What is Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is the strategy and techniques involved in the process of drawing the attention of potential customers. These strategies help your company build a meaningful connection with current customers and prospective ones as well.
To put it simply, this process attracts your customers by assisting them in their process of discovering your company, communicating with the company, and then becoming customers of your product and services.
It utilizes a series of non-disruptive techniques to attract visitors to its website and then converts these visitors into loyal customers. As a company looking to implement Inbound marketing, you have to ensure that none of the tactics you employ are aggressive or disruptive. It is all about the subtle captivation of your clients.
How do you know your business needs Inbound Marketing? Are you a new business owner or a veteran business owner looking for new ways to improve your business and increase your profits, you’ve just implemented some outbound marketing strategies? These strategies seem to work so far, but you feel like you need something extra.
Regardless of which one of these you are, Inbound Marketing is what you’ve been looking for.
To take advantage of this, we have prepared the ultimate guide to Inbound Marketing for you to make it easier for you to navigate.
Inbound Marketing VS Outbound Marketing
As a marketer or company owner, it is important to also know about Outbound marketing. You need to know how it can go hand-in-hand with Inbound marketing and also what makes it different from Inbound Marketing.
Various factors make both types of marketing differently. Outbound marketing for instance employs a more aggressive and disruptive technique as part of a proactive process of reaching out to customers. It is a sharp contrast to Inbound Marketing which is a more subtle method and involves creating content to draw customers in.
The techniques involved in Outbound marketing usually lead to a wide-sweep approach. This wide-sweep approach can sometimes have some drawbacks.
Typically, outbound marketing strategies have a low Return on Investment and this can be frustrating when you measure the resources usually put into it. These resources aren’t just financial, sometimes the Outbound processes require a lot of human resources.
These shortcomings, however, minuscule have led to more companies employing Inbound marketing strategies instead. Companies always love cutting costs wherever they can and generally, people aren’t very welcoming to disruptive adverts.
Just imagine the number of unsolicited marketing strategies the average person comes in contact with daily, this reduces the effectiveness of this form of marketing.
All these are reasons why companies are more trusting in the sometimes-slow methods of Inbound Marketing. Some companies go for both strategies sometimes, thereby reaping the benefits of both of them.
When done properly, the positive effects of an Outbound Marketing strategy can work seamlessly with well-placed Inbound marketing strategies.
An example is you putting out a TV advert to introduce your new product to the public. This is a typical Outbound Marketing strategy. The TV ad will be seen by those who require the product. These people will try to contact your company and that is when tools like your website come into play. Your website can help these people find out more about your product and then ultimately lead them to become paying customers.
Now, let us look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of this type of marketing.
Advantages of Inbound Marketing
Cheaper to Implement: Outbound marketing techniques are usually expensive for smaller businesses. Even the larger companies put a considerable number of financial resources into their Outbound Marketing.
As a business owner, you can cut these costs by making use of a less-expensive marketing strategy that you can target your preferred audience and have a decent Return on Investment.
Lead Generation: Beyond generating awareness, Inbound Marketing has to create awareness with the right leads and traffic. Inbound marketing strategies typically use a targeted approach and this gets the attention of members of the public who are interested in your brand.
This approach also makes the customers feel in charge of the whole process. A lot of customers like to feel in charge of the purchase process and the content they consume.
Sustainable: A lot of Outbound Marketing strategies and techniques only last for the duration of their campaigns. For instance, TV adverts. No matter how catchy a TV advert is, after a while, it will stop running.
However, the techniques involved in Inbound Marketing do not expire. The content on your company website for instance can stay there and it does not take any effort to keep it there.
Boosts Brand Position: Inbound Marketing boosts your company’s public perception, expectations, and interaction with the customers. The interaction can lead to an increase in trust and credibility with the public.
Easier to Manage: It is common to have various facets of Inbound Marketing such as social media, email, SEO, etc. built into one platform. This makes it easy for those in charge to manage these marketing channels and avoid the stress of monitoring various systems and platforms.
An advantage of Inbound marketing that is often underrated is the chance to learn. The interaction with customers that Inbound marketing fosters can help you learn from mistakes and improve your services. Social media is a great place to have these conversations with customers to know their needs.
Like every other thing in the world, if it has advantages, it has some disadvantages, no matter how few. We are going to list some of the disadvantages of Inbound marketing.
Disadvantages of Inbound Marketing
Return on Investment takes time: The processes involved in Inbound marketing take a while to return profits. If you were already anticipating quick results, well I am sorry to be the conveyor of this bad news.
This happens for reasons such as; Creating a brand takes time, same with building a large social media followership or even learning to optimize search engines in your niche.
Demands Special Skills: With Inbound Marketing strategies, you would need a professional in things like SEO, SEM, Video Marketing, Lead Generating Funnels, Email Marketing, etc… You should have team members with exceptional skills in these fields because having to do all these by yourself would be difficult. Just imagine having to create, promote and manage content all by yourself.
Competing Content: With marketers over the years favoring Inbound marketing over Outbound marketing techniques, it has led to some interesting developments. One of such developments is the increase in the number of blog or website content available. Of course, not all belong to your direct competitors, however, your content has to stand out amid the millions available.
Not always Effective: Inbound Marketing techniques work well when the product or service you are providing requires a decent amount of research from your prospective customers.
This can be an effect of the price of your product or some technical knowledge required to make the right choice. In essence, this means, Inbound marketing works well with certain businesses but will struggle with some others. However, that doesn’t mean if you have simple products, you should toss Inbound Marketing out of the window.
Inbound marketing strategies can still be employed to boost your brand reputation.
Inbound Marketing Tools
Many tools can be used in your Inbound Marketing process. We almost cannot cover all of them in one blog post. However, we are going to look at some of the tasks that Inbound marketers face daily and we shall talk about the best tools you can use to take care of these tasks.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): One of the best things you can have as a brand is a good relationship with your customers.
It is essential to track interactions and contact information all on the same platform, as this makes it easier to manage. Salesforce and Hubspot are great software that can help you achieve this. Having a CRM platform also helps you manage customer contacts, product sales, lead tracking, and productivity.
Email/Newsletter Marketing: This is different from the Cold email strategy that is employed in Outbound Marketing. Emails are a great way to share company news, blog posts, and special offers and customers prefer getting these types of information through emails.
There are factors to consider if you want to properly execute this. You need a private IP address, a proper email marketing strategy, and analytics to allow you to optimize for future email campaigns.
To achieve all these, Mailchimp is a tool that you want to use. With Mailchimp, you can write, edit and format your emails and even add photos.
Analytics: Your website or blog generates a lot of data. Some of these data include the demographic of your visitors, the number of these visitors, page views, traffic sources, etc. Google Analytics is a great way to collect the data generated by your website and you can analyze this data to make better decisions and improve your business.
Social Media Management: An important aspect of Inbound Marketing is building a social media following. To do this, you need to have an adequate presence on multiple social media platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. These social media apps typically have their analytics tool, but with Hootsuite, you can track your presence on all these platforms. This tool will enable you to schedule posts and also stay consistent.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Inbound marketing is almost incomplete without SEO. You always want your content to be at the top of any search made by someone looking for something in your niche. To do this, your content needs the right keywords in them. A tool that can help with this is Yoast. It is a Plugin that helps users create better content to attract and engage audiences.
Planning and Project Management: Managing your content schedule, assigning tasks to team members, setting deadlines, and managing inbound marketing workflow. These are vital parts of Inbound marketing however; they can be a little too much to handle. For this, you need an efficient tool to help you organize all of them. Tools like Trello, Asana, and Jira would keep you organized.
Inbound Marketing Methodology
Next, we are going to dive into the Methodology of Inbound Marketing. The methodology of Inbound Marketing is the process involved in creating meaningful, lasting relationships with customers and prospective customers.
The Inbound Marketing methodology involves three processes; Attract, Engage, and Delight. Below are the core features of an effective inbound marketing strategy:
Attract: As a company owner or a marketer who has chosen to implement Inbound marketing strategies, attracting the right kind of public is important. To achieve this, there are some important attracting strategies you need to be aware of.
They include creating and publishing the right kind of content and then optimizing this content with SEO techniques to ensure it is viewed by the right audience.
Engage: Now that you have attracted the right audience, the next phase is to engage them. Simply put, you will have to provide solutions to their pain points. Focus on customer service to ensure calls and emails from these prospective customers and selling solutions instead of just the product.
Delight: It is not enough to just attract and engage, you have to ensure the satisfaction of the customers. You can create avenues to get feedback from your customers, that way, you can learn about the experience they got from using your product. In doing this, you are creating a group of loyal customers.
Conclusion
It might not be the quickest form of marketing, but Inbound Marketing is a very efficient way to improve the number of customers to your business. Understanding the strategies of Inbound marketing such as Search Engine Optimization and its practices to ensure you attract the right audience to your post as well as increase the traffic to your blog or website.
You would also need to analyze the data you get from your analytics tool. This will help you attract customers and get familiar with their challenges and needs.
We do believe with this article, you should be able to navigate the waters of Inbound marketing as you build your brand.
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