A Guide Into Inbound Marketing
Imagine this. You just got done with a busy day and remembered your favorite Youtuber (Mark Rober) released a video that you can't wait to watch. As you get all comfy on the couch and turn on the video, an ad pops out, trying to convince you to buy a car with the money you don't have. Such a mood killer and annoying, right? With mass marketing techniques being released daily, the audience is growing tired of seeing ads. What can firms do to draw in their audience to become loyal customers without annoying ads? This is where Inbound marketing steps in.
So what is Inbound Marketing?
This marketing method works on attracting visitors and potential customers rather than pushing a brand onto them. With Inbound marketing, the audience is not being sold to, but they are being educated about what a company offers. It is a strategy of creating content or social media tactics that will spread brand awareness, so the audience can learn about you, go to your website for information, and then purchase or show interest in your product. In the article "Efficacy of inbound marketing," they described inbound marketing really well. "Inbound marketing makes it easier for brands to gain awareness because it focuses on earning a person's attention rather than buying it by offering highly engaging content."
The Methodology of Inbound Marketing has three steps and is crucial for marketers to understand.
Attract: Create useful content that brings brand awareness, which best aligns and speaks directly to the audience. You want to transition the audience from stranger to prospect. Some tools that can attract an audience are publishing blog posts or video content across social networks.
Engage: Here, you want to direct your audience into a lead. You want to deliver an experience that caters to your audience preferences, communicating with them on their preferred channels. You have to share information that will help solve the problems that your audience came with. The tools that will help to communicate with your audience are email, live chats, and bots. This is where you want to nurture and help close them into customers.
Delight: Once you have your customers, you need to provide help and support to empower your customers to succeed in their purchase. Doing this will bring them back, and they will also recommend you to others.
Why use Inbound Marketing?
With marketing methods like outbound, where firms engage in advertising on tv, billboards, radio, and focusing on pushing out a message hoping customers will respond, why should a firm use Inbound marketing?
- With inbound marketing, you can create connections and form lasting one-on-one relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. Outbound marketing doesn't offer these relationships, and their communications are, at times, one-sided.
- Inbound marketing helps firms save money since it costs less to implement than traditional outbound marketing, making it great for smaller firms to use. In this report from Hubspot, 53% of marketers believe that Inbound gives a higher ROI than Outbound marketing. Only 16% of marketers think Outbound gives them a higher ROI.
- Inbound marketing is not as annoying as outbound marketing. It aims to get customers coming to you by offering valuable, educational content that helps them understand or solve a problem.
Who uses Inbound Marketing?
- Birch box: In 2016, when the beauty product company was hit with hard times, they had to cut their marketing spend. This hit led Birchbox to eliminate tv ads and focus on social media using multiple social media outlets like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, and Snapchat. Since many of the women who use Birchbox are not experienced in beauty products, Birchbox created video content for their audience that offered advice and inspiration. When creating the videos, they learned that videos that were shorter and had creative text performed better on Facebook because their audience would view videos without sound on that platform. Longer makeup tutorials and unboxing videos best worked on Youtube. Birchbox also learned that live streams and Q&A sessions were good ways to engage with customers on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Birchbox did well because they offered useful information and content for all of their audience, catering to their preferences and communicating with them on their preferred channels.
- Uber: When customers complete their ride on Uber, the rideshare app makes sure to delight their customers. They do this by creating personalized emails that will make the user feel appreciated as a customer. By being personal in their emails, Uber can turn a one-time customer into a lifelong user. Uber's strategies in their emails are: personalized greetings, have employee signed emails, promo codes, and follow up emails of ride summaries.
Moving Forward
Inbound marketing is an important concept that all marketers should grasp. Utilizing this marketing tactic and following the methodology of Inbound marketing, businesses will succeed and gain customers that will come back and evangelize you to others.