If you’re in the field of digital marketing, I’m sure you heard the phrase “Inbound Marketing” very often. Most marketers always highlight the importance of inbound marketing while planning a digital strategy for any business. It’s easy to understand the basics of inbound marketing, but implementing inbound marketing strategies turns to be tricky.
What is Inbound Marketing?
The idea of inbound marketing was first represented by Hubspot in 2006. Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology to attract customers by creating valuable & engaging content and move them through your sales pipeline. It’s a cost-effective method that lets you convert customers organically.
Why Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a practice of getting potential customers by utilizing non-paid marketing channels like social, content, and search. Plenty of marketers gives importance to inbound marketing for a good reason, here’s why:
- 41% of marketers confirm inbound marketing leads to measurable ROI
- 82% of marketers discover positive ROI for their inbound marketing practices.
- If it executes well, inbound marketing can be ten times more effective than outbound marketing.
- Inbound marketing generates 3x more leads per dollar compared to other marketing practices.
Also Read: Top 20 short & effective Email Marketing tips for Startups
Why Use an Inbound Marketing Strategy?
The inbound marketing methodology depends upon content development to build strong relationships with leads and consumers. The more quality content you have, the more you’ll attract visitors, generate leads, and close the deals.
There are a few notable reasons why inbound marketing always works better than other marketing practices. Below are a few advantages and proven strategies to help you get started with inbound marketing:
1- Cost-Effective Approach:
To get started with inbound marketing, you only need a website and high-quality content. For small businesses, you need to spend a small budget for increasing the follower base of your blogs and social media accounts.
However, you can start with small and then scale it as your business grow.
The best part is you can also modify your inbound marketing campaigns based on the previous campaigns to get the most out of your marketing budget.
Also Read: Top 10 Tips to Catch more Leads for your Small Business
2- Tech-Geeks customers like inbound marketing:
In this running pandemic, traditional marketing practices are losing interest with customers. Search Engine Land shared the latest report
about current trends running in the market. As per their report, since the global pandemic, inbound marketing practices like paid search and social media campaigns increased by 26%. On the other hand, traditional marketing tactics decreased by up to 46%.
3- Inbound Marketing has long-term benefits:
The content we used in inbound marketing such as tutorial guides, infographics, case studies, or e-books have a longer lifetime than outbound content. You can use it again by updating and republishing your content to keep it relevant.
On the other hand, traditional marketing practices are for a short time. A sales guy spends many hours on cold calling and cold emailing to get some potential clients.
Inbound Marketing Strategies:
Now that you understand what inbound marketing is and how it works, it’s time to put your knowledge into action to get maximum from this marketing strategy.
Let’s talk about some of the best inbound marketing strategies and best practices to boost engagement with your prospects.
1- Analyse your buyer persona:
The first and critical step for any successful inbound marketing strategy is to create a buyer persona. With a buyer persona, we can point out the behavior, lifestyle, needs, and demographics of customers. In this process, you will be able to create engaging content as per the targeted audiences.
For a buyer persona, you need some data like data of your previous customers or leads, some website matrics like web or mobile traffic, landing page traffic, conversion rates, etc. If you don’t have this data, it’s okay. Ask your customers to fill out online surveys or answer the questions by using a phone so that you can collect some information about your customer behavior. You can use several tools for creating online surveys like Google Form, and Type Form.
Also Read: What is an Email Autoresponder? How to setup it for Your Business?
2- Customers Division:
Next Step, Subdivide customers as per the trends, behavioral data, or Patterns. Split-up customers as per their demographics information such as age, gender, and location.
All big eCommerce companies float email marketing campaigns based on their customer’s stage in the sales funnel. Each division of customers has different needs and characteristics. To get them through your sales pipeline, build resources that showcase your products as the solution to their problems.
3- Launch helpful Email Campaigns:
For a successful inbound marketing campaign, you need to have a growing email list. As per the report shared by Oberlo, every $1 spent on email marketing can give you an average return worth $42. More than 81% of small and medium-sized businesses depend on email as their primary tool for customer acquisition.
The above numbers can easily excite you to send a bulk of emails to your contacts, but make sure they’re relevant to subscribers first. Always remember, when we talk about email, quality beats quantity.
4- Launch Social Media Campaigns to engage your audience:
There are 3.5 Billion active social media users worldwide. In social media, most people discover the brand and follow businesses that line up with their interests and values. This makes social media is an ideal channel to attract new customers for the long term.
While posting product photos, customers’ videos on social media always focus on brand values and purpose.
Also Read: Standing out on Social Media with Animated Videos.
5- Mobile Optimisation:
There are 5.25 billion mobile active users worldwide. As per the broadband search report, 55.9% of traffic is from desktop users & the remaining 41.9% is from mobile users.
Google is also removing non-mobile-friendly sites from mobile search SERPs. It means it’s important to optimize your website and mobile content before planing any inbound marketing strategy. I highly recommend Google Pagespeed Insights to check your site page loading times.