Businesses have changed how they reach out to their potential buyers. Reaching out to the right people at the right time with the right message in this digital age has helped brands generate more leads, conversions, and revenue. However, brands are quickly turning their attention from traditional and modern outbound marketing techniques to inbound marketing strategies.
Executing inbound marketing strategies, however, doesn’t come naturally to modern-day brands when you have digital marketing strategies that can produce instant results. Inbound marketing requires one to take care of the fundamentals, something that we will be discussing here in this post.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Three things - helpful, non-interruptive, and non-intrusive. These are the characteristics of any inbound marketing strategy. It’s the kind of marketing, as ActiveCampaign puts it, the one that people love!
Inbound marketing, as the definition goes, is the marketing strategy that functions on the idea of attracting the right customers through high-quality, relevant, and experience-oriented content and campaigns designed just for that focus group.
This marketing strategy is oriented towards making a meaningful connection with the audience and presenting them with enough reasons to connect, consider, and convert. Unlike outbound marketing, which depends on interrupting the audience and presenting solutions when they don’t need it, inbound marketing is all about making your audience comfortable.
Importance of Inbound Marketing There are many advantages to using inbound marketing as your go-to marketing strategy. Here we discuss some of the best reasons why you should start using inbound marketing for your brand.
1. Cost-Effective Marketing
Inbound marketing is a cost-effective marketing technique that is really feasible for small businesses. Compared to outbound marketing, it doesn’t require a huge budget or a big team to pull off a marketing campaign. This is one of the reasons why marketing has become a level playing field.
2. Great at Building Authority
If you are looking to build brand authority and awareness in the market, you can rely on inbound marketing strategies like blogging, social media marketing, and SEO. The techniques will help you develop brand awareness and get an instant upper hand over your competitors still relying on traditional strategies.
3. Improves Credibility and Trust
Since your brand can leverage the wider market coverage through inbound marketing strategies, you will be able to generate more credibility and trust among your target audience. Consequently, you will appear higher and frequently in search rankings.
4. Helps Build Long-Lasting Relationships
Brands thrive on long-lasting relationships especially when they look at it as a long-term strategy. Inbound marketing makes you work on your online presence and consistently work towards strengthening it through blogs and social media posts. This helps you reach out to both current and potential customers, eventually building a long-term connection with them. 5. Makes Your Brand Blog (Very Important)
Do we even have to talk about the importance of blogging? A whopping 79% of the companies that have a blog report experience positive ROI through it. Blogging is the way to more leads and conversion. It is also a way you can showcase how good you are at what you do.
Five Inbound Marketing Fundamentals You Should Know
You are going nowhere with your inbound marketing strategy if it doesn’t cover the fundamentals. In this section, therefore, we are going to discuss the important fundamentals that you should implement in your upcoming inbound marketing campaign without fail.
1. Know Your Audience
The audience is who you create for. Sure, you do it for your brand as well but without an audience your brand is nothing. You have got to attract the right people through your marketing campaign. That can only be done if you know who want to target through it. So, before you go on to prepare a campaign, get to know your audience. Develop the buyer persona and find out how your product helps the audience solve their problems. Figuring out the right persona will help you design the right campaign.
2. Understand and Map Customer Journey
Consumers don’t just buy something outright. They consider, evaluate, and finally after weighing the pros and cons, they convert. Understanding the customer journey will allow you to customize the sales funnel effectively and respond to your target audience’s needs at different stages of the funnel. Once you have clarity over your customer journey, you will be able to deliver the right education and successfully solve their problems. We have published a piece of content on how the customer journey can be mapped. Do check it out once you are done with this.
3. Ditch Selling; Focus on Providing Value
Quit being salesy and focus all your efforts on providing as much value as you can. Identifying the buyer’s journey, needs and wants will give you the opportunity to create a campaign fueled by helpful advice and insights. You must create an inbound marketing campaign full of educational blog articles, tips, whitepapers, case studies, and more. More importantly, learn how to include a call to action when it really hits your potential customer the hardest.
4. Right Content Brings Right Leads
You might have the right content, the right focus group, and you might be prepared to let the content do its thing at various stages of a buyer’s journey. But it won’t do any good if you cannot deliver when it matters the most. Prepare the right content and optimize it for the right keywords to channel the attention. To prepare the right content, you must keep your target audience in mind, including their pain points, and let the customer make the decision. Also, keep promoting the content across all major online channels and build a massive online audience. 5. Trust is Your Biggest Asset
Instill trust in your audience through your content. Once you start creating and promoting high-quality content, you will begin building the right audience and even land leads. Prospects finding your content helpful will not think twice before contacting you. So, try to build trust by delivering relevant content that is informational and helpful.
Final Thoughts
Most importantly, you must keep yourself and your team on their toes since the online marketing landscape is constantly changing. Make them track the trends and encourage the team to make optimization and improvement a priority. It’s only then that an inbound marketing campaign can bring you any benefit!