Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on pull marketing – attracting customers, or leads, through content to create a brand awareness and to have potential customers and makes the company easy to be found.
Potential customers find your company via content marketing, blogs, SEO, search engines and social media, events and more.
Inbound marketing is implemented in huge numbers as it is a proven method for this digital age. The inbound marketing strategy helps you to attract more strangers, convert strangers to customers, customers into promoters, and promoters to more referrals and renewals.
Inbound marketing is the trending marketing strategy; In this blog, let’s look at what is inbound marketing and why do you need inbound marketing for your business.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing focuses mainly on creating quality content. It organically drives people into your business and brand. The goal is to create content for customers who are already seeking information online, researching and checking out the list of industries, and trying to choose if they need your service or product.
Inbound marketing generates traffic through inbound links. These links maximize the visibility of content on search engines and boost its ranking in search results.
Inbound marketing depends less on cold calling, cold emailing, direct mail, TV and radio ads to get more leads. inbound marketing is cost-effective and smaller businesses are able to compete for leads.
Make sure to publish the content of your potential customer’s interests, which will organically attract more inbound traffic which later you can convert, close and delight over a period of time.
Four Stages of Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing stages are defined by the kind of interaction expected from the content with the visitors. According to each stage, the content strategy changes. Here are the four stages of inbound marketing:
I) Attract
The first step in inbound marketing methodology is “attracting” visitors. This stage is all about providing the right content at the right place and at the right time. Make use of the right content to deliver through blogging, social media, keyword, SEO strategy and also a little outbound advertising.
Things to remember-
The main goal is to attract the right strangers to your website and to your brand with the quality to become leads and happy customers.
- Use the right content.
- Understand your potential customers
- Create customer personas (to know what wants your product, their interest, where to find them)
- Use blog posts to feed social media channels
- Use keywords and optimize web pages.
These steps will help you found by potential customers, attract strangers into visitors and followers.
Ways to attract-
- Blogging
- Content strategy
- Social Media
II) Convert
Once the visitors are attracted, you need to convert them as leads. The conversion tools should be attractive and informative.
Convert stage works well by getting the personal information of users such as email address and phone number on a landing page.
Getting the contact information and converting visitors to leads is not that easy. You can get the information through optimized landing pages, forms and calls-to-action.
The contact information are shared only in exchange for valuable information from you such as eBooks, whitepapers, infographics, webinars, case studies, tip sheets and more.
One of the best ways is to answer the questions by providing relevant, interesting and valuable solutions and continue the conversation which will automatically turn them into leads.
Ways to convert-
- Forms
- Meetings
- Messages
- CRM
III) Close
Close is the third stage in the inbound marketing methodology.
When you are in this stage, It’s time to give yourself a thumbs up! You have attracted the right visitors, right leads.
Now it’s the perfect time to transform those leads into customers.
If you do it right, you will close with the right leads faster and easier.
How can you close with the right leads?
Ways to Close-
- Pipeline management
- Lead Nurturing
- Predictive lead scoring
- Closed-loop reporting
- Lead intelligence
- Marketing automation
- Social media monitoring
- Use above techniques to get the right customers at the right time.
IV) Delight
The last stage in inbound marketing methodology is “delighting” your customers.
The goal in this stage should be to provide remarkable experience for the customers. On the other hand, the expectations of your business and how you treat the customers will increase.
If you want your customers to convert as promoters, you have to engage them, delight them, and make them more successful by publishing and sharing content that helps them better use your products and services.
By doing so, your customers will buy more from you, they will retain with you longer, refer their friends, and promote your business through referrals and renewals.
If you think that the visitors are now your customers and you don’t need to engage them, you are seriously missing out the most important thing!
You have to provide more outstanding content to your customers and leads. You should always engage your customers with amazing content, social media and other marketing regularly.
Delighted customers will be more happy to tell the world what they love about your business.
Ways to delight-
- Solve their problems
- Be helpful
- Help them achieve their goals
- Be enthusiastic
- Share more smart content
Delight your customers everyday!
Why do you need Inbound Marketing?
“Why inbound marketing?” is the very common question asked by majority of the people pondering over scaling up their business.
The old traditional marketing is marketing centric; whereas inbound marketing is customer centric. The best thing to get more customers is to keep creating content so that they will land on your website instead of your competitors.
Simple!
Reasons to choose Inbound Marketing-
- Affordable
- Organic and natural
- More qualified leads
- Fuels your CRM and marketing automation
- You can set your goals, objectives, and measure
- Increase traffic to your website and social media channels
Why do you need an Inbound Marketing Agency?
We wrote about it in detail in a blog post, because it is not a one-line answer. While scaling up a business, you already have so many costs to take care of. Adding an in-house marketing team costs would be a difficult task for many. So, you must give a read to this blog post called ‘Why You Should Hire A Marketing Agency’.
Conclusion
The inbound marketing methodology involves the marketer in every stage of the inbound funnel. In a nutshell, the journey begins by attracting the right visitors, converting them to qualified leads, closing more sales with customers, and delighting them throughout the process.
You are responsible for your results, and it’s not a fastrack process. It takes time and grows your customers organically. To know how much time it will take to show you results, read this.
At the end, you will get retainers, not short term customers.
You need to create and deliver specific quality content through inbound channels for marketing for your leads and customers at the right time.
To know more about how you can succeed in inbound marketing, learn and try it out by yourself. You can also download our “Inbound Marketing Complete Guide” and go through the exact stages of inbound marketing.