What is inbound marketing and how to use it?

Inbound marketing is the strategy of connecting with potential customers through materials and experiences that are useful to them. By using media such as social media or websites, marketers seek to engage, entertain, and inform the audience with the content they are looking for.

The contact that inbound marketing establishes with the public is made through useful content presented through organic means, such as search engines or shared links.

This more personalized approach to marketing has the advantage of reaching people who have already taken the initial step towards a purchase. Inbound marketing adds value to customers who are looking for information about a product.

HubSpot defines inbound marketing this way:

Sharing is warm and inbound is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to attract the customers of your dreams, inbound draws qualified leads to your business and keeps them coming back for more.

Examples of Inbound Marketing

• Blogs of current topics
• Campaigns for social networks
• Ebooks or electronic books
• Website Content for Search Engine Optimized (SEO)
• Viral videos
• Webinars

How does Inbound Marketing work?

The Inbound Marketing methodology is made up of four phases.

Attract

The goal is to attract the right consumers (target audience) to your website and your brand with attractive and quality content that answers the questions they have. To achieve this, use is made of blogs, keywords in combination with an SEO strategy, social networks, and even outbound marketing.

Turn into

With streamlined landing pages, compelling forms and calls to action, these visitors become qualified leads. Contact information is the most valuable currency that exists for the online marketer, so they should be given Premium content in exchange for it. This includes Ebooks or e-books, webinars, infographics, tip sheets, and case studies.

To close

Supported by tools like closed-loop reporting; scoring, fostering and vast intelligence of potential customers; Combined with best lead tracking practices and sales tactics, work will be done to transform those leads into new business.

Delight

This sometimes overlooked component of inbound marketing can be your secret weapon to guarantee referrals and renewals. Once someone becomes a customer, you don’t want to forget them, and you will continue to publish and share content that will help them make better use of your product or service, and please them by delighting them as partners and opinion leaders.

Who uses Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is specially designed to be applied by any company or business that works via the Internet. But it is certainly a very effective strategy for a wide range of organizations from different industries.

This marketing strategy has been used effectively by non-profit organizations as well as candidates for government positions of all kinds. Of course, it has also been and is used by countless companies that operate via the web.

The audience that best responds to inbound marketing is usually in the younger range of the audience, this is largely due to how relatively new the Internet is. A public that is used to viewing interactive content on the web will naturally find the most attractive inbound materials.

How to implement an Inbound Marketing strategy?

To develop an effective inbound marketing strategy, you must focus on achieving three steps:

Plan

Before designing a marketing material and implementing it, you should take time to create an appropriate plan. You must determine what your objective is: sell a specific product, enroll new customers for a service or other result you want. Once you know what you want your inbound marketing campaign to accomplish, decide what you are going to offer the prospect on the way to that goal.

Analyze

Defining a plan will make it easier to analyze the impact of the marketing elements used. It is very important to check the top figures for items on a regular basis, such as the number of visits a blog post achieves, how many readers clicked on the sales page, and whether sales have increased since the launch of the Bell.

Help define incremental targets and benchmarks in your planning phase to give these figures comparative value.

Check

You should execute the review of your strategy once you have implemented your marketing plan, and have collected data to verify its effectiveness. You can collect everything you have learned and summarize it into a more powerful campaign instead of starting from scratch. Keeping complete records and making comprehensive reports is essential to this learning process.