What Is Inbound Marketing and How Does It Work?
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Inbound marketing helps customers find a company or brand. Because the focus is on visibility, it encourages prospects to connect with the company through targeted advertising, lead generation via educational content and relationship building. Inbound marketing is a powerful tool that requires patience and planning.
Most people are familiar with the concept of marketing. They encounter it daily. Consumers face a deluge of marketing tactics companies use to encourage them to purchase. Marketing and advertising are everywhere, from cold calls and billboards to TV commercials and Facebook ads.
However, most people are less familiar with the key distinctions between two types of marketing: inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Each tactic has pros and cons. Some businesses are better suited toward inbound marketing techniques, while others should trust the “tried-and-true” methods of days past.
Before settling on a marketing strategy, companies must understand the basics of inbound marketing. That includes whom it targets, how it works and what it costs.
Inbound Marketing Definition
Inbound marketing describes marketing efforts that help potential customers find a company or brand. Inbound marketing focuses on visibility. It allows brands to make early contact with consumers and (hopefully) turn their awareness into a brand preference.
Inbound marketing takes several forms. Companies can create an inbound strategy that includes one or more of the following tactics:
How Does Inbound Marketing Work?
Inbound marketing’s purpose is to bring potential buyers to the table. That means companies focus on three key things:
Companies with inbound marketing strategies create a library of content to build brand recognition and relationships. High-quality content attracts visitors. Visitors turn into leads. Leads transform into closed deals.
HubSpot, one of the primary evangelists in the inbound marketing space, says:
“It’s about valuing and empowering these people [prospects and leads] to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.”
Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is one of many types of strategies to gain customers. Outbound marketing describes “traditional” modes of marketing. Outbound marketing refers to those strategies in which companies, not consumers, initiate the conversation. Outbound marketing strategies include the following tactics:
Companies still spend as much as 90 percent of their marketing budgets on outbound tactics. They do this even though outbound marketing’s return on investment (ROI) is increasingly difficult to track. As technology improves, more people avoid outright outbound marketing techniques like cold calls and TV commercials.
Stages of Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing strategies seek to engage customers in the sales funnel by providing relevant content. Companies typically follow a four-step process to steer consumers toward brand enthusiasm and continued business.?
Attract
Businesses must first attract individuals who can become potential customers. Companies center these prospects — buyer personas — in their marketing efforts.
Companies reach this audience by creating and publishing relevant content that provides value to them. This content can include product guides, client testimonials or promotional information.
The main goal of attraction is to engage potential customers with content that speaks to their needs, problems and wants. The best way to do this is through an optimized keyword strategy that touches on words or phrases relevant to a brand’s product, customer challenges and target audience. Organizations use the following practices to accomplish this:
Convert
Once customers’ eyes are on content, the next step is to convert those users into qualified leads. Qualifying leads can be a tricky process and is transactional. A brand may offer a potential lead something valuable — often a piece of content — in exchange for contact information (usually an email address).
Close
Closing a sale with inbound marketing is a collaborative process between the sales and marketing teams. The marketing team should take the initiative to further “sales-qualify” a lead and prepare them to buy through the following techniques:
Delight
Customer delight is one of the most significant signs of satisfaction, and it is a vital piece of the puzzle for all inbound marketing efforts. These strategies transform team members into true advisors and experts who can help a customer at any time.
The delight cycle includes continued promotional efforts like landing pages, lead-nurturing emails and calls to action (CTAs). They also include premium content offers focusing on what a brand’s customers need to grow.
Delighting customers is one of the most fun and rewarding parts of the inbound marketing cycle because it is where magic (read: upsells and renewals) happens. The marketing and sales teams continue to build and maintain a steady, happy relationship with the customer and offer them continued support.
Types of Inbound Marketing
Companies that invest in inbound marketing have plenty of tools to start the process. Most inbound marketing efforts focus on three main priorities.??
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies involve targeting specific keywords and phrases that relate to the following items:
Companies use SEO strategies to help their content rank highly on the search engine results page (SERP) for those keywords. The goal is to show up on the first page of the SERP when a company’s intended audience searches for those terms.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Unlike traditional SEO, pay-per-click advertising (PPC) does not rely on organic strategies to put a brand or company in front of leads. PPC is an advertising technique in which businesses pay for access to customers through various means, including ads that appear on the SERP or social media.
Companies that employ PPC often use budgets to “bid” on ad placement for specific search terms or keywords. Because PPC often uses searcher intent to serve ads, it is a form of inbound marketing.
Content Marketing?
Content marketing often serves as the bedrock for inbound marketing efforts because it touches every part of the sales funnel. Inbound strategies do not work without compelling content to drive SEO and PPC efforts. Content is often the carrot companies dangle in front of leads to collect information that can lead to later sales.?
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Inbound Marketing Benefits
Companies that implement inbound marketing strategies see several benefits, which can vary based on the time and energy they put into their efforts. Some of these perks are less immediately noticeable than those of other strategies. Their long-term usefulness makes them attractive prospects.
Lower Expenses
Companies that shift their efforts from mass marketing strategies to more targeted campaigns can save money and see a shift to higher ROIs.
Quality Traffic and Leads
Inbound marketing focuses on lead quality over quantity. This targeted approach allows sales and marketing teams to nurture qualified leads more likely to be interested in their solutions.?
Strong Brand Credibility
Companies that allow customers to research and find them organically can appear more trustworthy than those who plaster billboards along the roadside and invite customers to buy.
Creating compelling, expert-level content can also help build trust that companies are thought leaders and leverage social proof to reduce the risks customers associate with a brand.
Long-Lasting Impact
Inbound marketing allows companies to see long-lasting impacts, most often through consistent client relationships that form when leads turn to clients. Those clients become advocates for services or products.?
Inbound Marketing Challenges
Inbound marketing also has challenges. Companies pursuing inbound marketing as a strategy need to understand that it is not a decision to take lightly. It requires plenty of prep work and investment.
Planning for the Time-Consuming Process
Inbound marketing takes much time to implement. It is not a quick fix for issues and will not result in a flood of customers overnight.
Content planning takes time, including knowing what to create, when to publish it and what goal each unique piece of content needs to serve.
Waiting for Return on Investment
Just like creating content takes time, seeing ROI does, too. Inbound marketing can take months to generate results as content begins to rise in the search rankings. Some companies implement PPC campaigns in the interim to “jump start” traffic generation while content begins to rank in organic search.?
Finding the Right Analytical Tools?
The right analytics tools provide insight and information for inbound marketing efforts. Knowing which tools to use and which to cast aside affects how impactful an inbound strategy can be. Some of the most common analytics tools marketers use for their inbound efforts include the following:
While the above tools do not strictly focus on analytics, most allow for comprehensive management and reporting on marketing efforts.
Achieving a High Conversion Rate
Inbound marketing aims to raise conversion rates through more qualified leads and a tailor-made audience, making achieving that high conversion rate the biggest challenge. It requires an all-hands-on-deck approach for collaboration between sales and marketing teams to nurture leads and continue the conversation.
All content — from website copy to email campaigns — needs a clear, compelling CTA. That CTA should focus on the following steps to push leads down the sales funnel.
Skills for Inbound Marketing
Some digital marketing skills have a greater priority than others, and that is especially true for inbound marketing. The following skills need representation on any inbound team:
Careers in Inbound Marketing
With the above skills in hand, there is no shortage of digital marketing careers available. As inbound marketing increases in popularity, the following roles will only continue to grow.
Content Strategist
Content strategists do more than write. They also build the overall content development strategy, including emails, videos and social media.
SEO Specialist
SEO specialists perform keyword research to help uncover user search intent and determine opportunities to rank on the SERP. They also partner with content strategists to develop website and blog content topics. SEO specialists provide detailed recommendations for both technical SEO and on-page optimizations.
Social Media Manager
Social media and community management are vital components of an inbound strategy, and having someone on staff who knows how to handle those elements is critical. Social media managers can answer questions about products, but they also work to spread knowledge of the brand on platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter.
Graphic Designer
Graphic designers help create rich media and visual assets for content. They provide support by designing infographics, social media posts, logos and other elements that do not explicitly contain text.
The Future of Inbound Marketing
The future of inbound marketing looks bright as companies continue to invest in SEO, content marketing and podcasting. But one new wrinkle companies must be aware of is the increase in automation and machine learning. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools allow companies to clean data and optimize their content faster than ever. This automation can help with customer outreach, too, in the form of chatbots.
Ultimately, inbound marketing is a powerful strategy that can help a company focus on the leads with a good chance of converting. It can save money, which is essential during economic downturns. It is not, however, a one-size-fits-all strategy. It takes planning and work to do well.
Top Takeaways
(Reporting by NPD)