Want to drive more leads to your business? With inbound marketing, brands attract prospects by creating valuable, relevant content and meaningful experiences that anticipate customer needs and pain points. Unfamiliar with the concept? Don’t worry — we got you. In this comprehensive inbound marketing guide, we’ll explain what it is, what benefits this approach offers to businesses, and how it differs from traditional outbound tactics. We’ll also walk through the steps of the inbound marketing methodology and share our top three favorite inbound marketing tactics.
First thing's first. What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is a business and sales methodology that focuses on drawing customers in (rather than reaching out to them) with high-quality, useful content that is tailored to be relevant to a specific audience. This approach typically involves a combination of tactics, including search engine optimization, social media marketing, and email marketing. At its core, inbound marketing is about creating connections and building lasting relationships with your existing and prospective customers by anticipating and fulfilling their needs and wants. The goal is to answer questions and help the consumer through their existing reality rather than creating an entirely new one.
Builds trust and credibility Your customers want to make their own decisions and don’t want to be told what they should do, especially not by brands. So when you leave your customers to find you organically in the places they already hang out, both online and offline, they’re more likely to feel empowered and engage out of their own. Helpful content is crucial in building trust, and social proof will assist with brand credibility.
Easier to track and scale With inbound marketing, you have the ability to track your ROI easily and learn from the success or failure of previous marketing campaigns and efforts. Being able to track your ROI allows you to make informed decisions about the direction of your strategy.
Better leads, stronger ROI Traditional marketing has always been expensive, and it isn’t easy to measure their effectiveness. In this digital age, inbound marketing is not only more effective at converting customers — it also offers better ROI. By creating inbound marketing content specifically geared toward audiences that you know will find value in your product or services, you will attract higher-quality traffic and leads.
Persona targeting strategy The beginning of any worthwhile inbound marketing campaign or strategy has to define the target audience persona. How? There are various resources at your disposal for gaining insight into your ideal customer’s behavior and interests. These include: Reviewing Facebook page insights: Age, gender, and location aren’t necessarily that important, but they can lead to other noteworthy insights. You can find these by looking at the ‘Insights’ tab on your business’ existing Facebook page. Here you’ll find the necessary information about who is already engaging with your business online. Surveying your current customers and leads: Surveys don’t have to be elaborate or time-consuming to be effective. Creating a survey with free online survey software like SurveyMonkey, Survey Sparrow, or a form from Google Workspaces and sending it to your email database is a simple way to gain insight into your client’s demographics. Conduct one-on-one interviews: Once you’ve done some groundwork to gaining audience insights, it may be worth your while to select a few individuals and conduct interviews for more in-depth detail. Who should you interview? Start by taking a look at who your current clients are and select similar individuals.
Content creation Once you’ve conducted sufficient research and built out your targeted persona(s), you should have a good idea of where they hang out online and the kinds of content they’re most likely to engage with. Effective inbound marketing strategies often make use of a combination of these forms of content marketing. Blog articles: Even if you’re new to content production or the internet itself, you probably already know that a quality blog is one of the most effective ways to market your business online. Blogging does several things: it attracts new visitors to your website, it positions your business as qualified and experienced in its industry, and you can use it to keep your existing audience informed about the goings-on of your business. Email marketing: If you have a business, you have clients. And if you have clients, you have a database of client email addresses that you can use for such campaigns. Email marketing is a strategy of sending commercial messages and promotional material directly to a group of people who have previously, willfully engaged with your business online. This strategy is designed to capture the attention of your audience and convert them. Social media: Everyone who’s anyone is on at least one social media platform, and you should be too. But with such an overwhelming amount of content around, it’s not good enough to just post anything, your content has to be remarkable, engaging, and share-worthy. Creating high-quality content isn’t the only piece of the puzzle — you have to get your content seen by the right people. This means sharing it on the platforms your audience chooses to hang out on. Influencer campaigns: One of the most effective inbound marketing strategies that have developed over the five years is what’s known as influencer marketing. Influencers are the self-made “celebrities” of digital platforms and more specifically social media. How can you use their status to sell your business? By partnering with an influencer loved by your preferred target audience, your business can gain social proof that it is as good as you say it is. Influencer marketing is the word-of-mouth and endorsement element of inbound marketing campaigns.
Implement an SEO strategy When using the internet to sell anything that your business does, it is always advisable to put a concerted effort into your SEO strategy. Why? Content and websites that are optimized for search engines like Google outperform those that aren’t by a mile. SEO that’s done right is the simplest way to ensure that your online efforts are actually discoverable and seen by your audience.