What is Inbound Marketing?

How Can You Use it to Up Your Game!

How do we know our marketing strategies are effective? It is when the strategy reflects the current consumer behavior. It means that an approach that might have worked perfectly a decade or two ago, is not going to work today. This is an obvious fact, as businesses keep evolving, the strategies to promote them change as well. Consider this. Before television, marketing was about print media mostly: posters, billboards, newspaper ads. Then, TV’s paved the way for commercials and video ads. Then it evolved into cold-calls. With the advent of the internet, everything changed. 

People no longer purchase newspapers, and everything is becoming digital. This is where inbound marketing steps in, and takes the reins of modern day marketing.

Let us take this article step by step:

1. Consuming Media in the Age of Digitalization
2. What Should be the Focus for Marketers?
3. What is Inbound Marketing?
4. Predicting Ideal Customers
5. How to Implement Inbound Marketing Techniques?
6. The Fundamentals of Inbound Marketing

1. Consuming Media in the Age of Digitalization

Commercials on TV are no longer a hassle. With Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV, you no longer have to sit through ads you do not want to see. People with cable TV can record their shows and skip commercials. We rely on the internet and social media apps, like Twitter for news on current events, so print newspapers are no longer in fashion. Many of us, including myself, use ad blockers to block banners ads. If blocking is not an option, then we scroll through without even paying attention. Emails and newsletters have already found their place in our trash/spam folders. 

2. What Should be the Focus for Marketers?

The focus today is to reach the ideal customers with content designed wholly for them. Provide them with valuable content to draw them in. Helpful and relevant content saves you the trouble of pushing your campaign in front of a wide audience, with the hope it will reach the interested masses.

3. What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategy which uses pull marketing tactics including content marketing, events, blogs and SEO, among others. It focuses on creating content that gives value to the prospects.

4. Predicting Ideal Customers

Nowadays we have more understanding of our customers, their behavior and how to interact with them meaningfully than ever before. It has also allowed us to predict ideal customers, their needs and the motivators that lead them to purchase something. 

You have to think like a client to offer products and services to benefit the customer. In other words, think about what you would want from your brand as a customer, and then apply it in your strategy. It is pertinent for inbound marketing campaigns to have empathy with your intended audience, respect your prospect, like you would want to be respected.

5. How to Implement Inbound Marketing Techniques?

Nowadays, marketers need to focus on reaching ideal customers by creating content useful to them:

1. Content Is Elemental
2. Blogs
3. Whitepapers
4. Podcasts
5. E-Books

1. Content Is Elemental

Content is what drives people nowadays, and peaks their interests. The crowded market and competition has compelled people to go to brands that serve them with valuable content. You can opt for blogs, infographics, podcasts and ebooks as well. 

2. Blogs

Blogging is a great way of telling people why you are the best. It provides them with useful information, without exposing all of your secrets to them. Blogs should comprise helpful posts that will market your business. Blogs are also useful for attracting new audiences to your brand.

It shows people that you really want to help them with their problems. For instance, a soap making company can write blogs on the environmental hazards attached with plastic and give them tips on how to reduce waste.

 A chef can use blogs to share their recipes, but not all of them. The ones that are easy, and attractive, to lure people into buying their book, or subscribing to their channel.

3. Whitepapers

Whitepapers answer questions searched by prospects and help you establish yourself as an expert in the subject

White papers let you educate your audience about specific subjects and provide them insight about how your brand functions. For instance, a soap making company can send whitepapers on how their brand is environmentally friendly, and sustainable. This way, you are not selling your product directly, but discreetly. 

Whitepapers do require email ids for download. Therefore, they are an excellent way of capturing leads.

4. Podcasts

Podcasts have taken over YouTube in the past few years. Many celebrities like Russel Brand have started their podcasts to get their word out. It is a great opportunity for connecting with people. You can cover topics of general interests, discuss political dynamics, and just have random talks in an informal setting.

5. E-Books

E-books are short books that provide users with helpful content. They are also not as detailed as white papers, but like the latter emailed to the ones who have signed up for it.

6. The Fundamentals of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing has five fundamentals: 

1. Attracting traffic, 
2. Automating marketing, 
3. Loyalty and 
4. Analysis.
5. Attracting Traffic

The primary goal of any brand is to attract users and traffic to their website. You should not focus on bringing in prospects, who have the least likelihood of converting. Instead, seek to generate visits in a massive way. Attract customers who fit in your ideal customer profile, or the buyer persona. 

You can achieve this through multiple techniques:

1. SEO
2. Content Marketing
3. Social Network
4. Converting the Prospects

1. SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the most optimal way of positioning your website in major search engines. Whenever your prospects will search for a particular keyword, your website will be shown at the top of the search engine results, making it easier for the user’s to respond at the right time.

2. Content Marketing

I have written several blogs on the importance of content marketing. It offers users valuable content at the moment they need it. For more on content marketing you can read the blog here:

7 Reasons Why Content Marketing is Important.

Setting Content Marketing Goals That Matter to Business Leaders

8 Content Marketing Techniques You Must Try

7 Tips for successful content marketing for small business

3. Social Network

You can use social networks to diffuse your website and help your content reach the target audience. There are a wide range of social media channels available. Determine the ones which will be most saturated with the desired audience. The power of social media cannot be ignored. For more information you can check out my following article:

11 Reasons Why Social Media Should be The Primary Marketing Tool for Every Small Business

4. Converting the Prospects

Do you just want a prospect to reach your website and then leave? I bet not! You want them to at least have information about them, such as their email ids etc. to make them a lead. This way, they will continue to receive information from you and eventually turn into customers. The classic strategy is a win-win. The prospects will get valuable content, while you will get contact information from them. 

There are several other options such as demonstrations, events, meetings, live sessions and even phone calls. Read up on the following to get an insight on how you can use emails to your benefit:

Things to consider for email marketing

6 Tactics You Need to Use with Lead Gen

2. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is based on systematizing the process to communicate with your leads efficiently, until they convert. You can use the following techniques for this purpose:

1. Lead-scoring 
2. Lead-nurturing

Lead-scoring: By designing a competent evaluation system you can quantitatively assess the chances of a lead becoming a customer.

Lead-scoring: It is based on the score you obtain, and the characteristic of the lead. Thereafter, you design a number of automatic flows for sending apropos information to your contacts as per their need.

3. Loyalty

You want your customers to be loyal to you. Once they have converted into a client, it should not be a one time thing. You need to establish a long lasting relationship using various loyalty strategies. These strategies could include newsletters, offers and among others, incentives. 

Effective loyalty strategy is fruitful for the company. It maintains the client in a much less costly way than attaining a client from scratch. 

4. Analysis

If you are not going to analyze and measure the results, your inbound marketing strategy is still incomplete. You need to determine your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Once you have defined your KPIs you will have to establish the most appropriate metrics to assess the success of your strategy.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing pulls the audience towards itself through various strategies such as email marketing, whitepapers, and other incentives. Unlike conventional forms of marketing, where brands would push their campaigns and ads on a massive population, believing it would reach the right audience, inbound marketing first establishes its audience and demographic. Only then, does it create the marketing campaigns to reap the maximum benefits. 

Inbound marketing is about providing value to your customer. You have to keep in mind the five fundamentals of inbound marketing for crafting a successful strategy. 

The noninvasive technique can help brands to attract visitors and traffic to their website, entice them to become customers and automate the marketing process to reduce conversion times. The emphasis in inbound marketing is the non-invasiveness of the techniques It entices the clients to come to you instead of you impinging on their lives with aggressive, annoying advertising.