Inbound marketing is the art of attracting the right target audience to your website. It is the ideal way to engage customers with your website at the awareness stage of their journey and keep them interacting with you until they make their purchasing decisions. When well executed, inbound marketing streamlines the lead nurturing process and makes selling nearly unnecessary. Compared to outbound marketing, inbound is more cost-effective, especially when you create a culture of content creation within your business. If you are a small to medium-sized business, inbound marketing is a great tool to grow your business.
What is inbound marketing?
So what exactly is inbound marketing? As stated above, inbound marketing is about attracting prospects to your business by sharing valuable information and creating the perception of a personalized experience throughout their purchasing journey. I refer to this as managing individual relationships en masse.
For example, take this blog post you're reading. I wrote it with the intention of sharing information you and others like you (about 11,999 others each month according to SEMRush as shown below) want. I hope you'll find it valuable, perhaps even enjoyable. I'm writing it in a voice that will help some of you decide I'm not the marketing consultant for you. But, by remaining true to my brand, others will decide they'd like to know more about my marketing services because they find the information useful and the delivery relatable. Those people will be able to engage with me by subscribing to my blog, using the chatbot in the lower right corner of this post, or using "Contact" in the navigation.
But inbound marketing isn't just about content; it is also about leveraging customer relationship management (CRM) tools to facilitate lead nurturing. In other words, you create a system to deliver the right content for each phase of the customer journey that will convert a website visitor into a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and eventually and sales qualified lead (SQL). Current estimates say more than 80% of customers conduct online research before deciding what to buy and that by the time they make direct contact with you, they are 80% through their decision-making process. Inbound marketing ensures you engage with the customer throughout this process, making them more likely to choose your product or service.
Create your inbound marketing strategy.
While content marketing focuses on attracting users by providing helpful information, inbound marketing is about nurturing relationships beyond that first interaction. Inbound marketing encompasses tactics such as SEO, social media, video marketing, incentivized sign-up forms, email, and workflow automation.
Your inbound marketing strategy should start with a thorough examination of your target audience persona(s) and what they are trying to accomplish in each stage of their decision-making process by creating a journey map. One of the most critical steps in the journey map is identifying how you'll move your prospect along. Remember, in their journey's awareness stage, your target audience probably doesn't know about you. But this is where great content, social media, and video marketing can help you get found.
The first time you map out your customers' journey, you'll have to hypothesize what will be the most effective way to help your target audience stay engaged with you, then test it. If the tactic you've identified doesn't work, change it. If it does work, you may still want to change it to see if you can get better results. It's called testing - and you should always test to see if you can beat your control - but that's another topic. When creating your customer journey map, answers to the question "How will we move Persona A along" should include gated content and incentivized sign-up forms. This is how you'll get your prospects to give you permission to stay in touch with them - making them a marketing qualified lead (MQL).
If you're getting stuck identifying content ideas or targeted keywords, you may not be as in touch with your target audience as you should be. To get your creative juices going, see "They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer" by Marcus Sheridan. I'm not sure the concept is very revolutionary, but his approach to creating a culture of content creation is, and it should help you come up with some content ideas.
Inbound marketing aims to provide value and develop a relationship of trust with your prospect. It is important to remember that this is about what your customer needs along their journey - not what you want to tell them to convince them to buy. You'll know when the prospect becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL) by assigning values to each possible interaction on your site. As the prospect moves through the journey, they'll earn more points and once they become an SQL, it's time for your sales team to reach out.
You'll know if your inbound marketing strategy is working if:
You start to acquire more MQLs
MQLs convert to SQLs via your automations
Your email open rate hovers around 17-28%
Your email click-through rate averages 8-11%
Who should be using inbound marketing?
Because inbound marketing meets your prospects where they are with information designed to attract them to you, it can help improve your search engine ranking and drive traffic to your website. And since inbound marketing is focused on creating relationships with your target, it can also help turn your website into a lead generation tool and convert those leads to sales. Inbound leads cost 62% less than leads generated via outbound tactics, and they convert at a higher rate. With those kinds of statistics, it's hard to imagine who wouldn't want to incorporate inbound marketing into their overall strategy. Inbound marketing can take longer to impact your KPIs, though. So if you are in a rush, you'll also want to leverage outbound tactics.
Send me an email at veronica@4dstrategicservices.com if you'd like help analyzing your marketing to see where inbound marketing can fit in your overall strategy.
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