strangers into readers, readers into customers, and customers into fans. That’s the promise of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a powerful marketing philosophy that emerged as a response to the demands of the digital medium.
At a time when 67% of the customer’s journey is finished before they even speak to a sales rep, inbound marketing offers a solution to businesses that have seen shrinking returns from traditional marketing. However, despite its tremendous growth in the last few years, inbound marketing is still largely misunderstood.
In this blog, we’ll break down the core inbound marketing concepts and help you understand how you can use them to grow your business.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Simply put, inbound marketing is a strategy used by businesses to build brand awareness and attract customers to the business. It is about helping attract customers to your business. As such, the strategy focuses on promoting business visibility. This is unlike outbound marketing which is the traditional type of marketing that focuses on sending advertisements to customers.
The best way to understand the need for inbound marketing is to see it in relation to conventional marketing. Conventional marketing is focused on interrupting the user’s experience. Think of an ad on the radio or a commercial on TV. This content is rarely entertaining and almost never helpful. Yet, customers are forced to sit through it – an experience few enjoy.
This is why we need inbound marketing. Underscoring this is another phenomenon: most of your buyers are now searching for solutions online.
Just take a look at these statistics:
- 81% of customers research online before buying. For B2B buyers, this is as high as 94%.
- 54% of consumers make a purchase after seeing a product on Instagram.
- 57% of customers use social media to get recommendations.
This means that what would once be done by salespeople – educating customers and offering them solutions – is now being done by customers themselves through search and social media.
If your prospective customers can’t find you when they search for you on Google or ask around on social media – you might very well lose customers forever.
Understanding Inbound Marketing
In a nutshell, inbound marketing is an umbrella term for a number of marketing tactics that aim to attract, qualify, and win-over customers with helpful content. At the heart of inbound marketing is a simple belief: that helping is better than selling.
When you create content that helps customers understand their problems, you earn their trust and time. If you do it frequently and effectively enough, you get the right to sell them your products. Inbound marketing acknowledges that customers today do not want to feel like a transaction and that the best way to win a customer is to become their trusted advisor who helps them understand their problems.
Inbound marketing utilizes different marketing strategies to achieve this goal, such as social media marketing, events, and even SEO. One of the benefits of inbound marketing is that it can be used to boost trust as it reaches out to the customers even before they need your product.
The Benefits of Inbound Marketing
The first rule of inbound marketing is to prioritize the customer over everything else. Everything you do, from creating content to distributing it, will depend entirely on your customers. This is also why there is no fixed playbook for inbound marketing; what works for one business might not work for another.
For example, if your target customers hang out on Instagram and prefer looking at videos over reading text, your inbound marketing playbook should focus on creating visuals (infographics, videos, GIFs, etc.) and distributing them over Instagram and YouTube.
On the other hand, if your customers are mid-sized corporations who need extensive information before buying, you’d do better by spending your time creating whitepapers and distributing them through LinkedIn and email marketing. This is another characteristic of inbound marketing; it helps you create content your customers love and distribute it where they already hang out online.
Some of the benefits to your business are:
- Improved Brand Awareness – Inbound marketing offers an excellent way to build brand awareness. A strong social media presence helps you be easily found by customers, which is a very cost-effective way to make your business known. If your business website has good SEO, then it will be easier to find.
- Builds Brand Preference – Inbound marketing can be used to promote brand preference so that customers will choose your business over the competition. This is due to the strategy’s engaging and entertaining content offered to customers.
- Inexpensive Lead Generation – Inbound marketing focuses on providing customers with the information they need to make the right choices. This helps to position you as what today’s consumers want – a trusted resource. It shows that you’re an active member of your community and more than a business that just wants to take your customers’ money. So, it can be a clever and cheap way to generate quality leads without having to spend a fortune.
- Great Way To Get Feedback – By communicating with customers on social media, inbound marketing offers you a unique opportunity to learn about their problems and challenges. This then allows you to serve your customers’ needs better. What’s more, inbound marketing can also serve as a multifunctional tool by getting feedback while also gathering customer data.
The Three Steps
Because inbound marketing can include so many different types of marketing channels, it’s essential to break it down into a methodology. This will provide lasting, genuine customer interactions that can help grow your business.
Inbound marketing methodology can include three steps:
- Attract – It’s important to bring in the right customer demographics in order to have meaningful, long-lasting engagement. To do so, research relevant keywords and trends before publishing content.
- Engage – Once your potential customers have engaged with your brand, it’s essential to build on this by offering solutions to their problems. If your potential customers see you as an authority, they may be more willing to buy your product down the road.
- Delight – Continue to engage with your customers even after their purchase. The goal is to create trust between your brand and your customers. You may want to gather more information by including a survey in this stage. You may also ask customers to give you feedback.
Applying Inbound Marketing to Your Business
Inbound marketing matches the way customers buy products online, involving various actions, tactics, and techniques. Those include, but are not limited to:
- Conducting Analysis – Online shoppers start by searching for information and products online before deciding whether to continue with the purchase.
- SEO – This involves creating content that is high quality, and that is higher in search engines. This makes it easier to be found by customers.
- User Experience– Ensure that your website is easy to navigate and that it easily directs site visitors to precisely what they’re searching for. Remember that customers have a short attention span and can quickly switch over to a competitor if they don’t find what they’re looking for.
- Quality Content – Ultimately, online shoppers want to know what is in it for them and what they are getting out of it.
- Acquiring and Nurturing Leads – This will require you to take shoppers through the buying process until they make and complete the purchase.
- Building Brand Trust – This requires you to develop content that helps customers solve problems. It is focused on the needs of the customer rather than the needs of the business.
A Final Word
Unlike traditional forms of marketing, inbound marketing focuses on creating content that is intended to attract customers to the business and its products. The goal of inbound marketing is to offer quality and to ensure that the customers keep coming back for more.
Inbound marketing helps in building relations with your prospects. It avoids hard-selling a product. As a result, it promotes customer engagement. And, customers are more willing to engage with your business when they are presented with content that is informational, educational, and entertaining.
By providing customers with entertaining and engaging content, you help build brand awareness. Consequently, you generate quality leads, and as a result, customers are more likely to seek your business out when they are ready to make a purchase.
Let’s connect if you are interested in learning more about the essence of inbound marketing.
