What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is focused on attracting customers to your business through content marketing. It involves adding value to the customer at every step of his journey. With the help of content marketing, potential customers can find you through various channels like blogs, social media, search engine and more!
The main benefit of having an inbound strategy is that you do not need to fight for your customer’s attention. Since you will be focusing on content to help your users, it will be them coming to you, instead of you approaching them.

Why is Inbound Marketing better than Outbound Marketing?

Let us start with some facts!

 

  1. 90% of the data on the internet has been created since 2016, according to an IBM Marketing Cloud study. People, businesses, and devices have all become data factories that are pumping out incredible amounts of information to the web each day.
  2. In 2014, there were 2.4 billion internet users. That number grew to 3.4 billion by 2016, and in 2017 300 million internet users were added – making a total of 3.8 billion internet users in 2017 (as of April 2017) This is a 42% increase in people using the internet in just three years!
  3. Since 2013, the number of Tweets each minute has increased 58% to more than 455,000 Tweets PER MINUTE in 2017!
  4. Instagram users upload 46,740 million posts every minute!
  5. Every minute on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded.

So you see what I am getting at?

There is so much data being created every minute, that the customers have become spoiled for choice! You need to come up with the right strategy to pull users to your business.
The customers are very empowered right now. They have too many options. The Web provides them with instant information. They can access detailed reviews, compare prices, check features of your product with few clicks of their mouse.
Thus, Inbound Marketing is extremely powerful if it is done right. You have the ability to give the customers answers to their exact questions through your content. This helps you to build trust and reputation in your niche.
In comparison, traditional marketing is usually disruptive, you try to get the attention of a user when he is probably not interested in your service. It is no wonder, that all the businesses are striving to create an inbound strategy right now.

Results from the recent study from HubSpot :

  1. Close to 94% of the companies who adopt an inbound strategy have seen an increase in their traffic!

    More than 94% companies saw growth!
  2. Blogging is the best method for increasing traffic while SEO comes in at second!

    SEO is the best factor for digital marketing

So how do you develop an inbound strategy for your business?

Many thanks to HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Course for teaching me a lot of things about Inbound Marketing. I have come up with a strategy thanks to completing the course, and I suggest all of you to complete the course for the complete understanding of how to build an inbound strategy!
Okay, so let me try and summarize the course in the best way I can!
The Inbound Marketing Methodology
These are the four main steps involved in building an effective inbound strategy:

  1. Attract

  2. Convert

  3. Close

  4. Delight!

 

We will discuss each phase in detail now :

 

1) Attract

We, of course, want to attract the right type of visitors to your website. This is achieved by creating an effective user persona for your website. You need to know exactly what type of visitors you want to attract to your website. Define your expectations and build a strategy around it. We want to attract the right strangers to our website with quality, relevant and compelling content that satisfies their doubts or queries. We can use blogs, social media, and even paid advertising to do so. In this first phase we will be converting strangers to visitors and visitors to repeat visitors!

 

2) Convert

Driving traffic to your website means nothing if you cannot generate revenue from them. At the end of the day, your success is going to be measured by the revenue you generated. With optimized landing pages, forms and convincing call-to-actions we can convert these visitors to qualified leads! This can usually be done by providing incentives to the visitors which may include free e-books, infographics or any other digital content!

3) Close
After converting your visitors into leads, the next step is to convert these leads into customers. This can be achieved by remarketing campaigns, to get the leads back to your business. Follow up e-mails at regular intervals, Adwords and Social Media are the ways you can get back to your customers. This is the most crucial step in your process!
4) Delight
It happens often that businesses forget about their customers when they have already made a purchase. What they forget to understand is that your customer can be a very valuable asset to you. Providing support to him after purchasing your product or service is very essential. This customer can turn into a repeat customer. Up-selling or cross-selling campaigns can be implemented for this customer.
Your customer is also your marketing asset. A happy customer is bound to recommend your product/service to his friends and family. Word of Mouth is still the most effective way of marketing which also happens to be free! Do not forget this last but very important step of your strategy!

 

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