For every business product, service, or everything in between, marketing is very crucial. It is what brings all that one has to offer to an audience. You have television and radio marketing, and for the more modern approach, you have the internet and everything that can be found in it such as social media, blogs, and so much more. There is a really long list, but what’s important is undertaking an inbound marketing strategy regardless of the medium.
Depending on how you use different marketing mediums, you can either catch the attention of an audience and interest them to your service, or do the complete opposite. They can get annoyed and would have the immediate urge to close anything that pops up with your brand name on it. This goes to say that marketing is not all about showing your business, but also the quality of how you show it.
This is where inbound marketing comes in. Generally, it is an umbrella term that was coined by HubSpot in 2006 which talks about everything that brings value and content to your brand to attract leads, instead of chasing them. Not making much sense? Let us explain more.
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What is Inbound Marketing?
When you create a series of quality blogs that are packed with information and you put that in your brand website which ends up attracting attention, that falls under the category of inbound marketing. You are not chasing your leads or customers by shoving your products and services on their faces, but instead bring attention to your brand which leads to familiarity and then later a purchase when a person is finally ready to buy.
Inbound marketing generally is concentrating on your brand, building it up and adding value to it so that it can have the spotlight. There are no mentions of the products or services that you are selling, you leave that to the interested customer to find out for themselves, which is something that happens when you have made your brand interestingly credible.
Related: 6 Best Inbound Marketing Strategies You Need to Know
Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing
To further understand what inbound marketing is, we need to compare it to its counterpart: outbound marketing, also known as traditional marketing. Remember those advertisements on the television that presents a product, same goes for YouTube ads? Those are some of the forms of outbound marketing. Extreme effort is made to bring it to the audience, even if they didn’t ask for it.
An easier way to differentiate the two is identifying which is interrupting. Watching a movie and something pops out? Did it interrupt whatever you were doing? If the answer is yes then that is outbound or traditional marketing. The brand is offering you something you didn’t ask for and that is not something you do in inbound marketing. It is all about earning attention without individually asking people for it.
The Importance of Inbound Marketing
At this point, you might be questioning the legitimacy of inbound marketing. How can something catch attention if it is not presented in front of an audience? The answer is simple, you make your brand interesting and useful to a point that people can’t help but get involved.
So, the next question is, should you bother learning it? Definitely.
Inbound marketing is not just an alternative to traditional marketing, it is a much superior version of it. Time and time again, it has proven to generate more traffic and create more momentum to your brand which positively affects future products and services. As a matter of fact, statistics suggest that more than 90% of clicks on the web come from some sort of inbound marketing strategy.
Further making it standout, inbound marketing doesn’t have the consequences associated with its counterpart. Remember the last time you watched television, what did you do during the advertisement? Did you go to the bathroom or attend to other more important things? When you give an audience something which they didn’t ask for, the first thing they do is ignore it, putting to waste all the investment that was placed on the ad along with creating negative feedback to both your product and brand. So instead of gaining yourself an audience, you end up pushing them away.
Related: Inbound Marketing Definition You Need to Know
The Benefits of Inbound Marketing
If you are still at a crossroad whether or not inbound marketing is worth taking the leap, have a look at these key benefits and decide for yourself.
1. It creates high-quality leads
When people are coming to your website and being loyal to your brand, you are creating a customer who will always be seeking your product or service. They will not just be settling for what you currently have to offer, but as well as will consider everything else you will come up with in the future.
This is opposed to the traditional form of marketing wherein you are promoting a single product or service which only gains attention for that and that alone.
2. Lower average cost per new customer
It is a proven fact that inbound marketing creates more customers for a much lesser average price. This is because you are not investing financial resources by giving something to an audience who are most probably not in the need of what you have to offer, instead, you provide quality content and engagement which the people come looking for.
3. Long lasting effect
If you have a lead that is a customer to the brand and not just to the product, they will always be constantly considering whatever you have to offer, not just currently but especially in the future. This ensures that your future products, regardless if you market them or not, will get visibility.
4. Capitalizes on knowledge and creativity
When implementing traditional marketing, you are finding ways on how to bring a certain product or service to an audience. Compare this to inbound marketing wherein you can capitalize on any form of content relating to your business. Selling software? Create a blog about the different types, how to choose one, and so much more. The creative avenue is much more widespread and the best part is that you are not intruding into your clients’ personal space.
5. Significant web traffic growth
Creating quality content that is usable to a wide population will generate strong web traffic to your website, even from people who have no idea of your product and service. How is this good? People saw your website. You never know which of them are going to be in need of you in the near future or are already in the position to make a purchase.
There is no such thing as bad web traffic, as long as it is organic and from a real active audience, it provides your business visibility and generates customers. And if you know how to manage and treat them on a personal level, you can certainly expect that not only are they coming back for more, but will influence their peers as well through word of mouth.
Four Stages of Inbound Marketing
If you have reached this point then you have surely made up your mind about pursuing inbound marketing, so let us get down to the basics. There are four stages:
Attract
The very first step is to attract an audience. How do you do this? It is quite simple, put up content on your website. It can be in the form of a blog that answers questions, informative videos, or even social media engagement. This is the fishing line you throw out in the middle of the sea which your fish bites. You don’t serve the bait into their mouths, you make sure it is what they want and you just leave it there and make it do its thing.
Convert
After the fish bites the bait, the next thing is to pull it in. What can you do so that you can secure your visitors that they are going to want to stay? In other words, convert your visitors into leads.
You caught their attention, now it is time to engage them so that they would have all the reason to stay. Have forms that will collect their information so that you can communicate with them and provide them with further content that is specific to their needs that they are surely going to want and appreciate.
Don’t let your fish escape, make sure that you pull them in properly so that you can secure your catch. Don’t let the bait go to waste just because you used a weak line or hook. Also, don’t give them the opportunity to disconnect because you left them waiting for too long. It is a mixture of the right attention and approach. Sounds hard right? But the simple way to do this is by putting your feet into the shoes of your visitors and think of what you would and wouldn’t want. In short, level with them and connect on a personal level.
Close
From bating to reeling your fish in, it is now time to put it in the catch bucket and call it a day. In other words, securing the leads and turning them into full-fledged customers. The best way to do this is by improving your earlier email campaign. Instead of just sending out content, specifically target what you give out. If someone was caught through an e-book offering, do just that for that specific lead.
In a more general aspect, closing is about keeping constant communication. Segment your leads and keep them engaged by giving them what they need: buyer guides, case studies, testimonials, and so much more. With this being said, this is going to vary from person-to-person, and you are going to want to keep it that way. If you try to give a general approach to everyone, you might find yourself delivering mediocre service and winning none of them at all. Remember to keep your service optimum, there is no shortcut, and you shouldn’t be finding any.
Delight
There is no fish analogy for this part. Delight means keeping your new found customers happy, because all three stages will be put to waste if they later find themselves disappointed and underwhelmed. What further drives this stage is the potential for customers to be promoters. If they end up getting too happy, they will tell their family, friends, and anybody close to them.
Here’s the tricky part: there isn’t any. To delight your customers, you basically just have to further tailor your content towards them and treat them like people. What this means is that don’t be a brand, be a person who understands what others need. Make sure that they are having a good time, not just in regards to your product and service, but as well as with the entire customer experience.
Remember that turning your leads into customers is only half the battle. These people still have the choice to get dissatisfied and leave. To make things worse, your brand may put a bad taste in their mouths and they end up spreading negative feedback which could potentially kill possible customers. Keep them delighted so they are loyal to you which in turn makes your brand credibility a feature that puts more value to your product and service.
Buyer Personas in Inbound Marketing
It is now time to know who you should be marketing to. You might be asking, isn’t the general population my target? No, that’s how most businesses fail or end up spending more than they should be but only seeing a small return on their investment.
Remember that not everybody is going to seek your product or service. Stop wasting your resources on those you are sure are not in the market for what you have to offer. Stop handing out real estate flyers to students or sending emails about car loans to rich business men. You are simply putting money into someone who is guaranteed to never care at all.
This is where buyer personas come into the picture, and this should be the first thing you establish in your inbound marketing strategy. What this basically entails is identifying your probable target audience, their occupation, hobbies, spending limits, and so on, so that you can specifically target your marketing to them. For example, if you provide car loans, mold your marketing so that it becomes appealing to the college student. Show how one without a stable income stream can be able to afford one, showcase flexible payment options and minimal requirements. By showing what a customer wants to see, you are able to hook them easily.
It may sound easy but it isn’t all that straightforward. As a business, remember that you can have more than one buyer persona. You can have the college student working part-time in a restaurant, as well as the college student who is being financially supported by their parents. Two similar buyer personas, but with different needs which in turn means different specific marketing strategies for each.
Buyer’s Journey in the Inbound Marketing Methodology
To better serve your target audience, it is important to learn something that is called the buyer’s journey. This entails that there are three stages that an individual goes through when making a purchase, and depending on which stage they are, marketing should be specifically molded to it.
Awareness
The awareness stage is when a person starts to realize that there is a problem. If an office worker begins to contemplate on back pains, that is when he/she starts the journey of becoming a buyer. At this point, it is important to talk about the problem. Make them realize that there is an issue that needs to be resolved.
Consideration
After realizing that there is a problem, an individual will now start to think of a solution. Is it because of the chair? Is it because I’m slouching all the time? This is the point when a person starts to consider the available choices in the market that will tackle the problem. This is when you come in to introduce different solutions such as a better chair, elevated table, and much more.
Decision
Lastly, a person has made up their mind and has decided to go with your brand, but this isn’t to say that you have secured a customer just yet. How you handle them will either make or break your sale. This is when you present product support and address their questions until they finally make the purchase.
Inbound Marketing is All About Content
With all that you have read, you now have an idea that inbound marketing concentrates heavily on content. If you have nothing useful to offer, then you can assure yourself that your campaign is going to fail. From offerings through emails to blogs, everything is all about the capacity to give useful information. The more informative, the better. Regardless on what business you are in, there are always a lot of things to talk about, and here are some suggestions:
Guides
If you don’t know what content to talk about then guides are always a good place to start. Expand on ideas that tell people what to look out for. For example, if you have a shoe store, have a “search for the best shoe for you guide”. Guides are a good way to lead people to know what they want and need. Before you know it, you have persuaded them to further look into a topic and then later, make a purchase.
It is also important to remember that guides should put into context the customer they are talking to. The person living in minimum wage is going to have a different standard opposed to someone who is earning a little bit more. Learn to humanize your audience. What this means is that look at them as real people who have specific needs.
Inbound is not just about creating content. It is also about making sure to level with people and give them an experience that they are going to enjoy and feel valued. Don’t treat your articles as just written content, but an avenue to cultivate a relationship with your customers on a much deeper level.
How-to
How-to instructional guides can be the next thing you are going to write about if you have a wide grasp of a certain topic. Tell people on the proper process when doing something such as “how to lose weight”. The best part about these topics is that they are frequently searched, thus resulting in huge web traffic to your website, creating massive brand visibility.
Guides like these are very strong tools to connect with an audience. So, put a couple of them here and there, as well as use a range of different topics, from the simplest of tasks to more complex ones.
Explanations
Now, if you just want to expound on a certain field or topic, you can also do just that. Just talk about it with cohesiveness and make sure to add a lot of details to make it more informative. If people don’t know too much about a certain field, these kinds of blogs and articles are their usual go-to.
Always add a hint of your personal opinion in there as well. Don’t make it too strong though, just enough to make sure that your audience is not alone. Make them feel that an objective advice is given instead of just laying out information. Help them make decisions and they will learn to trust you, your brand, as well as your product.
Different Inbound Marketing Strategies
So, you have blogs, videos, and… what else are there? If you didn’t know, there are quite a lot of ways you can present your content, and this is important. The more versatile you are with your materials, the more you can offer to your visitors, leads, and customers. Have a look at your choices:
Blog
The most common and fastest one to produce. Simply, just write an article, guide, or anything that gets in your mind and you are good to go. Just make sure you put enough information and quality into it.
Blogs are great. They are versatile and easily accessible. Slow internet? No worries, this article will load in a jiffy. Don’t want to bother the person sitting next to you? Not a problem, you just have to read.
Most people love the simplicity of blogs. They can skim it, looking for the parts that they want to know and read, instead of going through, let’s say, an entire video. So, basic as it may be, always implement blogs.
Infographic
If you want to step up from blogs, then infographics are the way to go. It shortens the article, ensuring to provide only the most essential information along with a creative and visually appealing aesthetic. Infographics are easy on the eyes and keep people with short attention spans interested.
Whitepaper
Opting for the more formal tone in writing has its benefits. It gives more credibility to your work and is likely to be taken as proper advice, as opposed to being treated as a doubtable opinion. That’s what whitepaper is for. To put it simply, your blog is your typical essay and a whitepaper is your term paper. Less personal opinions and extensively composed of facts.
E-book
Invest a little bit more time and effort and you can turn that blog into an e-book. Now why would you do that? Shouldn’t articles be short to keep the reader engaged? True, but while most find a long article tedious, a long-written material composed of different subtopics and ideas still delivers a lot of engagement. Since it tackles a lot of aspects, readers are usually urged to keep on coming back.
Case Study
There is nothing better in persuading an audience than a case study. Showcase a real situation that most people would relate to. Through this, you are connecting to your audience by leveling with them. You are not just capturing their attention, but as well as their emotion that will hook them to the story you are trying to impart.
Webinar
Your written work can only do so much. It can only connect to your audience up to a certain level. To bridge this gap, you are going to want to have a series of video content that talks about a certain topic. Videos allow you to bring more emotion to your work and allows you to connect to your audience to an interpersonal level. You don’t necessarily have to show your face, simply the sound of your voice is enough to give more meaning and a lively presence to whatever content you are trying to impart.
Video Series
The difference of a video series from a webinar is that it doesn’t have to all talk about a certain topic or field. It can be a mixture of any which means there is more creative avenue. With this being said, this is much better in connecting to your audience, especially at the emotional level.
However, keep in mind that despite the benefits of a video series over its formal counterpart the webinar, it shouldn’t be used all the time. There is an appropriate time and situation for each. Video series target more on the opinionated side of things , compared to webinars that provide an educational and formal approach.
Podcast
Don’t have the guts to put your face out there? Don’t have the equipment to create a video? You can always just settle for audio, and that is what is called a podcast. This is not inferior to a video series or a webinar. There are instances when people would rather listen than to watch. Take for example the radio versus the news.
Imagine people having the opportunity to listen to your content while they are on their commute or just want to learn while doing something else. Definitely, podcasts target a certain niche and that niche has its fair share of audience. A market that you shouldn’t disregard.
It still adds extreme value to your website. Podcasts are just videos without the visual satisfaction, so you are still able to add a level of personalization to your brand as well as give more personality to your content.
SEO
Not really much of a content material, SEO or short for search engine optimization is a general term that covers all aspects of putting your content on the first page of search engines like Google. The closer your website appears to the first page, the more likely it is going to get clicked. To put it simply, when you were searching for something, what was the first thing that you clicked on? Was it the top result? When was the last time you clicked on the second page of the results?
Search engine optimization brings your content closer to your audience and gives it the visibility it deserves. Remember, no matter how much quality you placed into your website, if it doesn’t reach any audience, it doesn’t fulfil any purpose.
PPC
Again, not about content, but more on how to bring it to an audience. Whereas SEO is about organic efforts to put your website on the first page of search engine results, PPC pertains to paying to ensure a spot on the said first page.
You might be asking, how is this considered inbound if it entails payment? Isn’t this disruptive?
While those are valid questions, indeed, this still falls under the category of inbound. Remember, you are not forcefully serving your ads to people. Whenever they are searching for something, it just ensures that they get to see what you have to offer first. Technically, you are not being disruptive because the person is already searching for what you have to offer.
Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Success
Hubspot started way back in 2006 and during that time, they only had 3 customers. By 2013, that turned to more than 10,000. In 2014, they founded the inbound strategy which is what they have used all along. So, what is there that made it all that successful?
It all started with creating company value. Beginning with educational blogs, they later turned to webinars which they categorized as either educational or demonstrational, with the latter being for people who wanted more. It is through their webinar series that they made more lead conversions. But they didn’t settle with just that as they then provided free tools like Website Grader and Marketing Grader.
They created so much value for their website that it didn’t just function as a business. They ended up catering to the needs of the people, addressing specific niches that allowed them to get closer to their audience and connecting with them to a personal level. Before they realized it, they have created widespread visibility and credibility for their company. Customers are not just seeking their service, but for the quality of it and its accompanying support.
All of that has fueled a constant growth in 7 years after its founding, resulting in revenue growth of $77.6 million. That is from the $2.2 million in 2008 and $52.5 million in 2012.
In Conclusion
The times have changed, what worked decades ago in the marketing setting is no longer applicable today. People want choice. They no longer enjoy intrusive and disruptive marketing, making inbound marketing the modern day solution that should be the standard.
