Inbound marketing, "Know thy customer"

Hello readers,

This article discusses INBOUND MARKETING. It is a reflection of the certificate course offered by?Hubspot Academy. The article covers a brief overview of the course and some of the various topics covered. Further, mentioning the learnings and applications. It will assist you in discovering more about inbound marketing and may perhaps spark your curiosity in learning more.

Inbound marketing is a strategy that attracts and retains customers by creating valuable content and tailored experiences. Inbound marketing forms connections customers are looking for and solves problems they already have.

The inbound methodology is a method for expanding a business by fostering long-lasting relationships with people and assisting them in achieving their objectives.

This is carried out in three stages: attract, engage, and delight.

"Know thy customer." This would be number one if there were commandments to the inbound marketing methodology.

Developing buyer personas is the most effective technique to "know thy customer." A fictional, generalized buyer persona is a portrayal of your ideal customers. With buyer personas, one can better comprehend current and potential customers. They make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different types of buyers.

In addition to curating information about your buyer persona in a bulleted list, it's crucial to write a story about your persona. The story humanizes your persona, making it easier for everyone in your organization to think of them and remember their story when creating content or speaking to leads and customers on the phone.

Buyer Persona

Start with your customers or people who have already been through the decision-making process. Our goal is to understand the mindset of buyers as they make the decisions we want to influence.

There are many ways to get stories from our customers. Some of the most productive means include surveys, forms, your sales team, social media, and interviews.

The sales team spends the most time talking to buyers, so consider their feedback on the leads they are interacting.

We want to interview our customers, but we also want to interview our potential customers and folks who considered our solution but went with a competitor. This is the best way to gain insight to create your buyer persona.

Learning,

Creating accurate buyer personas opens the door to becoming a customer-first company. Your entire company's strategy will be in alignment. Conducting insightful and relevant interviews takes dedication and creativity. The payoff is developing accurate buyer personas and establishing a customer-first company mindset.

Content-

Content is at the core of successful inbound marketing. It provides the education buyers seek to make an informed purchasing decision and the value organizations aim to give potential customers.

To win the attention of your target audience, one should create relevant and valuable content throughout their path to purchase, also known as the buyer's journey. The?buyer's journey?is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase.

A clearly defined workflow will allow you to scale your process and continue producing quality content for your audience.

A content creation framework is a structure of processes for publishing content. It allows determining what steps and resources are needed.

We can follow these three steps to get started:

? Identify your workflow.

? Determine who is responsible.

? Gather your content creation tools.

Once the workflow of steps is finalized, responsibility is allocated. It will vary depending on the type of content to be created, but we can consider these primary roles:

? Content Strategy

? Writing or producing

? Editing

? Designing

? Distributing

Learning,

A framework for content development achieves the ideal mix between autonomous creativity and long-term content sustainability. The foundation we create today will serve as the cornerstone for scaling the content in the future.

Distribution

Distribution?plays a massive role in your content's success. As important as it is to create content for the buyer's journey, it's just as essential to determine how that content will reach your audience.

There is a wide range of choices for distribution channels, so we must select the best one. Too frequently, marketers promote untargeted content through as many channels as they can to get results. But doing so often ends in wasting time on ineffective channels and getting substandard outcomes.

Learning,

A better approach is to develop a content distribution strategy. An effective strategy involves choosing distribution channels based on the goal, target audience and results from running tests. Rather than relying on luck, developing a strategy will help to prioritize the right channels and ultimately achieve the goals.

Behavioral marketing and customer segmentation.

Behavioral marketing and customer segmentation are two vital skills for any inbound marketer.

Segmentation?can be categorized as implicit or explicit.

Implicit segmentation is based on characteristics implied by your contacts' behaviors. Here, you analyze your customers' habits and behaviors and make inferences.

Explicit segmentation is based on clear characteristics provided by your contacts or conversions.

Behavioral marketing?is the method by which companies target audiences based on their behavior, interests, intentions, geolocation, and other metrics using web analytics, cookies, search history, and additional insight.

Effective?segmentation?identifies where the customers are in the buyer's journey and assists them in taking the appropriate next step in their individual customer journey.

Application,

One may provide customers with the appropriate message at the appropriate time by using customer segmentation and behavioral marketing methods. When implemented, the effect on business is significant.

Marketing attribution-

Marketing attribution reporting helps you see the impact marketing has on a specific goal, usually a purchase or sale. For example, to see the way a blog post or social media campaign impact sales, you might use marketing attribution techniques to determine how many leads or how much revenue that set of assets influenced.

Application,

Attribution reporting helps to pinpoint the content that influences people to progress through their buyer's journey. If it is found that some of the content are not getting the ROI needed, an adjustment in the content strategy can be made — saving both time and resources.

Artificial intelligence(or AI) and?Marketing automation?are becoming increasingly crucial to business, and this will only intensify?as technology develops and advances.

As defined by Gartner, artificial intelligence is a technology that "applies advanced analysis and logic-based techniques, including machine learning to interpret events, support and automate decisions, and take actions."

Automation can allow interactions to be more efficient, and AI can empower each interaction to be more relevant. Used correctly, you can magnify the personalization you provide for your customers.

Marketing automation and artificial intelligence (AI) facilitate scalability, improve productivity and efficiency, and provide you with more insight into your target audience and your efficacy. Marketing automation and AI can give valuable insights into your customers and efficacy. AI can analyze a collection of behaviors of your website visitors and make recommendations based on those behaviors.

Even though it initially costs more money and effort, using automation and AI intelligently will enable you to execute tasks more quickly and accurately.

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To conclude, inbound marketing and the implementation of these methods into organizations can be advantageous to both the customer and the company. The certificate course might facilitate competency development and reveal previously unexplored opportunities.