The Basics of Inbound Marketing
For new organizations, it can be daunting to try and attract new clientele. It might feel like you don’t have enough cash to really start advertising and promoting yourself, but in actuality, you don’t need a lot of money to start growing your audience and customer base. With inbound marketing, you don’t have to worry about throwing your marketing money down the drain because it requires very little investment and can be done from the comfort of your own home/office.
Inbound marketing focuses on bringing potential consumers to the final stages of the buying process by providing helpful and relevant content throughout the journey. Inbound marketing makes it easier for potential customers to find organizations through blogs, search engines, and social media. Rather than going out and finding those customers yourself through typical advertising methods, inbound marketing brings the customers to you by producing quality content that catches attention and ropes people in.
How to Create Successful Inbound Marketing
The entire point of marketing is to turn random people into leads into customers into promoters. The best way to do this is to give them a reason to care about what you are putting out there. The best way to do that is with inbound marketing.
According to HubSpot, there are a couple of universal phases that one has to go through when utilizing inbound marketing to turn strangers into promoters. Let’s break those down.
- Attract: It’s important to bring people to your site with inbound marketing that will resonate with the information you are putting out there. If your target audience member is a mom raising a hectic family, you don’t want to be attracting men who ride motorcycles together on the weekends — they most likely will not convert to customers. The best ways to attract potential customers are through blogging, showing up in relevant searches, and posting content on social media platforms. The more visible you are the better chance you have of attracting potential consumers. It also important to create consistent messaging. Any blogs or social media posts you send out to connect with potential customers should all relate back to your central brand offerings.
- Convert: Because you are attracting potential strangers to your services/products with your inbound marketing, you are now going to have to convert them into leads. Leads are strangers that have turned into potential consumers. Once you have brought these people to your information, the path to conversion can vary. Basically, you want to make sure they continue to engage with your content past that initial hook. This can be done through newsletter forms, scheduling meetings, sending individual messages, or importing these leads into a Customer Relationship Management software system to keep tabs on for later engagement. Whatever avenue you take to convert leads into consumers is going to depend on your offering, but it’s important to keep people engaged consistently to ensure they reach that next step in the buying process.
- Close: This may be considered the most important step — closing the deal. Now, it’s time to truly turn those leads into consumers. This is done through a variety of channels, but it’s important to open lines of communication, consistently provide good content, and creatively provide solutions to problems with what you have to offer. This can all be done through inbound marketing efforts, like producing helpful blog posts or sharing information on social media.
- Repeat: Keep creating good content and engaging authentically with leads and consumers. The only way to ensure consumers will continually come back to your product or service is to continually provide good content and support to them. Keep it up!
Why Inbound Marketing?
You might be wondering why inbound marketing is such a big deal, and it’s because of changes in how consumers make buying decisions. The average consumer is much less likely to be swayed by traditional advertising techniques now — they want to engage with organizations that care about them and provide them with solutions. Because there is an abundance of information at our fingertips with the Internet, consumers are more likely now than ever to comparison shop and do their research before making a final purchase decision. Other factors play into making a purchase as well, such as the ethics of a company, the partnerships a company has with other organizations, and the benefits one gets from purchasing from the company — all of which can be shared through inbound marketing tactics. Consumers are increasingly looking to find answers to questions rather than sales pitches. That’s why inbound marketing, in the form of blog posts specifically, is so helpful to consumers. If you can answer questions for them, they are more likely to buy into what you are selling.
As the world has grown and more and more consumers and providers are entering the market, marketing and advertising has become more personalized. Mass marketing, like billboards and national TV ads, used to move product off the shelf, but now, organizations are leaning toward more personalized marketing, like inbound marketing, to make the sale. Consumers want to feel as if the relationship they have with an organization is personal. Inbound marketing can do that.
Everything relates when you practice inbound marketing. You create blog posts to improve SEO rankings. You share blog posts on social media to attract new consumers. And all of this is done to create leads and relationships with potential consumers. No matter your service or product, you want people to see it. To be seen, you should be practicing inbound marketing. The best thing about inbound marketing? It doesn’t have to cost insane amounts of money. As long as you focus on creating good content, you’ll be able to promote and incorporate inbound marketing without any additional cost.
If you need help creating inbound marketing collateral, reach out to Cabedge today. With our team of marketing experts and content creators, we can help get your marketing to the right people.