You may have probably heard of inbound marketing, but you might not be sure how it differs from traditional online marketing. Today, let’s find out what is inbound marketing and what makes it unique.
Table of content:
- What is Inbound marketing?
- Value of inbound marketing
- Inbound marketing methodology
- Conclusion
What is Inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing can be considered as one of the most effective and meaningful marketing methods for every business. The philosophy behind inbound marketing is the idea that people appreciate personalized, relevant and valuable content instead of interruptive messages. Thus, they will develop a positive impression and be willing to connect with the brands that share the same values.
Inbound marketing is based on attracting the attention of target customers by creating valuable, helpful content and providing experiences that are tailored to their unique needs and buying journey. While outbound marketing methods such as cold calling, cold emails or interruptive ads try to push advertising messages towards customers, inbound marketing is all about pulling customers to the brands in a more delicate way. While outbound marketing seeks out customers, inbound marketing focuses on visibility to let potential customers come to you. Some forms of pull marketing are content marketing, blogs, SEO, social media, and more. Instead of interrupting people with messages, they don’t always want, inbound marketing helps brands to build relationships when the customers are actively looking for solutions to their problems, convert them into leads, and nurture them until they are willing to engage with you.
“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” – Craig Davis.
Value of inbound marketing
Many brands have applied inbound marketing philosophy in their marketing activities and consider it as an ethical marketing method. For instance, CRM provider HubSpot is one of the successful case studies while applying inbound marketing in every aspect of its marketing activities. They have built lots of valuable, useful content for their target audience that brings in a ton of organic traffic, including blogs, online courses, eBooks, case studies, industry reports, etc. The resources answer important questions that their target audience wants to know, which become a truly inbound marketing machine.
Here are some main benefits of inbound marketing to your business:
Inbound marketing methodology
The inbound marketing methodology is a long-term, multi-step process focused on growing the customer base organic. When done correctly, inbound marketing can gear significant results for businesses toward building awareness, developing relationships, generating leads and sales. The inbound methodology has 4 main stages to convert strangers into customers: Attract, Convert, Close & Delight
- Attract – Turn strangers Into visitors: Attracting potential customers is the first step in the inbound marketing methodology. At this stage, prospects are usually searching for content to answer their questions. Thus, marketers will create useful, high-quality content to help them resolve their problem and drive them to visit the brand’s website. It’s important to distribute content to a broad audience through SEO, blogging, and social media marketing.
- Convert – Turn visitors Into leads: With enticing, free content, you can direct individuals to sign up for emails, effectively turning website visitors and social media followers into leads.
- Close – Turn leads Into customers: The closing stage is where leads are becomed customers. Now, marketers need to use different marketing tools to engage with the target customers to close the deal, including email marketing, marketing automation, and social media.
- Delight – Turn customers into Promoters: For inbound marketing, the stage of turning customers into promoters is very important. Customers can become the biggest advocates or the biggest detractors for your brand. Ideally, this phase will lead to referrals, WOM and social media shares. Thus, marketers need to engage continuously with them through email newsletters and other touchpoints to promote loyalty and advocacy among existing customers.
Conclusion
With an inbound approach, your brands have opportunities to engage and nurture relationships with the target customers in every stage of their buying journey. This is something that cannot happen one night, but it will help your business to acquire loyal customers and promoters who have high lifetime value to your business.
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