Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology aiming to attract clients and visitors through amazing and high-value content, instead of bothering them with unsolicited and invasive advertisement.
Inbound marketing is all about making your audience fall in love with you, from the moment they first get to know your brand or products, to when they become loyal customers and promoters of your brand. This methodology has been given positive results for all kind of companies over the years, while delivering value to their customers.
If you’re thinking about implementing an inbound marketing strategy for your business, let us share with you the great benefits and advantages it will bring to your company.
Inbound Vs. Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing is the “traditional” push marketing, where you perform actions and tactics to reach out new customers through direct contact and targeted advertising. However, people are tired of seeing thousands of irrelevant messages and invasive advertisement a day; so, they began blocking those messages, opting-out from invasive e-mail marketing lists, and stopped buying from those companies.
Inbound marketing is quite the opposite. It’s all about understanding your buyer’s journey and creating custom and relevant content for each moment, with the main goal of turning visitors into clients over time. This methodology adds value, improves long-term ROI and builds trusts and confidence.
Benefits and Advantages of Inbound Marketing
When you implement an Inbound Marketing strategy for your company, you will:
- Improve your current client’s loyalty towards your brand
- Increase qualified traffic to your website or e-commerce
- Receive more qualified leads willing to buy your products
- Build more trust and confidence in your audience
- Improve engagement by not sending unwanted content and advertising to people that don’t want to receive it
- Increase your ROI and conversion rates
- Know how your audience relates and behaves with your brand, product or service
- Learn and evolve with time
- Improve your brand’s online positioning, increasing online visibility
- Guide your user through your brand’s sales funnel
As you see, all these benefits are quite important for a sustainable and growing digital marketing strategy.
4 Stages of Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is developed in 4 stages or steps, who follow a logical order, as follows:
1. Attraction
This first step aims to attract new users to your website, app, e-commerce, or digital media through relevant, attractive and timely content. These contents will be positioned using SEO strategies, social media sharing, and referrals from other websites.
2. Conversion
Once you’ve attracted new customers, you want them to do something on your website, app, e-commerce or landing page. So, this step is all about encouraging them to take some action, like subscribe to your newsletter, download an E-Book, register on your app, schedule an appointment or do some other action.
By obtaining some information about them (like e-mails, birthdays, names…) you can register them on your data base, and begin a conversation with them to find out if they could become customers.
3. Selling
Once you have their data and you know they can actually become customers, you are going to send them relevant and high-value information, without being invasive or aggressive, about your products and services. The main goal is to share with them enough information, so they can make an informed purchase and see how your products and services are better from your competitor’s.
4. Loyalty
Lastly, you want to surprise the new customers, make them fall in love with you and make them feel there’s no one else that offers them more information and attention. This way, you build a close and trust worthy relationship with the clients, and they reward the brand by buying more, recommending the products to other people, talking about your company and loving you.
How to implement an Inbound Marketing Campaign?
Now that you know what is Inbound Marketing and its 4 steps, you might be wondering how can you implement an Inbound Marketing Campaign for your brand. Let’s see!
1. Set Goals
Every campaign must have some clear and SMART Goals, which must be the base line for your strategy. You should ask yourself what you want to achieve, when you want to achieve it, and set possible and relevant goals.
Also, you have to define your Buyer Persona if you don’t have it figured it out yet. Who do you want to target? By having a well-defined Buyer Persona you’ll know better your customer’s needs, so you can create better products, services or offers.
And finally, you should have everything organized on a calendar, so you have everything under control.
2. Build your content
Content is the most important part of a campaign. According to your goals, you should create amazing content, offering high-value information, showing your brand’s or product’s benefits, solving people’s doubts or questions, and guiding them through your sales funnel.
Try offering different content types: E-books, guides, downloadable content, social media posts, videos, podcasts, blog articles, infographics, etc.
3. Create a Landing Page
Now you have set your goals, defined your Buyer Persona and organized your content. What’s next? Now you have to think about how your visitors or clients will have access to that information.
We recommend you to have a specific landing page for every Inbound Marketing campaign you design, and to optimize it correctly so you can welcome your visitors, gather their data, share the contents and get some insights like registers, traffic, downloads or subscriptions, etc.
4. Run the campaign
Now that everything is ready, you just have to communicate and run the campaign. You can share the information in your social media, run a paid advertising on search engines like Google, send a newsletter to all your subscribed clients, create a blog article, send a SMS, or share it on your physical stores.
There’s no channel better than other, so get creative and mix them up!
5. Review, analyze and repeat
Once you run the campaign, you’ll get some results. Now it’s time to analyze and understand what’s working and what could be improved.
Take some time to analyze the numbers and results per channel, and see how many new customers you got, how many downloads or subscribers, and see how you did according to your goals.
The more you do it, the easier and the better it will be for your brand and company.
4 tools for your inbound marketing strategies
1. Hub Spot
You can create complete strategies for marketing, sales, customer care and CMS, all with a tool so complete that it brings everyone together. Your teams can collaborate with each other and learn what valuable data each department brings to the table.
2. Google Keyword Planner
With this Google Ads tool, you can find out which terms your audience searches for and which ones are related to your product or service.
You should always make sure to reach your audience with the right keywords. If you use them well, it will be much easier to show your ads or blog content at the right time.
3. lander
With Lander you can attract visitors to your landing pages thanks to its templates with nice, functional, friendly and very clear design, which will help your users to spend only the necessary time and perform the action you request.
In addition, you can customize your landing page according to your needs.
To review its performance or make adjustments to make it work better, Lander offers features such as lead management, A/B testing, SEO ranking, etc.
4. Booker
Is ideal for managing aspects of your business that have to do with scheduling appointments, growing your customer base, and managing payments. You can create surveys, email marketing campaigns and promote yourself on social networks. In addition, it is responsible for attracting new customers, maintaining existing ones and retaining the most valuable ones.
Conclusion
Now you know what is Inbound Marketing, what are its main benefits and advantages, and how to run a successful campaign. It’s time to stop doing some blind marketing actions, and implement this effective methodology to attract new and better customers.
We can help you attract, convert and retain your audience, by creating strong and lasting relationships based on trust and confidence. Contact us! We’ll be happy to help!