Inbound marketing is an advertising methodology focused on creating valuable experiences for customers. The idea is that by supplying your audience with meaningful moments, you’ll give them a compelling reason to keep coming back to your brand.
The concept of inbound marketing wasn’t born until 2005 thanks to HubSpot Founder and CEO Brian Halligan. Halligan didn’t approve of the concept of outbound marketing. With outbound marketing, you’re constantly fighting for your customer’s attention. With inbound marketing, you pull your audience to you by providing the information that they’re searching for.
The Inbound Methodology
The Inbound Methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.
When your customers succeed, you succeed.
The Inbound Methodology can be applied in three ways:
- Attract. Draw in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
- Engage. Present insights and solutions that align with your customer pain points and goals.
- Delight. Provide help and support to empower your customers to find success with their purchase.
The Benefits of Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing ensures your target audience is heard, not shouted at. It delivers the right information at the right time at the right place. But there are other significant benefits people don’t normally think about. Inbound marketing:
- Simplifies the jobs of sales AND marketing
- Increases brand awareness and visibility
- Educates prospects in the digital world they live in
- Increases trust and credibility
- Generates quality traffic and leads
- Compounds value in initiatives over time
- Builds on your social media presence
- Enhances your SEO organically
- Brings attention to your brand through word-of-mouth marketing
Inbound Marketing Strategies
There isn’t just one way to effectively incorporate inbound marketing strategies into your digital marketing efforts. There are multiple ways to actively market to your target audience the inbound way.
- Attracting strategies. When you attract your target audience, you’re making sure your target audience and buyer personas are tied together through the magic of content creation and development and hyper-personalization. To attract and reach your audience, you start by creating and publishing valuable content like blog posts, your products, customer testimonials, case studies, and more. You’re willingly providing a solution to their challenges and issues. Make sure your content is optimized with an SEO strategy as well. This will allow your beautifully crafted content to rank in search engines.
- Engaging strategies. When using inbound strategies to engage your audience, ensure you’re communicating and dealing with leads and customers in a way that makes them want to build long-term relationships with you. When using these engagement strategies, inject information about the value your business will provide them with.
- Delighting strategies. Delighting inbound strategies ensure customers are happy, satisfied, and supported long after they make a purchase. These strategies involve your team members becoming advisors and experts who assist customers at any point in time. Make sure you have thoughtful, well-timed chatbots and surveys to assist, support, and request customer feedback. Invest in the best social media listening tools to help you monitor your efforts.
