How To Use Inbound Marketing & Everything You Need to Know

To say that the marketing world has evolved dramatically in recent years would be an understatement. In fact, the entire idea of how we perceive marketing has shifted. The inbound approach to marketing has been the main driving force behind this change.

While the outbound strategy may have its use in some ways, inbound marketing is the way to provide customers with more value than ever before.

Offering high-quality content in every stage of the customer journey, up to the decision to purchase, is at the core of every inbound marketing strategy.

What's Inbound Marketing Exactly?

The meaning of the term inbound marketing maybe clear as day to someone in the industry. But if you’re just looking to get your business off the ground and exploring marketing options, you might not be sure about what all of that entails. In essence, inbound marketing is the opposite of what most people understood marketing to be.

Consumers no longer have to wait for a commercial to pop up on the TV or call to ask about a product. They can just go online and conduct their own research.

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This process has three main stages.

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First comes awareness, where a buyer recognizes a pain point that requires a solution. When the symptoms of a problem are identified, usually some high-level research ensues.

The consideration stage is the second step. The buyer has several options on the menu and they are contemplating which one is right for them. The final stage involves decision making and choosing the brand or vendor that fits the buyer’s expectations.

Inbound marketing aims to provide relevant valuable, and overall high-quality content at every stage of the process. The idea is to develop versatile and remarkable ways to show the customer that you understand their needs and that there is a tailored product or service that can fulfill that need.

Inbound marketing takes many forms, from blogging to video content, but what all of these tools have in common is that the customer gets specific content within the right context. In the highly connected world of today, inbound marketing has proven to be a more sustainable and preferred way of acquiring and keeping customers.

Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

Before diving deeper into all the key elements of inbound marketing, let's see the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. If one is to pinpoint the crucial difference between the two, it would be that with outbound marketing, marketers reach out to customers.

But with inbound marketing, customers come to you. You could also juxtapose these two approaches with interruption vs.permission.

Outbound marketing relies heavily on cold calling and emailing, as well as interruptive ads and banners. Inbound is customer-centric and relies on producing and sharing relevant content.

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The Key Components of Inbound Marketing

To develop an effective marketing strategy that maximizes the ROI and attracts qualified prospects, you need to get acquainted-with the essential elements of inbound marketing. Take a look at the components-of inbound marketing that can transform the way you connect with customers.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a website. To do that successfully, you need SEO tools that can help optimize your web pages for organic search results. Google and other search engines use crawlers to gather information about all content available on the internet for later organization into a search index.

The algorithm then returns relevant data from that index to each search engine user based on their query. But how do you optimize your website to meet SEO standards? The first step is actually to work-on the quality of the traffic.

That means that when people access your website, they get relevant content and not something completely unrelated to what they searched for.

Without it, no amount of clicks can guarantee a successful conversion. However, once you have that covered, you can work on getting more traffic from SERPs (search engine result pages). Keep in mind that paid ads may take up premium spaces on SERPs.

For organic pages to rank high on SERPs, they have to be SEO optimized. This is where another crucial element of SEO, keyword research, comes in. Including relevant keywords in your content can boost SERP rankings. Your site’s mobile-friendliness is yet another important consideration for SEO purposes.

2. Web Design

Optimizing your website for inbound offers is part of an effective inbound marketing strategy. In order to boost traffic and leads, the web design must contain several essential ingredients.

The first concept to remember is that more is not always better. For inbound websites or landing pages, too much content can overwhelm a visitor. If they're unable to find where to click in the first minute or so, they're likely to leave the page altogether.

When it comes to personalization, the main focus is the purpose. The introduction of any new element to the website must have a valid reason.

Also, there's no need to keep a website static.The web design can incorporate dynamic and personalized details such as"recently viewed items" or other behavioral info.

Apart from goal-driven pages that will generate more leads, today’s inbound marketing mandates a mobile-responsive site. This means having a site that’s easy to navigate regardless of the visiting device.

3. Lead Generation

At a fundamental level, a lead is a consumer who has expressed a genuine interest in a product or service. And in the context of inbound marketing, lead generation is a company’s attempt to get consumers or potential new customers to give out their contact info.

Lead generation can be critical to business growth.For most people, a familiar way to generate leads is filling out an online survey, after which they may receive a cold call or email from the company behind the survey. Who can blame them for staying away from these surveys?

However, lead generation works differently for inbound marketing. Examples of inbound lead gen include landing pages, live events, blog posts, coupons, and job applications. The key difference is that prospects have first shown interest in your product or service.

Another effective lead generation tool is chatbots. These software bots present a unique opportunity for marketers to engage with potential customers 24 hours a day.

Other benefits of chatbots as an inbound marketing tool include instant responses, automated answers to straight forward questions, and even resolution of simple, common complaints.

4. Marketing Automation & Lead Nurturing Workflows

Marketing automation is a big term in marketing lingo. It is the process of using software to automate specific marketing tasks in the name of better operational efficiency.

Considering all the marketing techniques and tasks required of a company daily, weekly, or perhaps monthly, the ability to offload them to technology, and doing so reliably, can be invaluable. Marketer scan have more time for doing other things, like focusing on lead nurturing.

After developing and launching an inbound marketing campaign, you’ll quickly learn that it’s only the start. You let loose the lead generation engine and it’s churning out leads, but now it’s time to keep all the leads satisfied. And lead nurturing doesn’t end at the decision stage of the buyer journey.

Nurturing leads can be labor-intensive work ripe for automation. Besides the labor savings, this is a great way to enable systematic tracking of your leads and content. Automated software can help ensure that your leads are never forgotten and that you can provide content to them at the right time.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is closely associated without bound marketing and the reason why so many inbound marketers shy away from it.

But the reality is that email marketing works for both inbound and outbound marketing. It all depends on its utilization.

When a company sends out an email to a prospect who hasn't expressed a direct interest, that's outbound email marketing and the part that may be regarded as spam. However, when someone provides their email address willingly and you reach out to them, that’s inbound marketing.

One of the advantages of inbound email marketing is that you can reach out to your customers even when they’re not on your website. You can remind them about previous purchases and re-engage them with relevant deals and discounts.

All the Moving Parts of an Inbound Marketing Strategy

To develop a successful inbound marketing campaign, a company can’t just focus on any one element.

Having an SEO-friendly site optimized for inbound marketing is a necessity, but that alone isn't enough. The market-centric outbound system no longer appeals to the average shopper.

Today’s consumers demand quality content that they can comb through while doing their research. Lead generation and automated lead nurturing are exceptionally helpful tools that will help your business gain and retain customers.

If you want to get started with inbound marketing campaign and learn more about automating your marketing tasks contact Sultan Marketing and request a quote.

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