What Is Inbound Marketing?

Generally speaking, inbound marketing is about creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business. How do you do that?

You attract prospects and customers to your website and blog through relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat and by promising continued value.

Finally, you delight them by continuing to act as an empathetic advisor and expert. Inbound marketing tactics include everything from content marketing and social media to technical SEO and UX optimization, email marketing, video, and even digital advertising.

Unlike outbound, with inbound, you don’t need to fight for your potential customers’ 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.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t want, inbound marketing forms connections they’re looking for and solves problems they already have.

Inbound marketing is about delivering solutions and opportunities that have a positive impact on people and your business. By all means, an inbound marketing strategy can include a number of different channels and types of content to attract prospects and customers to your website.

But, inbound marketing is just one part of a larger movement in the business world. It’s the foundation for the idea that it’s not enough to just attract people to your website; you have to continue to help, support, and empower them well after they become a customer.

That’s how your business grows — by keeping Marketing, Sales, and Service constantly focused on how to help current and future customers. We call this the flywheel, and the philosophies of inbound permeate and accelerate that flywheel — from Attract, to Engage, to Delight — to help your business grow faster, and better.

What are the Benefits of Inbound Marketing? 

On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers. Especially onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them.

One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog. This allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.

Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, convert, close, and delight customers online. On the contrary, inbound marketing is just one part of a larger movement in the business world.

Many marketing teams that have not fully embraced inbound marketing use a variety of inbound tactics including advertising, search engine optimization, social media, and email marketing. By diversifying tactics, marketing teams strive to increase their chances of success, but often lack a cohesive way to figure out if those efforts are working.

Which are the Stages of Inbound Marketing?

Inbound is a method of attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value and builds trust. As technology shifts, inbound guides an approach to doing business in a human and helpful way.

Inbound is a better way to market, a better way to sell, and a better way to serve your customers. Because when good-for-the-customer means good-for-the-business, your company can grow better over the long term.

From a business perspective, the methodology represents the growth of your business. And happy customers provide the energy that fuels that growth. The inbound methodology is composed of three stages. Including, attraction, engagement, close, and delight.

Inbound businesses use the methodology to build trust, credibility, and momentum. It’s about adding value at every stage in your customer’s journey with you.

The key elements of inbound marketing include;

1. Attract: Provide helpful content via your website or blog that is optimized for the terms your target audience is searching for.
2. Convert: Using actionable language and calls-to-action, convert your audience members into leads. This happens when a visitor gives you permission to record their email address or other contact information in exchange for something of value you can provide, such as a PDF guide or other content offer, webinar tutorial, or free consultation.
3. Close: Turn those leads into customers by nurturing them with email marketing, other valuable content, and ultimately sales conversations.
4. Delight: Make your new customers want to become promoters or evangelists of your brand by providing exceptional customer service and making sure their experience with your company is one they’ll want to recommend to everyone they know.

From a business perspective, the methodology represents the growth of your business. And happy customers provide the energy that fuels that growth.

Either because they buy from you again or because they bring new customers to you. Especially by promoting your product to other people in their network. But, if you produce unhappy customers, they’ll slow your company’s growth.

May it be, either by selling to people who are bad fits for your offering or by overpromising and under-delivering.

What are the Best Practices for Inbound Marketing?

During the past few years, the same change in buying behavior that sparked the inbound movement has also spread throughout the whole customer experience. How people communicate and what they expect from your business has changed.

The good news? The inbound methodology, along with technology, continues to help businesses adapt to fast-changing needs — not just with marketing but with the entire customer experience.

In other words, inbound marketing helps businesses to strategically generate new, qualified leads that marketing and sales teams can nurture and convert into more customers.

Marketing teams that succeed with inbound marketing are able to plan holistic and measurable tactics. For example, by understanding the lifetime value of a customer and then creating a campaign that tracks;

• how social media,
• a content offer promoted at a trade show,
• online advertising,
• and follow-up email marketing all work together.

Further, inbound marketers get a much clearer picture of what their return on investment is and how effective their efforts are.

1. Management Software Use

Supporting this methodology is a full platform of software for marketing, sales, service, and customer relationship management. These tools are powerful alone, but they’re even better when used together, helping you grow with the inbound methodology.

By combining the inbound methodology with the HubSpot software, you’ll grow your business and get customers who buy more. Additionally, you will acquire customers who stay with you longer, refer their friends, and tell the world they love you.

2. Content Value and Social Share

Companies that use inbound marketing software get up to three times as many websites visits and nearly four times as many leads. Nearly half of all buyers view up to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative, according to the online marketing website Demand Gen Report.

Inbound tactics like blogging, social media marketing, and search engine optimization help bring more traffic to your website, where smart utilization of high-value content and strong calls-to-action can turn those visitors into new leads.

Additionally, inbound marketing software can help companies gather a history of how each lead interacts with your company’s website or online properties, such as social media and email marketing.

Generally speaking, inbound marketing is about creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business.

3. Sales Drive

Imagine if your website just worked for you to generate leads. Even when your sales team was done for the day.

How much would your sales team benefit by getting new, qualified leads complete with business intelligence?

Including,

• job title,
• budget information,
• needed products or solutions,
• and what solution the prospect currently uses?

For traditionally sales-driven organizations, the inbound methodology can make your sales reps’ lives easier. For instance, by identifying who the right kinds of customers are, how much those customers are worth to your business, and what questions those ideal customers need to answer.

Particularly when they are looking for a service provider or product solution.

4. Your Planner companion

Inbound marketing is about more than just attracting more traffic, however. The inbound methodology helps companies plan strategies to attract best-fit customers. These strategies include answering questions and delivering value by creating original content.

For example, content that people can find with Google and other search engines. Marketing teams usually deliver that original content via various platforms. Including, blog posts, podcasts, downloadable guides, social media, webinars, video, and other media.

Planning your website’s design, marketing content, and functionality to attract the leads you want. And then to nurture them until they are ready to talk to your sales team helps boost your results.

Inbound can help build a brand, target a niche market, or give greater visibility into what’s working–and what isn’t.

5. Inbound Marketing Identifies Qualified Leads

What about visitors who aren’t ready to buy? Or those who aren’t ideal customers? Sales and marketing teams can filter strong prospects from casual searchers with qualifying offers. Especially those that use permission marketing, such as a form submission.

By gauging a visitor’s level and area of interest by offering help that requires filling out a form, your website becomes a lead-generation tool. Comparatively, an inbound linker that helps separate real buyers from unqualified leads.

6. Lasting Inbound Marketing experience

When all of your teams are aligned around an inbound approach, you can provide a holistic experience for anyone. Particularly, those who interact with your business, no matter where they are in their buying journey.

Moreover, attracting isn’t just the role of marketers and engaging isn’t just the role of sales. Also, delight isn’t just the role of services and solutions support.

To create relationships that last and customers that stay, every customer-facing team needs to focus on how they can contextually attract, engage, and delight. Especially your prospects and customers and continue to build trust in your brand.

Outbound Marketing vs Inbound Marketing

The main difference between these two marketing strategies is communication. Through outbound or traditional marketing, the conversation about a certain thing is initiated by the marketer without your choice.

It’s one-way communication and most of the time it interrupts you while you’re enjoying a nice movie, documentary, etc. For instance, you’re watching your favorite TV show and suddenly there’s an advertisement of something that you’re not interested at all.

It irritates you and sometimes your interest in the show is lost. In this case, the marketer doesn’t think about the customers, the ad is not targeted to a certain audience, and tends to forcefully push its message.

On the other hand, inbound is customer-centric, the communication with the marketer is two-way; marketing campaign is made based on prior research to identify your buyer persona and ideal customers so that it can be targeted to a certain audience.

Further, the campaign aims to pull the audience by sharing valuable information via content marketing, blogging, and social media. In this case, you optimize your website in order for the users that are looking for your brand can find you easier.

This way you attract customers with useful and valuable content while adding value to each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Learn more about Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

As an inbound marketer, your goal is to attract new prospects to your company, engage with them at scale, and delight them individually. You also partner with your sales and services teams to keep the flywheel spinning effectively and help the business grow.

It’s a big job, but the Inbound methodology and Marketing strategies you have covered with the jmexclusives team will be so helpful to you.

When implemented correctly, the inbound methodology provides business leaders with a clear picture of where leads come from. And how much it costs to acquire them.

Inbound marketing will help your business or organization attract more visitors to your website. For additions, contributions, suggestions, and further questions you would like answered for you, please submit through the jmexclusives Contacts Page.

Takeaway,

In reality, online digital marketing can become impersonal, due to the virtual nature of the message and content delivery to the desired audience. In that case, marketers must attend to their strategy for online marketing with a strong understanding of their customer’s needs and preferences.

Eventually, techniques like surveys, user testing, and in-person conversations can be used for this purpose. Whereby, Online Marketing is undergoing crowd siege and is highly competitive.

Although the opportunities to provide goods and services in both local and far-reaching markets are empowering, the competition can be significant. Whereas, companies investing in Facebook Promotion Campaign may find visitors’ attention difficult to capture.

Due to, either the number of businesses also marketing their products or services online as well. Marketers must, therefore, develop a balance of building a unique value proposition. And also, a profound brand voice as they test and build marketing campaigns on various channels.

Resources;

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading and have understood some of the main benefits of utilizing an Inbound Marketing plan.

Besides, if you’ll have additional contributions, suggestions, or even questions, please feel free to Contact Us. By the same token, you can share your thoughts with other readers in the comments box below this article.

Finally, below are more useful links related to the topic above.

1. What is Online Digital Marketing?
2. Search Engine Marketing Definition
3. What is Marketing Leads conversion?
4. Optimizing For Rankings & Search Visibility
5. What’s the Meaning of Affiliate Marketing?