Inbound marketing, a term focused on generating clients for small businesses was initially invented by a company called Hubspot. They are a CRM (customer relationship management) company who coined this term, inbound marketing initially which later on became popular across digital marketers all around the globe.
If put it simply, it is the idea of attracting your ideal or potential customer with information so that they receive value from you on the first go instead of receiving a product or a service offer from your end. You only get to promote your product or services to these group of people once you offer them value. Value can be in the form of a YouTube video, via blog posts or even via social media or as an eBook.
To understand inbound marketing, we also should have a look at the traditional outbound marketing. This will help you to distinguish the two different strategies. Outbound marketing focuses on reaching out to cold traffic who do not know anything about you or your brand. This can be in the form of a billboard or even via television advertising. Inbound marketing on the other hand takes time to understand the needs of your customer before reaching out to them with an offer.
How do Inbound Marketing Increase Your Visibility, Leads & Sales?
Internet is a noisy field and this is especially true if you are offering a product or service in exchange for money to people. People are generally receptive of taking services online and that is where the power of inbound marketing comes into play.
To understand how inbound marketing can increase your visibility, leads and sales, let’s use an example of a business owner who is trying to sell insurances to people. Instead of going from door to door or cold calling people who have no interest in receiving information around insurance, the person decides to create a blog where he or she talks about insurance and the benefit along with risks of it being honest. At the same time, he starts to create YouTube videos and he starts to interact with people who have questions around insurance.
This is a traditional form of inbound marketing. Instead of actively promoting his products or services, he or she will easily be able to reach a broader number of people with the informative content that he or she is producing.
That’s where the power of inbound marketing is. The best part about inbound marketing is the fact that it is reusable. If you build a free insurance course or a few YouTube videos talking about insurance then you can use that same material again and again and you can add layers on top of it to make your marketing strategy even better.
These are not possible with traditional marketing activities. Another very important benefit which is often ignored is the idea of being different in a noisy environment. When everyone is trying to sell something to each other, you offer value in exchange for nothing which results in more sales for you with inbound marketing. This is why, inbound marketing has been proven as one of the most successful marketing activities in the digital ecosystem in recent years.
Now, there are four big stages of inbound marketing which every marketer should know about. It is a structured process and you should make sure that you follow the same structure if you don’t want to get harmed in your marketing. The last thing that you want to happen is turning your inbound marketing plan into an outbound regular marketing strategy.
The first thing that you should take care about is attraction.
Before you do anything else, you will have to attract the right kind of potential clients to your website, right? Attraction is the first step of everything and to make sure that it happens, you need to formulate a strategy from the very beginning.
The interesting thing about inbound marketing is that though you attract customers at the first stage, you need to think about your end product from the same moment. Let’s assume that you will be selling a web development service. The first question that you should ask yourself is what kind of content that I can offer for free to people who are interested in web development? It might be courses or eBook around the topic of development, it can be blog articles or even podcast. In the perfect world, you will be doing everything together but that is not the right approach at the beginning. Therefore, you might decide to start with something that you are most comfortable with.
As soon as that is sorted, start doing that inbound strategy of attraction. Initially, you will receive little to no response to your marketing materials. You should keep hustling as it takes time to get to the end results that you are looking for. If you are passionate enough and if your products are of good quality, you will surely end up at the forefront of your target clients.
The next stage of inbound marketing is conversion. You have to make sure that you are converting at least a decent amount of the people that you are ‘attracting’ on that first stage. We are not talking about turning your visitors into customers at this stage. We are talking about turning them into leads so that you can later on try to convert them as customers via other means of marketing such as email marketing.
In general, the conversion ratio should be a bit higher for you than for anyone else because you took time to offer value to your customers at the attraction stage. However, it is advised not to expect crazy conversions.
Also, it is very important that you have a solid set of tactics to be able to convert your potential traffic into leads. Having proper lead generation systems will allow you to convert more leads.
The third stage of inbound marketing is the closing stage. This is probably one of the most important stages if not the most important stage of your inbound marketing strategy. If you are not being able to close your leads into paying customers, there is no point in doing inbound marketing in the first place.
You have to make sure that you are converting at least a decent amount of leads into paying customer so that your business grows. This is not easy and that is why, you need solid marketing effort to make this a success.
The conversion stage can again be divided into re-targeting and email outreach strategies where you will reach out to the leads that you have converted at the previous stage and you will now try to close them to purchase your service. You might offer them benefits such as a free trial or even a discount depending on the nature of your business. The whole idea is to turn them into paying clients by any means.
One big advice at this stage is to keep on running your regular attraction and conversion strategy at the back-end. You should be able to build a system where you will continue to generate leads which will result in more traffic and therefore, more closing opportunities for you at the end of the day.
The fourth and the last stage of your inbound marketing is the stage of delight. You will have to make sure that you are delighting your customers or even your leads with something that is worth for them to share with their friends and family. It can be a little or a big thing depending on what you offer, however, try to make it something weird and funny so that the chance of them sharing this with their peers increase.
You want to delight them so that they can feel a strong relationship with your company and that is only achievable if you can delight them. Remember, if you have given them a free eBook at the initial attract stage or even a few free value videos, that will not be working at this stage for them. The methods that you used to attract them is not going to be the same methods that you will be using to delight them. Therefore, you need something different and something that they can remember for a long time.
There you go. Those were your four major steps of a successful inbound marketing strategy. An inbound marketing strategy is only achievable if all the pieces of it works together to make it a success. For example, if you have a great attraction strategy however, if you don’t have a decent conversion strategy, the attraction strategy might fall apart.
One great idea about inbound marketing is to offer as much information or value free as possible. This might sound weird but offering even some parts of your service might result in getting more clients for you. Try to optimize the whole process and you will never have to focus on outbound marketing ever again.
Inbound marketing, a term focused on generating clients for small businesses was initially invented by a company called Hubspot. They are a CRM (customer relationship management) company who coined this term, inbound marketing initially which later on became popular across digital marketers all around the globe.
If put it simply, it is the idea of attracting your ideal or potential customer with information so that they receive value from you on the first go instead of receiving a product or a service offer from your end. You only get to promote your product or services to these group of people once you offer them value. Value can be in the form of a YouTube video, via blog posts or even via social media or as an eBook.
To understand inbound marketing, we also should have a look at the traditional outbound marketing. This will help you to distinguish the two different strategies. Outbound marketing focuses on reaching out to cold traffic who do not know anything about you or your brand. This can be in the form of a billboard or even via television advertising. Inbound marketing on the other hand takes time to understand the needs of your customer before reaching out to them with an offer.
How do Inbound Marketing Increase Your Visibility, Leads & Sales?
Internet is a noisy field and this is especially true if you are offering a product or service in exchange for money to people. People are generally receptive of taking services online and that is where the power of inbound marketing comes into play.
To understand how inbound marketing can increase your visibility, leads and sales, let’s use an example of a business owner who is trying to sell insurances to people. Instead of going from door to door or cold calling people who have no interest in receiving information around insurance, the person decides to create a blog where he or she talks about insurance and the benefit along with risks of it being honest. At the same time, he starts to create YouTube videos and he starts to interact with people who have questions around insurance.
This is a traditional form of inbound marketing. Instead of actively promoting his products or services, he or she will easily be able to reach a broader number of people with the informative content that he or she is producing.
That’s where the power of inbound marketing is. The best part about inbound marketing is the fact that it is reusable. If you build a free insurance course or a few YouTube videos talking about insurance then you can use that same material again and again and you can add layers on top of it to make your marketing strategy even better.
These are not possible with traditional marketing activities. Another very important benefit which is often ignored is the idea of being different in a noisy environment. When everyone is trying to sell something to each other, you offer value in exchange for nothing which results in more sales for you with inbound marketing. This is why, inbound marketing has been proven as one of the most successful marketing activities in the digital ecosystem in recent years.
Now, there are four big stages of inbound marketing which every marketer should know about. It is a structured process and you should make sure that you follow the same structure if you don’t want to get harmed in your marketing. The last thing that you want to happen is turning your inbound marketing plan into an outbound regular marketing strategy.
The first thing that you should take care about is attraction.
Before you do anything else, you will have to attract the right kind of potential clients to your website, right? Attraction is the first step of everything and to make sure that it happens, you need to formulate a strategy from the very beginning.
The interesting thing about inbound marketing is that though you attract customers at the first stage, you need to think about your end product from the same moment. Let’s assume that you will be selling a web development service. The first question that you should ask yourself is what kind of content that I can offer for free to people who are interested in web development? It might be courses or eBook around the topic of development, it can be blog articles or even podcast. In the perfect world, you will be doing everything together but that is not the right approach at the beginning. Therefore, you might decide to start with something that you are most comfortable with.
As soon as that is sorted, start doing that inbound strategy of attraction. Initially, you will receive little to no response to your marketing materials. You should keep hustling as it takes time to get to the end results that you are looking for. If you are passionate enough and if your products are of good quality, you will surely end up at the forefront of your target clients.
The next stage of inbound marketing is conversion. You have to make sure that you are converting at least a decent amount of the people that you are ‘attracting’ on that first stage. We are not talking about turning your visitors into customers at this stage. We are talking about turning them into leads so that you can later on try to convert them as customers via other means of marketing such as email marketing.
In general, the conversion ratio should be a bit higher for you than for anyone else because you took time to offer value to your customers at the attraction stage. However, it is advised not to expect crazy conversions.
Also, it is very important that you have a solid set of tactics to be able to convert your potential traffic into leads. Having proper lead generation systems will allow you to convert more leads.
The third stage of inbound marketing is the closing stage. This is probably one of the most important stages if not the most important stage of your inbound marketing strategy. If you are not being able to close your leads into paying customers, there is no point in doing inbound marketing in the first place.
You have to make sure that you are converting at least a decent amount of leads into paying customer so that your business grows. This is not easy and that is why, you need solid marketing effort to make this a success.
The conversion stage can again be divided into re-targeting and email outreach strategies where you will reach out to the leads that you have converted at the previous stage and you will now try to close them to purchase your service. You might offer them benefits such as a free trial or even a discount depending on the nature of your business. The whole idea is to turn them into paying clients by any means.
One big advice at this stage is to keep on running your regular attraction and conversion strategy at the back-end. You should be able to build a system where you will continue to generate leads which will result in more traffic and therefore, more closing opportunities for you at the end of the day.
The fourth and the last stage of your inbound marketing is the stage of delight. You will have to make sure that you are delighting your customers or even your leads with something that is worth for them to share with their friends and family. It can be a little or a big thing depending on what you offer, however, try to make it something weird and funny so that the chance of them sharing this with their peers increase.
You want to delight them so that they can feel a strong relationship with your company and that is only achievable if you can delight them. Remember, if you have given them a free eBook at the initial attract stage or even a few free value videos, that will not be working at this stage for them. The methods that you used to attract them is not going to be the same methods that you will be using to delight them. Therefore, you need something different and something that they can remember for a long time.
There you go. Those were your four major steps of a successful inbound marketing strategy. An inbound marketing strategy is only achievable if all the pieces of it works together to make it a success. For example, if you have a great attraction strategy however, if you don’t have a decent conversion strategy, the attraction strategy might fall apart.
One great idea about inbound marketing is to offer as much information or value free as possible. This might sound weird but offering even some parts of your service might result in getting more clients for you. Try to optimize the whole process and you will never have to focus on outbound marketing ever again.
