What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategic approach to growing your organization’s online presence in the audience, generating meaningful needs, attracting them through valuable content, and building long-term relationships with valuable prospects that contribute to business results.
It focuses on building brand awareness and solving the audience’s pain points, not on direct selling through cold emails or cold calling.
Types of inbound marketing include:
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Are you clear about this? Or not?
It’s like a funnel. Starts with product/service awareness, highlighting the pain points, to consideration, to the end result means the loyal stage. Inbound marketing content works with the same strategy, to get an audience through SEO, Email, content, and social media marketing, to get updates with all strategies again. Just the type of meaningful content matters.
Each content type serves a specific purpose where the brand is currently engaging with the targeted prospect. Together, these strategies build a brand shine in the eye of the audience. If anyone asks, your customer takes your name first, called brand voice marketing.
Let’s look at how Hostinger uses inbound marketing:
Their blog contains different stages of their targeted audience roadmap, maybe on the pain point, maybe on the consideration stage and finding more updates regarding their product, maybe on the decision stage, going to boost their business in Germany. They guided them about what they offer, and what their prospects get when with them.
Well, inbound marketing is the ongoing digital marketing process to attract customers through the organic way, not by paying thousands of dollars and burning them with the wrong process.
Building trust in your audience, enhancing brand awareness, and establishing relationships, inbound marketing principles engage with brand reputation with authentic, informative, and engaging content.
Key benefits of inbound marketing include:
- Ranking on search engine: Publishing and updating website and social media relevant content helps search engines to crawl and rank higher as per the search queries.
- Build brand awareness: Having high-quality valuable content, helps new audiences to resolve their pain points with the content strategy.
- Engage with audience: Valuable content helps your existing audience find their issues and get feedback from the audience to improve the product or services.
- Increased organic traffic: Appearing your content on search queries leads to generating more organic traffic.
- Enhanced customer loyalty: High-quality content helps in building long-term relationships, and enhancing user experience with your valuable content results and guidance.
How Does Inbound Marketing Work?
We learned above that inbound marketing is an approach based on reaching the audience at the right time. So it is necessary to look up where the customer is.
Whether on the awareness stage or maybe on the decision. Crafting your content and using the marketing strategy as per the requirements helps in getting the right audience, and building loyalty with them.
Awareness
Before pitching with valuable content, desire to generate them to consider, and be your loyal customers. All these desires start with getting the audience towards your brand through your content strategy. Inbound marketing is all about creating awareness of your brand, product, or services in the new or existing target audience.
With your content, the audience just gets to realize about their problems, and our goal is to grab their attention by providing the possible ways to solve their problems, not by mentioning your brand or even competitors. You just provide them with what they need and that’s all.
Majorly the type of content for inbound marketing in this stage includes:
- Blog post
- Infographics
- Social media post
- Ebooks
And the inbound marketing strategy will be:
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your content should educate your audience at this stage, providing endless possibilities and ways to get over the pain point. Key point is to build the content strategy by considering broad aspects to get and attract more audience and target more as possible.
Consideration:
Have you attracted the audience? If yes, let’s move on to the next phase of the marketing funnel, the “Consideration Stage”.
This stage aims to engage with the leads and audience to help them find solutions to their problems with your products and services. They are actively looking for solutions and are requesting more to be considered for the next step.
This stage is most important, getting your 10%-15% efforts in the awareness stage to 50%-60% of the sales process. The content material in this phase consists of:
- Guides and Tutorials
- Articles about the products & comparison
- Case studies of the existing customers
- User-generated content or influencer content
While all the above inbound marketing strategies used in this include:
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
However, the strategy or marketing tactics will vary on the product or service and your audience’s behavior. The best is to create in-depth content that’s persuasive, explains about your product specifications and compares with your competitors’ products.
Decision:
In this third stage, generating leads with your 50%-60% efforts is the end for the conversion, from strangers to your customers, they are ready for the green flag. Engage with your leads with your push strategy contents, to push your valuable leads toward taking action.
Crafting content and generating ideas for this stage is crucial, because just putting the CTA (Call-To-Action), and the client just gets paid off. The ideas regarding your products or services, demos, or guides regarding what you are serving to them, act on key performance of all your journey maps. With this, you achieved 100% success in your marketing funnel. From leads – to conversion means from 0% to 100%.
Content ideas include:
- Success stories
- Urgent or need responses
- Product demos
- Customer testimonials.
Same strategies of inbound marketing are applied, but the most effective for the conversion is considered an email marketing strategy because of professionalism, also spotting a brand recognition, culture, and positive image to your audience.
Loyalty:
In most funnels, this stage is missed. But, while considering your journey maps, this stage is on what you spend less and get more than expected.
This is the fourth and last stage of the marketing funnel. In this stage, customers will get customer support, and product updated content for getting the responses and brand image position in their existing audience. Also, this stage will help in building or rechecking the buyer personas and revising the strategy to get more efficient results from the organic or paid campaigns.
Valuable content in this stage consists of:
- Product updates
- Get promotions and discounts
- Instant responses to queries
- Guidelines about any events or more.
All inbound marketing strategies work in this.
But, this phase of the marketing funnel is playing a dominant role in the marketing of your brand as well with the “Brand Voice Marketing”. Your loyal or potential customers spread your products in their circle and guide new audiences about the solutions that you offer. The content from the audience in this stage is called “User-Generated Content (UGC)” and helps by increasing 40% in your brand awareness without any effort.
How to Use Inbound Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses
Every business aims to enhance its online presence on search engines and social media to grow its audience and spread its footprints in the market. But what is necessary for marketing? What are the key steps to consider in inbound marketing?
- Audience: Understanding your potential or targeted audience (buyer personas) for building the marketing strategy or campaign to work on.
- Create Engaging Content: Develop high-quality relevant content as per the journey maps. Build visual content to engage with your audience in the meantime.
- Consistency is Key: Regularly post content on social media to keep your audience engaged, active with your brand, and informed about the updates and what’s new to in.
- Utilize SEO Strategies: Implement effective SEO practices to ensure your content ranks well in search results, is easier for your customers, and engages with them with valuable tactics.
- Leverage Social Media: Use platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to share your content and engage with your audience directly. This helps in building a strong community around your brand to enhance the audience.
- Monitor Analytics: Tools like Google Analytics or social media insights to track performance and work on the strategies accordingly.
Note: Use a remarketing strategy for your old content too for retargeting the audience.
Essential Tools for Inbound Marketing
To optimize inbound marketing efforts, consider using the following tools:
Ready For Your Inbound Marketing Strategy?
Inbound marketing is an essential strategy for building brands and businesses and giving a new height to work on. Looking to build lasting relationships with their customers through valuable content and experiences.
As an inbound marketer, your goal is to attract new prospects through your marketing strategy (content or social media marketing), engage with them on the platforms, and delight them to be loyal partners for our brand.
By effectively utilizing content or social media marketing, small businesses can enhance their brand awareness, engage their audiences, ultimately drive conversions, and build trust relationships with their loyal and potential customers.
You also partner with your sales and services teams to keep the flowchart, marketing funnel, or journey map effective and help the business grow. It’s a big job, but don’t worry, we are here to cover all these steps as per your requirements.
