Whilst many businesses focus much of their marketing efforts on outbound marketing strategies, a strategy that shouldn’t be overlooked in inbound marketing. Of course, you want to show off what your brand can do and what it can offer, but inbound marketing can equally bring your business quality traffic, engagement and leads. So, what is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a marketing method that places you in front of your audience at various points in their customer journey, and lets your customers come to you. By effectively harnessing fundamentals such as content marketing, social media and SEO, you’re creating and enhancing your brand awareness and nurturing your leads.
This technique is great for those who want to generate high quality leads, because it allows you to nurture your prospects from the first interaction they have with your business, right through to purchase. This in turn increases your conversions and provides you with a highly measurable return on investment (ROI).
What are the benefits of inbound marketing?
There are many benefits of inbound marketing including:
Enhances your brand image
Inbound marketing is all about positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry, and you can do this by providing useful solutions that help solve your audience’s ‘problems’. This could be explaining how your products or services can solve a problem your customer is experiencing, or by simply offering a streamlined checkout process for example.
Encourages customer interaction
When it comes to traditional marketing methods, like outbound marketing, the conversation is only one-sided. But with inbound marketing, you can put your brand in the centre of the conversation and encourage interaction from your customers. A great way of leveraging this is through your social media channels. You could encourage conversations by running polls or surveys for example, and allow your customers to have their say.
You can incorporate it into your current marketing strategy
The beauty of inbound marketing is that you can apply it to your current marketing efforts. For example, if you produce regular blogs as part of your content marketing strategy, you can implement inbound marketing and optimise your blog posts for SEO and include powerful call-to-actions to increase leads and conversions.
What are some inbound marketing examples?
Inbound marketing can take many forms and some methods can cost you little, to no money at all to implement. Some examples include:
- Blogs – producing high quality, written content that focuses on answering questions your customers are asking can help drive traffic, engagement, leads and conversions for your business.
- Videos – incorporating video in your content marketing strategy like tutorials or testimonials for example, can help towards building trust with your customers.
- Web Design – providing your customers with a seamless user experience through your web design is vital for a successful customer journey, so ensure you give your audience what they want when they visit your site.
- Email Marketing – sending regular email campaigns is a great tactic for nurturing your existing customers by providing them with valuable, engaging content.
Where should you start with inbound marketing?
To be part of the conversation, brands need to understand what their customers are talking about. Conducting audience research and creating buyer personas are a great way of learning about your customers mindset and allows you to find opportunities to present a solution to their problems.
Once you’ve understood the problems they may be facing, and the steps they may take in the lead-up to a purchase, you can begin to create an inbound marketing strategy to ensure you’re providing relevant content for your audience at each stage of the purchase funnel.
Need help with your inbound marketing strategy?
If you’re not sure where to start with your inbound marketing efforts, or you need help understanding your audience and their pain points, why not get in touch with us today? We can help you create audience research and form a strategy that works for your business.