Inbound Marketing Strategy – What Is It?
Inbound marketing is an approach used by businesses to build brand awareness and attract customers to the business. It is about helping customers locate the business.
The inbound marketing strategy focuses on promoting business visibility. This is unlike outbound marketing which is the traditional type of marketing that focuses on sending adverts to customers.
Inbound marketing is about attracting customers and is not about going to where customers are.
Instead, the customers come to you.
This approach to promoting your business utilizes different 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.
Without a doubt, inbound marketing is a great way to generate leads and expand the customer base.
The whole idea of inbound marketing revolves around one of the most important things we should all know how to do as human beings…
Building Relationships!
Inbound marketing helps in building relations with prospects. It avoids hard-selling a product. As a result, it promotes customer engagement.
Customers are more willing to engage with your business when they are presented with content that is informational, educational, and entertaining.
It is not about getting a salesperson to push a customer into buying a product.
Inbound marketing has a higher return on investment as customers receive an open invitation to the business and can make their own choices.
This type of publicizing also offers an excellent way to generate quality organic leads.
It is significantly cheaper than other forms of marketing and promotion. AND to top it off, it allows the business to connect with people interested in its products.
The Benefits Of Inbound Marketing
We all know the struggle of figuring out the best psychological tactics to make people buy your product or service.
Multiple copies, different psychological hooks, and frameworks until something works.
But well, as we said, inbound marketing has nothing to do with that type of marketing.
So what are the biggest benefits of inbound marketing? Let’s see!
1. Improves Brand Awareness
Inbound marketing offers an excellent way to build brand awareness.
If your business has a strong social media presence and can easily be found by customers on social media, then this can prove a very cost-effective way to make your business known.
Furthermore, it is essential to remember that more than 90% of online shoppers start their search online.
If your business website has good SEO, then it will be easier to find.
2. Builds Brand Preference
Inbound marketing can be used to promote brand preference.
This means that customers are more likely to choose your business over the competition.
This is all thanks to the tactic’s engaging and entertaining content and offering this to customers.
3. Cheap Lead Gen
Inbound marketing focuses on providing customers with the information they need to make the right choices.
Therefore, it can be a clever and cheap way to generate quality leads without having to spend a fortune.
It is also an efficient way to market your business.
To put this into perspective, inbound marketing has a higher return on investment than other forms of marketing.
It generates three times more leads than other marketing strategies.
4. Great Way To Get Feedback
By communicating with customers on social media, inbound marketing offers a unique opportunity to learn about their problems and challenges.
This then allows businesses to make the required changes to the products to better serve the customers’ needs.
What’s more, inbound marketing can also serve as a multifunctional tool by getting feedback while also gathering customer data.
Inbound Marketing Strategy – How To Use It
Unlike traditional forms of marketing, inbound marketing methodology focuses on creating content that is intended to attract customers to the business and its products.
This is just the contrary to bringing the product to the customer and hoping that they will make a purchase.
It is about attracting customers themselves to the product.
The goal of inbound marketing is to offer quality and to ensure that the customers keep coming back for more.
If you are interested in learning more about the essence of inbound marketing, head to part one of this article series, where we go in depth on the topic.
Now in part two, let’s have a look at how exactly you can apply this to your business.
How It Works
Inbound marketing matches the way customers buy products online, involving various actions.
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 – It involves inbound marketing content creation that is high quality, and that is higher in search engines. This makes it easier to find 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 leads and nurturing them – this will require you to take shoppers through the buying process until they make and complete the purchase.
● Building brand trust – this requires a business to develop content that helps users solve problems. It is focused on the needs of the users rather than the needs of the business. This helps build trust in the business.
How To Use It
Alright, with all of this theory that we chugged down in both parts of this article series, let’s see what you can actually do to use inbound marketing!
Ready? Steady? Sell!
1. Attracting
This is the first step to inbound marketing and entails locating and attracting your target audience.
Some of the questions that you can ask yourself include:
● How can I help customers find my website?
● Do I use hashtags, or do I use keywords?
You can help rank your site higher on search engines by making your website more visible to potential customers by answering these questions.
2. Convert
All promoting is ultimately about converting the leads into customers. Some ways that you can do this include:
● You can ask visitors to sign up for your newsletter
● You can include a compelling call to action in your content
This ensures that site visitors don’t just access your website and leave without providing something in return, such as their contact information.
3. Close
Sometimes you may not be able to convince customers to fill in a sign-up form or subscribe to your newsletter.
Consider if you have the option of using automation. A good example is automated emails which can be sent at appropriate times to remind customers to finish the checkout process.
This can go a long way towards improving conversions and closing sales, considering that as much as 45 to 50% of abandoned cart emails will be opened.
4. Delight Phase
This is the final step in your inbound marketing strategy. You need to show customer appreciation for buying your products. It may involve offering a discount or sending a thank you email.
You may want to gather more information by including a survey in this stage. You may also ask customers to give you feedback.
Final Word
Inbound marketing helps businesses generate quality organic leads.
It is not about presenting the business’s products to potential customers.
Rather it is about providing quality content that attracts and retains customers.
Implement an inbound marketing strategy that you can use to grow your customer base and improve your business’s bottom line.