Inbound marketing differs from traditional outbound marketing by focusing on attracting customers through relevant and helpful content, rather than pushing certain messages to your target audience. Whereas outbound marketing strategies such as cold acquisition, direct mail and television advertising attempt to reach customers through mass media, inbound marketing focuses on creating valuable experiences that naturally draw potential customers to the company.
Inbound marketing is pretty much the foundation of lead generation. The idea is that potential customers (leads) looking for a solution to their problems, needs or requirements come to your brand.
You actually entice your potential buyers to come to you. You get to know them, you find out where they are on the web and engage with them, but on their own terms.
By focusing on relationship building, inbound marketing strives to win customers not just once, but to transform them into true fans of your business, who in turn attract new customers through positive word of mouth.
Most marketers today already use a mix of different types of content, spread across different platforms, to connect with their potential customers at every stage of the customer journey.
How does that relate to inbound marketing? The idea is that creating content such as white papers, infographics, e-books and blog posts spread across different channels will ensure that your customers find their way to your brand. All those subtle marketing actions will draw them in, with all their associated needs and pain points.
Do you create SEO proof content, and then promote that content through social media, opt-in email campaigns or a thousand other ways? Then you are already doing - a limited form of - inbound marketing!
The biggest mistake you can make? Just starting with an idea, without knowing where you stand, what your goal is or what your customer is really waiting for. To tackle social media marketing really well, you need a kind of kick-off package that will increase your chances of success. The most important thing? Getting to know your customer, from left to right, inside and out. Without understanding your customer's needs, you can never offer them the value they are looking for.
| Inbound marketing | Outbound marketing |
|---|---|
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Consumer-oriented |
Sales-oriented |
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Informational |
Disturbing |
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Two-way communication: consumer involvement
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One-way communication: imposes itself on the consumer
|
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Marketers add value
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Marketers sell
|
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Focus on quality content
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Focus is on sales messages |
The four stages of inbound marketing are Attract, Convert, Close and Delight. With those four stages, consumers become true promoters of your brand, rather than strangers simply buying your product. In each stage, there are specific methods to achieve that conversion.
When you start dating, attraction is the first thing to consider. With inbound marketing, it's no different. As a business, your job is to attract people who could potentially become customers. Those people are called buyer personas, and they are the focus of your inbound marketing efforts.
Attracting your buyer personas requires a focused strategy that starts with creating quality content. That content should not only attract your buyer personas, but also give them a nudge in the right direction. And that direction is the next step of the conversion process.
You've successfully attracted your potential buyer, well done! Now the next step is to convert that potential buyer into a qualified lead. To do this, you need lead nurturing. To do this, you need the potential buyer's contact information.
How can you do this? It's easy: a give-and-take approach. You need to offer something of value to your potential buyer first, so they are willing to provide their contact information. This 'something of value' comes in the form of content, such as an e-book, whitepaper, blog post, webinar, and so on. The possibilities are endless.
The next step in inbound marketing methodology is to close your leads and turn them into happy customers. Because this goal is consumer-oriented, the process is typically a joint sales and marketing effort. Your leads should be sales qualified and ready to buy at the end of this step.
The story doesn’t end once you’ve closed your lead. No, with inbound marketing you don't abandon your customers once they've made a purchase. The goal is to ensure brand loyalty, and to do that you have to keep showing your customers that you still value them.
You do this by staying engaged with your customers online. Targeted call-to-actions, interaction on social media and email and marketing automation are some of the most effective strategies you can use to stay in touch with them.
By keeping your customers happy, you create more sales opportunities, not only with your existing customers, but also with those with whom they share their positive experiences! This will undoubtedly give your company a lasting competitive advantage.
Using inbound marketing methods in combination with outbound marketing strategies can help you better target specific segments of your audience: from prospects to existing customers, to specific industries and job levels.
Inbound marketing is all about the right strategy. So start by reviewing your overall marketing strategy: are you using advanced tools and software, such as marketing automation and data analysis? How well do your marketing and sales teams align? Are you engaging in omnichannel marketing? All of this plays a significant role in how effectively you can integrate your inbound marketing strategy into your overall marketing.
As you already know, developing customer relationships is the most important aspect here. Therefore, it is essential to talk to your sales team about what helps them connect with potential buyers. This will give you a good understanding of what you can do to build an even stronger relationship with your potential customers (leads), and thus also establish a streamlined buyer cycle in collaboration with your sales team.
If you're not up to speed with marketing automation and data analysis, you're not only missing out on a lot of valuable information, but the implementation of your strategy will be more challenging and much harder to track. Marketing automation saves you a lot of headaches when managing the complex, multichannel campaigns required for inbound marketing. Inbound marketing needs a strong marketing automation platform to help marketers create content and, of course, manage the campaign as a whole.
Once your entire system is automated, data analysis becomes a must. Your inbound marketing strategy depends entirely on what content you create to reach your target audience, and what content best suits that audience. It then becomes crucial to track engagement. Then you can perfectly measure where your prospects are in the customer journey, what content to send next and when to move them into your sales funnel.
Although inbound marketing is actually meant to attract prospects to you, you need to be able to promote your content in the first place. It is important that you have a real presence on the Internet, and even more specifically on social media. However, you don't have to be on every social media platform to be good at inbound marketing. Focus on the social media channels where your audience is most engaged with the content you present to them.
Your website is also an important asset to your inbound marketing strategy. Your website is the face of your business. Almost everyone does online research before making a purchasing decision. More than likely, the first introduction to your company will be through your website. Therefore, be sure to test your call-to-actions (CTAs), experiment with the placement of your content and use interactive or visual media whenever possible.
