inbound marketing is about all that you love to do and about the PEOPLE NEEDS

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Inbound marketing is the process of helping potential customers find your company. This frequently happens before the customer is ready to purchase. But making contact early can turn into brand preference and, ultimately, leads and revenue.

The technique uses many forms of pull marketing to create brand awareness and attract new business. These include:?

• Content marketing
• Social media
• Blogs
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Events

Whereas outbound marketing seeks out customers, inbound marketing focuses on visibility, so potential buyers come to you. Instead of “renting attention,” companies focus on new methods geared towards:?

• Building awareness
• Developing relationships
• Generating leads

Benefits of an inbound marketing strategy.

These methods make you attractive to customers because they don’t make people feel like they’re being sold to. The content provided by inbound marketing is educational, entertaining, and may be more welcomed by consumers.

When done correctly, inbound marketing can return dramatically better results than traditional marketing. That’s because these classic methods disrupt prospects, rather than inbound methods, that give people an open invitation to engage if they want.

When consumers find your company this way, it has a stronger influence on their future marketing decisions and their feelings toward your business in general. The best part? Inbound marketing consists of entirely organic leads, so it relies on brains rather than budget.

Inbound marketing has many key benefits. These include its ability to:

• Put customers in the driver’s seat, connecting you with people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say.
• Work wonders for social media shares, brand awareness, and search engine optimization efforts.
• Let customers engage with your brand at any time, so you can generate qualified leads?for much less money than traditional marketing.

The empowered buyer has all the information they need to make a buying decision at their fingertips any time, any place. Detail specs, pricing, and product/service reviews are right in their pocket, not to mention social media’s impact on information sharing. To be successful in this evolving landscape, visibility through inbound marketing is key.

The inbound marketing methodology explained.

Like every good marketing concept or discipline, inbound marketing is underpinned by theory. Rather than starting your inbound marketing randomly, in an ad hoc fashion, you should use this theory to understand why you are doing it and what you hope to achieve.

The Inbound Methodology offers three approaches to consider:

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1. Attract?- all about content.

Create and publish content regularly to engage potential customers and address their needs, problems and wants.

In digital marketing, content is everything. This strategy is all about using content smartly to develop relationships with customers and prospects. Crucially, the content must be user-centered, it must address people’s needs, problems and wants.

• Create a content plan based on SEO keyword research and ensure the content you create is optimized for search, with correct metadata, H-tags, and People Also Ask questions.
• Mix up different formats, such as informational articles that answer questions relevant to your brand, such as how to guides and explainers, with benefit-led product and category pages.?
• Curate content published on your blog and use across social channels, email marketing and more. Follow a publishing schedule for uploading new content.

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2. Engage- selling the solutions

Establish good relationships with potential customers or clients by talking to them about their challenges and offering solutions.

Conversations are at the heart of engaging inbound strategies. Here, you foster relationships with potential customers by building relationships through giving them your attention. Calls coming into your business are a huge focus.

• Inbound sales execs and customer service agents are given more freedom to build relationships with prospects and manage these leads?by getting to know them and understanding their issues.
• Crucially, these execs avoid any type of hard sell. Instead, they focus on empathizing with the potential customer’s problems while looking for opportunities to suggest potential solutions rather than pushing products onto them.?

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3. Delight.?— post-purchase satisfaction.

Prioritize retention/advocacy customer journey stages with a focus on post-sales content and comms.

Customer satisfaction, long after they have completed their purchase, is the focus of delighting strategies. It’s all about continuing to build a relationship with a customer post-purchase and ensuring they can find the help they need.

The aim, naturally, is to convert them into brand advocates.

• Develop a post-purchase customer journey which serves relevant content at key stages. For example, a tablet. In the days after, an unboxing video, two weeks after, apps to download, three weeks after, seasonal-focused content to get more from it.?
• Gain insights from post-purchase surveys, offer responsive replies to social media queries, and ask for opinions on the types of content people would like to receive. Inspire future purchases with discount codes and other exclusive content.?

Inbound marketing generally has less of an upfront cost than other marketing efforts, and it can have a seriously impressive ROI when used correctly.

Inbound marketing:?

• Brings?leads to you.?Inbound marketing generates three times more leads per dollar than traditional methods (Content Marketing Institute.)?
• Boosts web traffic.?Businesses with content marketing strategies say web traffic is their top two measurements for campaign success (HubSpot).
• Has a proven ROI.?Small businesses report getting the best return on investment from?email marketing, a type of inbound marketing.

I’ll be back to you with material on this fascinating topic...