Inbound Marketing - The Art of Creating Attraction

What is Inbound Marketing?

You're a marketer or a business owner, and you're trying to boost sales or increase your digital presence, or otherwise grow your business. Maybe you've heard the term inbound marketing or content marketing, but you're leery of buzzwords and don't want to waste your time on a fad. Maybe you've even tried some techniques that go along with the inbound approach, like running a blog or increasing your social media presence. 

It's no wonder businesses are turning to digital marketing initiatives to meet their bottom line. When it comes to your digital presence, simply being online isn't enough anymore. You have to find marketing strategies that match the online behavior of your ideal buyers.  

Most marketers understand that customers are turning to the Internet to find what they're looking for; a recent study conducted by Fleishman-Hillard found that 89% of consumers begin their buying journey with a search engine.

This leaves companies like yours with two burning questions: "How do we build brand awareness and get our website to the top of the results page? And how do we convert visitors to customers once they're on our site?" 

In 2006, HubSpot coined "inbound marketing," which refers to attracting prospective customers with targeted, relevant content.

Inbound Marketing Definition

Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that focuses on attracting potential customers or leads through the creation and distribution of valuable and relevant content, rather than interrupting them with unsolicited promotions or advertisements.

Customers don't want to be sold to; they want to be educated. They want businesses to add value for them even before they've taken the step of purchasing a product or ordering a service. A successful Inbound Marketing Strategy seeks to provide that value through blog posts or free consultations. Traditional outbound marketing techniques can still bring in business. Still, you've been hearing so much about inbound lately because outbound sales in isolation are no longer enough for most businesses. 

What are the advantages of going inbound, and how does it help businesses attract relevant visitors and convert them into leads?

Why Does Inbound Marketing Matter?

• Inbound marketing generates 3x more leads than outbound marketing; it is more customer-focused and provides value to potential customers before asking for anything in return. This leads to higher lead quality and a higher conversion rate.

• Inbound marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing; it is more efficient and effective than traditional outbound marketing methods. Inbound marketing also has a longer-lasting effect, as it helps to build relationships with potential customers and create a sense of loyalty.

• Inbound marketing leads have a 33% higher close rate than outbound marketing leads. Inbound marketing leads are more qualified and interested in what you have to offer. They have already taken the first step in the buying process by visiting your website or engaging with your content, which makes them more likely to convert into customers.

• Inbound marketing can increase website traffic by 97%. Inbound marketing strategies, such as search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and social media marketing, can help to improve your website's ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). This leads to more visitors to your website, which can increase your lead generation and sales.

• Inbound marketing can increase brand awareness by 70%. Consumers of content marketing and social media marketing followers provide the foundation for getting your brand in front of a wider audience. This builds brand awareness and credibility, which can lead to more leads and sales.

How Does Inbound Marketing Generate Results?

A long-term inbound marketing strategy will generate sustainable results. But developing an inbound marketing strategy won't happen overnight. Strategizing, creating, and setting realistic goals and expectations takes time and planning. Then you use the data you collect to fine-tune and recalibrate your content, hitting even more of your target audience with even less wasted spending. 

How Does the Inbound Marketing Methodology Drive Growth?

At this point, you may feel like you understand what inbound is and how inbound marketing (or content marketing) compares and contrasts with other methods of attracting leads. But there's still something that you can't quite put your finger on: how does inbound help you grow your business? 

With so many options to market to your existing and prospective customers, it's more difficult than ever to attract and hold people’s attention long enough to convert them into paying customers and increase your company’s growth potential. Once you have their eyeballs on your company website, how do you convey the information you need them to have to make the right choice and pick you over your competitors? 

Inbound marketing drives growth by creating an exceptional customer experience, improving brand reputation, and increasing customer loyalty.

One of the key elements of inbound marketing is creating a landing page, which serves as a central hub for all your inbound marketing efforts. A well-designed landing page includes a clear call-to-action (CTA), an invitation to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading content. The landing page should be easy to navigate and designed to meet the needs and expectations of the target audience.

Gated content, such as ebooks, whitepapers, and infographics, is a crucial component of inbound marketing. Offering valuable and relevant information in exchange for contact information, such as an email address, helps to convert prospects into leads. The content should be high quality, solve a problem, or answer a relevant question to the target audience. By providing helpful information, inbound marketers establish their brand as thought leaders and build trust with their prospects and customers.

By focusing on the needs of the customer, inbound marketing establishes a strong connection with the target audience, which ultimately leads to long-term growth.

The title of Simon Sinek’s book says, "Start with Why." This means you start your sales pitch by NOT selling anything. You start it by connecting with the people behind the business. Then work up to telling them how you can help them make their business everything you know it can be. And from there, you sell your services to achieve this growth.

How Do You Create Content for Inbound Marketing?

The content itself can take many forms. A company blog is a great way to share detailed stories or updates. The myriad social media platforms connect with people when they want to be entertained. So, posting funny videos or pictures that draw attention to a certain aspect of your business creatively is a fantastic way to draw people in.

Content marketing is fundamentally about educating customers; it's also an opportunity to be creative and craft an experience that will delight them personally, make them subscribe/follow you and your business, and, most importantly, make them customers for life. If you're really good, they may even tell their friends!

"Content marketing is fundamentally about educating customers; it’s also an opportunity to be creative and craft an experience that will delight..."

Regarding content marketing, we believe in the power of planning and strategy. If you're just starting, be sure, to begin with a plan in place. If you've been at this for a while, take this time to reassess your goals. What do you want to accomplish with your content, and how will you accomplish it? Getting started is key. And if you're looking for more tips on turning your team into expert bloggers, download our FREE blogging eBook by clicking below.

When planning your inbound marketing strategy and considering what content to generate, keep the following ideas in mind:

1. Educate Your Visitors

Think of content marketing as having a conversation with a potential customer. What do you want them to know about your company? What are the key pieces of information you want to be sure they have right off the bat?

According to a Demand Gen report, 47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a company representative. Make those pieces of content count by ensuring that your offerings contain relevant information. To become their trusted advisor for all things relating to your industry, you need to connect on this personal level.

2. Solve Your Customers' Problems

The next step in successful content marketing is to tell your customers how you, by way of your business, can solve the problems they identify in their businesses. How do you know what these problems are?

Ask.

Then, tell them how you can help. "Want to increase your company's revenue stream? Here are the four ways to get you the desired growth numbers." By engaging with your customers in the comments section of your blog or by replying to their tweets, you develop and maintain the kind of relationship people feel good about. Once you've identified a handful of these problems, create content outlining how to solve them.

3. Keep Multiple Channels in Mind

When building your content strategy, it's essential to leverage different types of content and consider what information you want your customers to get and at which point in their buyer's journey with your company. A necessary corollary is that you want to tailor your content to each platform you use. For example, if you have an article that covers "The five most important things to know about XYZ," you will want that on the company blog or in an email newsletter. On the other hand, if your creative department came up with some great new videos showcasing the newest widgets in your industry, think along the lines of Facebook or Twitter.

4. It's About Trust

The bottom line is that you want your customers to use your company because they trust you and your product or service. You can build that trust by using content marketing strategies and being open and honest about your company and how you can help solve its problems. This will keep your existing customers loyal and help bring in new customers who got excited about working with you because someone they already trust shared your content. Now, your company is growing and, in turn, helping you help them grow theirs. 

Why Is Inbound Marketing Important For Your Marketing Strategy?

1. Inbound brings leads to you

The modern inbound methodology is genuinely a product of the digital age. Combined with marketing automation and analytics modern marketing software includes, it's a uniquely 21st-century approach that opposes traditional marketing tactics for reaching customers, such as print ads, radio ads, billboards, and telemarketing. These are more of a shotgun approach that lacks focus and targeting.

Although these strategies are still used, more and more marketers are finding that inbound allows them to reach a much more targeted audience, allowing them to focus on the specific issues customers are facing. This will enable them to respond in particular ways they can help. This is establishing the right customer relationships from the very beginning.

By creating blog posts, for example, that offer people relevant, timely, and interesting quick takes on the state of your industry (for example), you position your website as a source of high-quality information that will keep potential customers coming back for more.

There are myriad social media platforms where you can link to these informative posts on your company website. This is another way to bring eyeballs to your company site while creating additional means by which your customers, existing and potential alike, can interact with you and your company.

These repeated visits will lead to more potential customers converting to paying customers when they see how your content fosters interactions. This will keep people on your site longer and encourage them to explore other pages to learn more about you and your company. And the extra engagement and interaction on social media give you added opportunities to explain how you can assist in solving their business problems.

The best part? All of these customers are being drawn to your site without you contacting them directly and without any direct sales pitches being needed!

How Does Inbound Marketing Compare to Outbound Marketing?

Whatever your specific situation, there are so many marketing strategies out there that it can be hard to sift through them all to find the one, or the combination of ones, that's right for your company. Well, help is on the way. In this section, we'll aim to define, then briefly compare and contrast, two strategies - one inbound and one outbound.

Those strategies are content marketing and Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Before we dive in for a more detailed view of these options and how they can interact for additional impact, let's start with a quick definition of terms:

Content marketing is "marketing that tries to attract customers by distributing informational content potentially useful to the target audience, rather than by advertising products and services in the traditional way."  An approach with a rapidly growing following, allowing you to develop a relationship with your customers as a trusted resource and partner.

Content marketing allows you to nurture this relationship with existing and new customers by creating informative content that brings them back to your website because they see it as a resource. This fosters interaction, which leads to conversions. You'll notice that this sounds like how we described inbound marketing above. There's a good reason: the two ideas are closely linked and can be used interchangeably regarding blogging and content creation. Still, you may have heard it contrasted with PPC in the past, so we'll spend this section talking about it in its terms. 

Pay-per-click, better known as PPC campaigns, is "a system used to set prices for online advertisements on a search engine or other website, by which the advertiser pays a small fee to the publisher each time a user clicks on the advertisement." 

You've undoubtedly seen PPC ads when you've used a search engine like Google (I'll be lumping all search engines under this universal term for brevity). At the top of a page of search results, you'll generally see a small number of paid ads. These are due to PPC: the advertised company pays Google each time visitors click their ad. PPC campaigns are increasingly showing up on social media platforms as well.

Now that you have the definitions, the question remains - which marketing method suits your company?

PPC - Click Generator

As briefly described above, PPC involves paid search, that is, paying a search engine such as Google to display your ad on their website. Each time someone clicks your ad, you are billed a small fee.

Much of the strategy in this method revolves around keyword use. The more specific keywords you use, the better targeted your ad will be, translating into the right people seeing your ad and clicking through to your website.

With PPC marketing, you can increase your visibility at the cost of time spent researching keywords and ad placement strategies, analyzing metrics, and adjusting your preferences with each search engine. This strategy can often become expensive fairly quickly. Additionally, many savvy internet users have browser plugins that block these ads from appearing, or they prefer organic search results, driven largely by our next marketing approach - content marketing.

Content Marketing - Marketing, Sustainably

Content marketing, on the other hand, works by attracting customers through timely, industry-specific content. With this strategy, it's all about adding a value proposition for your customer, in this case, helpful content, to keep them returning for more. You want them to view you and your business as a trusted, reliable resource. There are a variety of content channels available: blogs, vlogs, ebooks, videos, and email newsletters, for starters. Each plays a role in helping you create engaging content and feed the interactions that transform a first-time visitor to your website into a loyal, repeat customer.

Creating the content for this strategy will take time and resources. It will also:

• help you grow your readership/followers,

• inspire trust in your customers (new and existing alike),

• and lead to them putting you in that coveted position as a trusted advisor

Regularly creating fresh, inspiring content will also benefit your website's SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This, in turn, improves your ranking in the organic search results on Google. According to MarTech, 70-80% of search engine users only focus on organic results. With better SEO, more searchers are bound to find you.

Decision Time - PPC? Or Content Marketing?

Now that you have a handle on these two competing yet complementary marketing options, the question remains - which marketing method is suitable for your company?

The truth is that both are viable marketing techniques, and they can work well together. The rest of the truth is that no amount of money spent driving clicks to your website is worth much if you don't have quality content for visitors to see once they get there.

Therefore, the best bang for your buck is building that trust. Engage your customers and build that sense of trust within your industry. How? By creating high-quality, engaging, topical, and even inspiring content.

The best bang for your buck is to start building that trust.

It's true that creating meaningful and engaging content that will attract customers does take time and expertise. That said, the potential for sustainable growth is immeasurable. The Marketing Institute says, "Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less." So, content marketing brings in more customers, cheaper than traditional outbound marketing.

As a bonus, your customers will see you as a trusted source of helpful information rather than a persistent annoyance who never lets up with the sales pitches.

Then maybe as your company begins to see the associated growth of clients who love you and tell all their friends about you, it will be time to consider using PPC to drive even more customer eyeballs to that storehouse of knowledge you've created.

According to industry leader HubSpot,

Paid ad campaigns present an effective marketing channel when used strategically and in sync with other initiatives

PPC has the potential to drive new eyeballs to your website. These eyes won't stay around long enough to convert without a high-quality, informative, trust-inspiring content marketing strategy.

As with any strategy, intent and focused attention are paramount. By creating a solid content base for customers to read, watch, and interact with - you'll create and keep customers for life.