What is Inbound Marketing? - Learn the basics
- Sofia D.
- Jul 1, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
Inbound marketing is a business strategy that creates valuable content and experiences for customers. Inbound marketing is simply the process of helping potential customers find your company.
It is common for this to happen before the customer is ready to buy. However, early contact can lead to brand preference, leads, and ultimately revenue.
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What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing uses many types of pull marketing such as blogs, events, and search engine optimization (SEO) to create brand awareness and bring in new customers.
Inbound marketing focuses on visibility so potential buyers find you, while outbound marketing is about finding customers.
Outbound marketing can be disruptive to your audience by providing content they don't want. Inbound marketing creates connections and solves problems that customers already have.
Inbound marketing is not about "renting attention". Instead, companies use it to create awareness, develop relationships and generate leads.
These methods are attractive to customers as they don't make them feel sold to. Inbound marketing provides educational, entertaining, and welcome content.
Inbound marketing is a better option than traditional marketing, which can disrupt prospects instead of inviting them to connect. This is how consumers feel about your company and its future marketing decisions.
What's the best part? The best part of inbound marketing is that it uses only organic leads. It relies more on brains than budget.
Inbound marketing can put customers in control by connecting them with people who are interested in your message. Inbound marketing is a powerful tool for customer retention and lead conversions. It can also greatly increase social media shares, brand awareness, and search engine optimization.
Customers can engage with your brand anytime, anywhere through a well built inbound marketing strategy. This makes it possible to get qualified leads for a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing.
Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing
The name is key to understanding the differences between inbound and outbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is focused on attracting potential customers in, whereas outbound marketing is concerned with pushing a business' offering.
Outbound marketing involves purchasing it. Inbound marketing, however, is more about attracting attention.
Inbound Marketing: Owned and Earned Media
Inbound marketing employs both owned and earned media to reach potential customers in clever ways.
Owned Media is the media channels that a company has control of. Your website, blog, brand social media profiles, product landing pages, and YouTube channel are all examples. You can decide what, when, and how you want it published.
Earned Media refers to the coverage you get for your hard work. This includes coverage in magazines and newspapers. It includes news coverage, often obtained through digital PR. However, online mentions can also include mentions on social media and the use of hashtags. Earned Media is less your responsibility but should be a reward to you for the hard work that went into your inbound marketing campaign.
Outbound marketing: paid Media
On the other hand, outbound marketing is often associated with paid media.
This could include traditional offline advertising, PPC or display advertising, as well as paid emails.
Paid Media includes social media advertising such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter advertising, etc.
While often associated with outbound marketing, it is worth noting that social media advertising can boost inbound marketing campaigns.
For example, advertising on Facebook allows you to reach your target audience regardless of their niche.
Inbound marketing can help with common problems
Inbound marketing can be a great investment when it comes to long-term strategies. It will increase brand awareness, preference, and ultimately revenue.
Problem - I need to grow my brand awareness. 93% of all buying cycles begin with an internet search. Organically increasing brand awareness can be achieved if your company is found at the top of search results or active on a searcher's social network. You should ensure that you have the proper messaging and content to appear in these important inbound channels.
Problem - I want to improve the brand preference. Building trust with potential customers and increasing their likelihood of buying from you before they even think about it will help you build trust. It is amazing how familiarity can make a difference.
Problem - I want to generate more leads but have limited funds. Inbound Marketing is a long-term investment that builds upon itself. Your results will increase as you become more proficient at curating and creating content that attracts organic leads.
Problem: I don't have the budget or staff to do inbound marketing. As with many other things, inbound marketing is more rewarding if you put more effort into it. Either way, you won't be wasting your time by having a solid strategy that clearly outlines key themes, content, and distribution.
Planning, implementing and optimizing your Inbound Marketing Plan
Inbound marketing returns are more significant if you invest more. The key to creating amazing content is not budget but brain and commitment.
Content isn't something you can just throw at and expect it to work. It takes effort and dedication. Here's how you can get started.
Step 1. Define your business goals. Identify your buyer personas. Find out as much information about your audience as you can. You won't be able to write content for your customers unless you know your audience.
Step 2. Provide content for every stage. Be proactive and answer all customers' questions at any stage of their buying process. Determine your unique, compelling story. What makes you compelling? We call this transformational inbound. It goes beyond traditional marketing methods. Transformative inbound marketing leverages the power of valuable content to retain and attract customers throughout their lifecycle. Inbound marketing that is transformational places more emphasis on relevance and personalization.
Step 3: Choose your delivery platforms. Your audience will be more satisfied if you provide valuable content. You can determine the best way to reach them via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, LinkedIn, or your blog.
Step 4. Create and implement your content calendar. You need to ensure that your audience is engaged by consistently producing new, relevant content. A steady stream of content will help you to remain relevant and be trusted as a thought leader by answering your customers' questions, problems, and pain points.
5th Step: Analyze your results and optimize the inbound marketing strategy. There are numerous metrics you could use when evaluating the success or failure of your inbound marketing campaign. These resources can give useful insight into the performance of your campaigns, regardless of whether you analyze SEO rankings, inbound link popularity, or the number of published articles. You should set aside some time every week to analyze your campaigns. This will allow you to understand the effectiveness of your inbound marketing efforts and help you make improvements.
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