What is Inbound Marketing?

There are many ways to fish. You can use a net to catch as many fish as possible, or bait a fishing line to attract a handful of fish and reel them in. Whichever path you choose, you have just done some marketing (at the expense of the fish, unfortunately).

At the risk of comparing your human customers to aquatic creatures, inbound marketing is akin to hook and line fishing. Rather than going all out with advertising, branding, and product placement as tools to win customers, inbound marketing does the opposite.

This article explains what inbound marketing is and how it differs from outbound marketing. We will also explore ways you can incorporate inbound marketing into your marketing plan.

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

The major difference between inbound and outbound marketing is in how you and your customers meet.

Outbound marketing focuses on getting your marketing message out to the market via advertisements and other mass publicity materials. Examples of outbound marketing methods are billboards, tv commercials, and event sponsorships.

Inbound marketing focuses on providing value. Content is used as a tool to meet specific customer pain points. Inbound marketing cannot occur without first gathering a significant amount of information about the customer’s needs.

With inbound marketing, the customer finds the content useful, builds a genuine interest, and willingly seeks out the product or service. Inbound marketing begins from the consumer, not the marketer. It is a customer-centric approach to marketing that puts the customer’s needs in front of the marketer’s goals. Outbound marketing is marketing goals first, customer needs next.

In outbound marketing, the marketer has to pay for direct advertising to communicate the brand or product message. Inbound marketing embraces the available free channels like social media to provide customers with valuable messaging that points back to the product.

Outbound marketing tries to get the consumers interested in the product by providing as much information about the product as possible. Inbound marketing is more subtle. It positions the product as the solution to the customer’s needs without shoving the product in their face.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Here are five ways inbound marketing can be beneficial for your business:

1. Value for customers

Inbound marketing positions your brand to be discovered by potential customers looking for answers to specific questions that you have the answer to. For instance, a customer searching for how to bake a cheesecake may encounter your video about the perfect cheesecake recipe. That customer has found an answer to their question, and you have just used an inbound marketing technique to attract them. Inbound marketing helps you attract the right audiences and generate quality leads for your business.

2. Builds your brand voice and identity

Inbound marketing helps to build your distinct brand voice and identity. With outbound marketing, it is harder to establish a brand voice that resonates with your audience because you’re trying to connect with many different kinds of audiences at once. Inbound marketing speaks directly to your customer. It clarifies your business offerings and distinguishes you as a solution provider.

3. Value for money

It goes without saying that many businesses spend a huge part of their running costs on marketing and advertising. Unfortunately, this spend does not always result in the instant sales spike you project and customers are not happy blasted in the face with a thousand ads from the same company over and again. This is where Inbound marketing saves your business. You can be certain that your content either solves a customer’s problem instantly or will be useful in the nearest future. The same content is capable of converting into sales. In every way, you get value for your money.

4. Complements outbound marketing

Inbound marketing does not disturb your existing outbound marketing activities in any way. You can run market activations, product displays and media commercials and at the same time, have articles online or emails answering questions potential customers might have about the product category. Like the fish example above, inbound marketing draws them in with their interests and questions as outbound marketing makes your product details available to them such that they can make their purchases.

5. Opportunities to learn

Since inbound marketing provides you a platform to communicate with your potential customers, it also provides feedback from the customers either directly or indirectly. From research on ways to approach the customer, discovering their likely needs and how to proffer solutions to those problems to responses after the inbound strategies, you learn more about your business, see what to adapt and adjust. Your business becomes better and you are better able to serve your target market.

Stages of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing happens across four stages:

1. Attract

To provide value, an inbound marketing strategy needs to pull in the right audience to benefit from the value created. Pulling in the right audience comes by knowing what your audience needs and creating content around that need that enables them to find you.

For example, leveraging inbound marketing as a fashion designer could mean creating social media posts showing how customers can find the perfect clothes for their body type. Those seeking answers to such questions can find your content, leading them to check out your page or website. The best part is that these types of content appear natural and don’t even come across as a marketing effort.

2. Engage and Convert

After attracting your audience and building interest in your product or service, the next stage is converting them to customers. The key is to keep engaging by consistently providing value to the customer with the aim of leading them to an eventual purchase. Using the fashion designer example, you may follow up your video with a fun game or quiz. Sweeten the deal with a reward like a free consultation.

This stage of inbound marketing does not involve actively trying to sell your audience anything. You are simply gaining their confidence by asserting yourself as an authority on the subject. Be sure to get some contact information from them, like an email, to keep the communication going.

3. Close

This is where your sales instincts must kick in. Now that you have established an ongoing relationship with the customer, you can start taking a sales-focused approach to your interactions with them.

Set up an email marketing campaign and begin sending emails, placing phone calls, and employing other means of direct marketing. All these efforts must be geared towards getting them to make a purchase. Since you have first built a relationship with your customer, you now know exactly how to tailor each marketing material to meet their exact needs. Address any concerns, and make them feel like becoming a paying customer with your brand is the best decision they will ever make.

4. Delight

Many marketers make the mistake of neglecting a customer after closing a sale. They move on from that customer to begin the inbound marketing process anew with a new category of potential customers. Inbound marketing is an ongoing process that allows you to retain a customer for years.

To do this, you have to continually delight the customer even after their purchase. Provide more content that addresses questions they may have, and show them how to get the best from your product. Be open to receiving feedback and even get some of your customers involved in your marketing process. Customers tend to trust each other more than the sellers. A satisfied customer will become an ambassador and recruit new ones.

Going back to our fashion designer example, articles about how to style the new dress a customer bought will be a great way to keep a customer in the delight stage.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

These are a couple of things to do that will help with your inbound marketing activity.

1. Create buyer personas

A buyer or target audience persona is a fictitious image of who your target audience or your likely customer is. You can conduct research based on the kind of audience you are seeking to attract with your marketing and create a persona around each major category.

A good persona includes the buyer’s background, interests, motivations, purchasing power, and so on. All of these details are relevant when crafting content for your inbound marketing strategy. Know your buyers’ backgrounds and see how your products fit into their stories.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your online presence so that your content and products rank higher in search engines. Ensure that all your online content, from social media to blog posts, and the texts on your website, contain keywords relevant to your market. SEO is very crucial in the attraction phase of inbound marketing.

3. Compelling Content

In inbound marketing, content is king. You do not want to risk sounding like all you care about is selling a product. Engage your audience with compelling content that holds their attention and makes them feel valued. Master the use of visuals to relay your message swiftly and creatively. Use videos and animations as well.

4. Social Media

Inbound marketing requires consistent engagement targeted at the right set of people. Social media is a great place to get this level of online engagement. Have a strong social media presence and build an identity for your brand. Engage your customers and have them relate with your brand as the personality that it is. Most social media platforms come with great tools for measuring brand attitude and perception.

5. Interviews and Surveys

You need to know customer pain points to address them. Interviews and surveys are one great strategy to adopt in your inbound marketing activity. Survey the target market to know what their needs and challenges are. You can even go as far as finding out likely solutions they have tried. Bring all this information back to inform your marketing content. Interviews and surveys disguised as fun quizzes and polls also serve as a means of getting engagement.