Some thoughts on Inbound Marketing ...

What is Inbound Marketing?

On the surface, you might get the idea that "inbound marketing" is just another one of those buzzwords that populate our digital marketing world. However, I am convinced: inbound marketing is much more than just a fad. It is a serious challenge to traditionaloutbound marketing efforts.

And it is so popular because it works.

Let's start with the statistics: According to a Nielsen study, 68 percent of inbound marketers say their marketing strategy is effective. Among outbound marketers, however, only 48% say this. So less than half think what they are doing is effective.

Let's jump in with this statement. In this article, I try to give you an overview of everything that constitutes "inbound". I go into the essential points you should know to make inbound marketing a reality for your company.

The definition of inbound marketing

If you're here because you searched "What is Inbound Marketing?" in LinkedIn, then we can conclude two things:

1.   The fact that you found us is already a sign that our own inbound marketing efforts are working.

2.   You're probably looking for a quick and easy definition of inbound marketing, so let's cut to the chase.

Inbound Marketing in a nutshell:

Inbound marketing is a digital marketing strategy that organically brings leads and potential buyers to your business when they're just looking for solutions, rather than penetratingly vying for their attention.

However, before I go into more detail about what this means exactly, we need a brief digression on inbound's counterpart: outbound marketing.

What is Outbound Marketing?

"Outbound" marketing is what most people think of when you tell them you work in marketing. Outbound encompasses all the traditional forms of getting brand messages across and actively pushing them into the market:

• Catalogues
• Posters
• Radio and print advertising
• Cold calls, i.e. calls made by cold callers
• etc.

In the days before the digital revolution in marketing, when people did not have instant access to the world's information, outbound marketing was a given. Times have changed, however, and much of your customer base now perceives outbound marketing as aggressive and too intrusive.

Disadvantages of outbound marketing

• Expensive
• Impersonal
• Not aligned with modern buyer behaviour

Outbound marketing is seductive. Online ads, for example, offer a clear if-then relationship to the media invested (CPM, CPC) and the apparent success (number of clicks, landing page impressions).

One feature that is very common on the outbound side is "pay-to-play". Most channels pay you to get the right to interrupt the user. AdWords, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, remarketing] ads, paid app installs - all these outbound channels are very popular in administration because they give you clear conversion and attribution metrics that let you keep a supposedly firm grip on your marketing spend and ROI.

The line between outbound and inbound often becomes blurred. For example, AdWords ads could be seen as an unwanted interruption to the user accessing search results. However, when played correctly, an AdWords ad can also be just as relevant as the first organic search result.

A highly personalised product remarketing strategy is another example that doesn't fit 100 percent in outbound. The user already had an interaction with your brand and showed interest in a specific product. So serving related ads via remarketing could be very relevant to the user and not seen as an interruption.

Pure outbound campaigns suffer from the fact that they sometimes have to allocate large media budgets. Their yield - especially at the end of the customer journey - remains questionable or unclear.

The impersonality of many outbound marketing strategies and the inability to target and analyse specific market segments - are further reasons why outbound is under pressure to adapt in the 21st century.

While some people are rushing to call outbound marketing "obsolete" and "dead", I think singing the death song is a bit premature.

In fact, companies that use an inbound-driven strategy in combination with smart outbound tactics can have even more success than those that only use inbound.

What is the difference between outbound marketing and inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is about turning the perspective of traditional marketing concepts like outbound on its head and transferring it to modern forms of communication. The basic idea behind inbound is this: Instead of scaring, interrupting and coercing your audience to pay attention to your message, you create quality content and experiences that your customers actually want to search for and experience; content that customers are comfortable finding - at the exact point in the customer journey when they need it.

Whether your potential customers find you through search engines, Facebook, YouTube or other channels: They voluntarily initiate interactions with your business because they are interested at some level or need what your business offers.

The core: people have actively chosen to receive your marketing messages.

Obviously, this fact alone gives inbound marketing a huge advantage over outbound concepts.

With outbound, your company is the one seeking the conversation with your prospects. With inbound, it's the other way around: your customers contact you first. This simple reversal changes the dynamics of the sales process permanently. Above all, what you know about the people at the other end of the screen and how you can convert them into paying customers is transformed.

Meanwhile, people are also getting better at tuning out advertising and other traditional outbound marketing techniques. Tools such as the Digital Video Recorder or On-Demand allow TV viewers to consume in peace, while streaming services such as Netflix completely eliminate advertising.

The situation for outbound marketing is even more appalling when we look at the state of online advertising. The average click-through rate for online display ads (think 90s banner ads) is a shockingly low 0.07 per cent. The vast majority of people have learned to unconsciously filter out banner ads on websites (banner blindness) because they are usually "annoying", "distracting" or "irrelevant". As a result, half of all internet users say they have never clicked on such an ad.

Of course, all this is only relevant if you can place your ads in people's field of vision in the first place, which is becoming increasingly difficult with the growth of adblocker technologies. Just under 25 percent of German internet users say they use an ad blocker on their computer. The trend is rising sharply. Most smartphones block advertising by default.

In the face of these challenges, we need a new paradigm that reflects the changing behaviour of users. This paradigm should work with users instead of pushing them away with intrusive, impersonal ads that get more and more screechy in a desperate race for clicks.

For many companies, this paradigm is happening with the shift to inbound marketing. It is the natural evolution of your marketing strategy. But just because people are coming to you now doesn't mean you can sit back with a pi?a colada in hand. Trust me when I say that good inbound marketing is not easy:

• First, inbound requires proactive, planned effort upfront to create targeted content that your audience will find engaging and personally relevant.
• Next, you should work on convincing potential customers that your offers are exactly what they were looking for when they triggered that particular Google search at 11pm.
• After all, you need to offer products and services that continually excite people so that they continue to return to your business.

Inbound marketing vs. content marketing

I've talked a lot about "content" now when it comes to inbound, so let's pause for a minute to clarify the relationship between the marketing disciplines of "content marketing" and "inbound marketing".

Although many companies treat inbound marketing and content marketing as synonyms, they are not quite the same thing. In fact, you can say that content marketing is a subset of inbound - a very important part of it. However, it does not tell the whole story.

Content marketing is exactly what it sounds like: creating high-quality, valuable online content that improves your relationship with a target audience.

This content can be in the form of blog articles, in-depth technical content, social media posts, infographics, eBooks, podcasts, videos or any other format you think will be relevant to the people you are trying to reach. Different types of content are used to guide people along their customer journey to a close.

Your content can address a variety of issues and needs based on people's interest and position along the sales funnel. While content marketing describes the strategy behind the creation of content, the inbound strategy focuses on the path to the goal: the customer journey and its contact with the customer.

The Inbound Customer Journey (Funnel or Flywheel)

In the inbound area, content is divided into three categories that are tailored to the needs of people on their journey to booking or purchase: Roughly speaking, a distinction is made between the areas at the top of the funnel (TOFU), in the middle of the funnel (MOFU) and at its end BOFU).

Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU): Attract

TOFU content is usually for the awareness and conversion phase and is often in the form of articles that readers discover through search engines, social media or email marketing. This content should be targeted to the widest possible audience in order to achieve the greatest number of conversions (i.e. the greatest number of people entering the funnel).

It typically attracts the appropriate attention to address a particular question or pain point that your audience often faces. Since you are only concerned with getting readers to convert, you should avoid overt sales pitches or offers at this stage.

Middle of the Tunnel (MOFU): Engage

MOFU content is for leads who have already converted but are not yet ready to buy immediately. Some of the most valuable types of MOFU content are educational resources such as webinars and e-books.

This content can become more technical and delve a little deeper into the benefits of your product, ending with the offer of a sales pitch.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Delight

BOFU content is what companies use when leads are on the verge of closing. At this stage, you should unleash all their expertise in the form of case studies, data sheets, demos and free trials.

At this stage, the customer has already made up his mind. A good offer completes the journey. If you have accompanied the customer through the funnel with an inbound marketing suite - such as Hubspot or Salesforce - you can make them a personalised offer based on their needs. This increases the probability of closing a deal many times over.

In addition to the content described above, inbound includes a variety of strategies to attract the attention of your potential customers and convert them into paying customers. Inbound relies heavily on tools and forms such as:

1. Call-to-action: Text and images that encourage your audience to take their own action or contact your business after interacting with your content.
2. Landing pages: Web pages that users use to download or register for content offers such as eBooks and guides.
3. Forms: Obtaining user contact details such as name, email address, job title and interests in exchange for content or anything else of value.
4. Website analytics: software platforms that collect information about your website visitors to track user behaviour and measure the performance of your content.
5. Customer relationship management (CRM) software: systems that help you store and manage your interactions with prospects and customers throughout the sales lifecycle.

Who is Inbound Marketing interesting for?

The short answer to this question is: "Any company that does digital distribution".

Setting up an inbound marketing strategy is not witchcraft, but it requires a clear commitment to change (change management) and consultants who know how to do it.

In conclusion, inbound marketing becomes more cost-effective as the project progresses because success:

1. Scaled with the effort put in
2. Learning effects and rising rankings
3. Minimise friction