Inbound marketing is a strategy where you focus on a long-term relationship with potential customers. You do this not by sending a sales message (outbound, also called push approach), but by offering added value in the form of content. The result is that customers come to you, rather than the other way around. And that is exactly why we call it "inbound marketing," or a pull approach.
Your website plays a key role in your inbound strategy, this is the place where potential customers can go during their buying journey. At least, if you manage to make your website the go-to resource for all your target audience's challenges. Therefore, the content does not focus on your organization or product, but rather on the customer and her needs.
Of course, the ultimate goal is to make the website pay off. Only there is a time for everything. The strategy of inbound marketing is to take visitors by the hand, gain their trust. Then to convert them into leads and satisfied customers. You can clearly see this in the phasing used in inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing has taken off in recent years. Google the term and you'll see a multitude of models. Some models use more phases than others, but in basic terms, inbound marketing can always be traced back to 3 phases:
Phase1. Attract: In this phase, you attract visitors to your website, the hub of your inbound marketing. You attract this traffic to your website by offering valuable content that meets the information needs of your target audience. For example, articles, a checklist or a white paper. Your target audience finds this content through search engines or social media. Once on your site, you can start building a relationship with them. There are several software tools that can help you do this, more on that later.
Phase2. Convert: In this phase, you turn visitors into leads. You entice your visitors with so-called "call-to-actions" to leave their contact information in exchange for valuable content. This could be an ebook, a calculator or a scan.
Phase3. Close: In this phase, you intensify contact with visitors who have already left their contact information. This is also called lead nurturing. You delve more deeply into the customer's questions and challenges so you can provide more targeted value. With this, you help your contact find a good solution, and bring the lead closer to the purchase decision, so to speak.
Sometimes an additional step is added to this model: delight. This is about exceeding expectations. The idea behind this is that satisfied customers stay and often even buy more or become ambassadors of your brand.
If you look closely at these phases, you may recognize other important marketing concepts in these phases. The phase model is broadly similar to the marketing funnel. In addition, you use the principle of the customer's buying journey to structure your marketing efforts. The continuation of inbound marketing is also called inbound sales. It is common for customers to request an appointment with an account manager themselves. Inbound sales works differently than a "traditional" sales process where the initiative is taken by your sales department, also called the traditional push approach.
The principle of inbound marketing is not complicated, but it depends on good preparation. It is essential to get to know your customer well and where his or her needs lie. The buyer persona is a way to empathize with your target audience and create profiles of your decision makers and influencers. You do this by mapping their background, goals, challenges and pain points. This allows you to write targeted valuable content for your customers. Among the questions you answer here are:
In the customer journey, or purchase journey of the customer, go one step further and see how ideal customers arrive at a purchase decision. Most companies use multiple buyer personas, each with its own customer journey.
The Internet has revolutionized the way we make purchases. Nowadays we look for answers ourselves. Online. Only when we have done extensive research, we contact you for a closer look. By then, more than half of the purchase journey is already over (57%). The goal of inbound marketing is to help leads get to this point through lead nurturing, or "warming" leads. Inbound marketing also provides better alignment of marketing and sales.
Inbound marketing and content marketing are often mentioned in the same breath. And that is not surprising, because both methods are aimed at helping visitors with the questions the customer has at that moment.
Yet there are also differences. Inbound marketing makes every effort to convert the visitor into a lead. You do this by actively offering relevant content to your customers at the right time. Email marketing often plays a crucial role in this process.
Content marketing is more focused on establishing yourself as an authority in your domain. This sometimes includes content forms that are more difficult to convert, such as podcasts.
Opposed to inbound marketing is outbound marketing. Outbound marketing is also seen as a traditional form of marketing. Here you focus mainly on broadcasting your marketing story, for example in the form of telemarketing, advertisements and direct mailing.
The effect of outbound marketing has been declining for years. We are being bombarded with more and more advertisements and are becoming 'immune' to them, so to speak. Adblockers are on the rise, people consciously choose to ignore ads and register in do-not-call registers. There is also a fragmentation of the media landscape going on, which means that there are more and more channels and, as a result, it has long since ceased to be self-evident to reach your target audience.
Another difference between inbound and outbound marketing is that the results of outbound marketing are not always sustainable. The moment an advertising campaign stops, the effect also ebbs away. Much of the content for inbound marketing produces long-term results, for example, because the pages are found permanently through search engines. By the way, this does not mean that outbound marketing methods have no place at all in the arsenal of the modern marketer. Depending on the objective, a targeted ad in the search engine, social media or print media can still be a good choice, however here you also see that the approach is often to help the target group, rather than to sell a product.
Why are more and more companies choosing an inbound strategy? Common arguments are:
Inbound marketing focuses on the online landscape. Good software is a requirement to get results from inbound marketing. Software applications that are commonly used are:
HubSpot is a platform that integrates these three components. It is designed as an inbound marketing tool. Because you have a HubSpot CRM, CMS and email marketing program in one, all the components work together effortlessly. So you know exactly which blogs have been read by your leads and you can easily follow up with personalized emails.