Farewell to the old techniques of marketing, outbound, based on the purchase of contact lists for telemarketing, events, fairs, advertising in specialized magazines or newspapers, the new marketing strategy, defined inbound, is based on a fundamental concept:
“DO NOT LOOK FOR CUSTOMERS BUT LET PEOPLE GET YOU”
The goal is to help your potential client find you through keywords that he usually uses when searching for information and insights.
This tactic focuses on creating educational content – content marketing strategy – that may be of interest to the potential client to attract them to your website.
DEFINITION:
The term “Inbound Marketing” was coined in 2005 by HubSpot, an American company that produces software for marketing.
According to them:
Inbound marketing is focused on attracting customers through relevant and helpful content and adding value at every stage in your customer’s buying journey. With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels like blogs, search engines, and social media.
Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing does not need to fight for potential customer’s attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, you attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for your business.
The best way to attract potential customers and get them to know and appreciate your business is to offer targeted quality content that matches their questions and meets their real needs.
The purpose of Inbound Marketing is to attract traffic to the website in order to obtain a potential customer – said lead – and then transform it into the final customer, through valuable content.
People go through different phases during this process: they learn about your company, interact with it, buy, return to purchase, and each of these phases requires different marketing actions.
In each of these phases, it is necessary to provide the right content, through the right channels and at the right times of our sales funnel.
Blog posts, videos, images, e-books, infographics, guides, webinars, events, seminars, and presentations are examples of engaging content that can give your target added value.
You can also focus on brand storytelling, native advertising, video marketing, and podcasts.
HOW TO CREATE AN INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY:
The Inbound Marketing process is divided into four essential phases: Attracting, Converting, Concluding and Delighting.
This strategy causes a big change in your marketing organization.
It takes time to implement this strategy and before seeing the results achieved, we need to reorganize and restructure the marketing processes and the activities carried out.
However, laying a solid foundation for your strategy will help you create more engagement with potential and current customers and greater flow from new visitors.
1 STEP: ATTRACT
In this phase, the goal is to attract traffic to the website and to do so it is essential to know the habits, problems, objectives of our ideal customers, so as to know what topics to focus on, what makes people interested in us.
It is necessary to take care of the blog, find the right keywords and share the contents of the blog on social networks in order to increase the number of users who visit the site.
2 STEP: CONVERT
After the first step, you need to convert your traffic in leads by opening a conversation with them creating a landing page with forms and call to action. In this way, you can reach new contacts with name and email.
Once you’re in touch, you answer questions and provide relevant and free content like e-books, tutorials, discount, webinar etc.
Read more about free content
Names and emails are valuable data to continue with the third phase of the process.
3 STEP: CLOSE
Once you’ve attracted the right visitors and converted the right leads, you need to convert them into customers.
When you convert, not everyone is ready for purchase, but some may be after a week, a month or in the future.
In order for these people not to be attracted to the competition, you can establish a relationship with them, continuing to offer valuable content and to prove that it is worthwhile to stay with you. How? Through the planning of DEM campaigns.
This action can both increase the number of customers and decrease decision-making times during the purchase phase.
4 STEP: DELIGHT
Once you’ve got your sales and customer what you need, the relationship is fueled in order to turn your customers into your brand’s ambassador.
To have a good relationship with your customers you will need to organize events to take an approach that goes beyond the virtual while also giving importance to social monitoring of conversations and interactions on your accounts and finally to impress your client you can create some smart content within your site.
PROBLEMS AND SUGGESTIONS:
1.If your company has a single contact database and sends a standard email every month without segmentation, the inbound marketing strategy allows you to perform the profiling of the new contacts generated, and then proceed with sending personalized emails, leading to the maturation of a successful lead nurturing strategy.
The next step is the creation of content, call-to-action and landing pages dedicated to the top of the funnel prospects, i.e. those who are informing about a problem but who have not yet identified the solution that suits them.
2. If your company has a website but it is not optimized to attract customers and therefore does not allow you to increase turnover and brand awareness, inbound marketing allows you to optimize, in an SEO perspective, the website in order to increase traffic and better meet the needs of potential customers, thanks to the use of well-studied keywords.
A successful step is the creation of different and new landing pages to be accessed through links on social networks and in e-mails and then organize DEM campaigns for follow-up emails.
CONCLUSION:
Using Inbound Marketing you can grow, reach a long list of contacts at lower costs and establish a human bond with your potential customers.
Inbound marketing is a multi-channel approach that alone is not enough but needs to be integrated with a series of practices – such as lead generation, conversion landing page, contact form, call-to-action, workflow, lead nurturing strategy, etc. – that help you accompany your potential client along with the conversion process.
For this reason, this is just an introductory article that discusses the 4 main steps for starting an inbound marketing strategy.
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