Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and offering tailored experiences. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves their immediate problems. The inbound methodology helps to grow your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you. Why? Because when your customers succeed, you succeed.
From Interruption to Attraction: The Inbound Marketing Shift
The inbound methodology can be applied in three ways:
- Attract. Drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
- Engage. Presenting valuable insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals, making them more likely to buy from you.
- Delight. Providing help and support to empower your customers to succeed with their purchases.
When customers find success and share that success with others, it attracts new prospects to your organization. This is how your business builds up momentum and creates a self-sustaining loop. These strategies will help you effectively market to your target audience the inbound way. Below, you’ll find specific strategies for each inbound method of attracting, engaging, and delighting consumers to keep the momentum moving forward and helping your business grow.
Attracting Strategies
Inbound marketing strategies that attract your target audience and buyer personas are tied to content creation and development. To reach your audience, start by creating and publishing valuable content—such as blog articles, content offers, and social media. Examples include guides on how to use your products, information about how your solution can solve their challenges, customer testimonials, and details about promotions or discounts.
To attract your audience members on a deeper level through inbound marketing, optimize all of this content with an SEO strategy. An SEO strategy will require you to target specific keywords and phrases related to your products or services, the challenges you solve for customers, and how you help target audience members. This will allow your content and information to organically appear on the search engine results page (SERP) for the people searching for this information — also known as your target audience or the right customers for your business.
Engaging Strategies
When using inbound strategies to engage your audience, ensure you’re communicating and dealing with leads and customers in a way that makes them want to build long-term relationships with you. When using these engagement strategies, inject information about the value your business will provide them. Specific engagement strategies may include how you handle and manage your inbound sales calls. Focus on how customer service representatives handle calls from interested people and prospects. Additionally, be sure you’re always solution selling rather than product selling. This will ensure all deals end in mutually beneficial agreements for customers and your business — meaning, you provide value for your right-fit customers.
Delighting Strategies
Delighting inbound strategies ensure customers are happy, satisfied, and supported long after purchasing. These strategies involve your team members becoming advisors and experts who assist customers at any point in time.
Incorporating intelligent, well-timed chatbots and surveys to assist, support, and request customer feedback is a great way to delight these people. Bots and surveys should be shared at specific times throughout the customer’s journey to ensure they make sense and offer value.
For example, chatbots may help current customers set up a new technique or tactic you’ve started offering that they’d like to take advantage of. Additionally, a satisfaction survey may be sent out six months after customers have purchased your product or service to get their feedback and review ideas for improvement.
Social media listening is another essential strategy when it comes to delighting customers. Social media followers may use one of your profiles to provide feedback, ask questions, or share their experience with your products or services. Respond to these interactions with information that helps, supports, and encourages followers — this shows you hear and care about them.
Lastly, the mark of an inbound strategy focused on delighting customers assists and supports customers in any situation, whether or not your business gets any value out of it. Remember, a delighted customer becomes a brand advocate and promoter, so handle all big and small interactions with care.
Content as the Cornerstone: Building Trust and Credibility
When you ask marketers how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say “outbound marketing.” However, many innovative and successful businesses are now embracing the art of inbound marketing. So, what’s the difference between inbound and outbound? This chapter will walk you through it along with the benefits and drawbacks of each strategy. is a traditional method of marketing seeking to push messages out to potential customers.
Outbound marketing includes trade shows, seminar series, and cold calling activities. It is costly, and the ROI is much lower than inbound marketing. From email blasts to outsourced telemarketing, we refer to these methods as “outbound marketing” because marketers push their messages out far and wide, hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.
Outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time for two reasons. First, your average human today is inundated with at least 2,000 outbound marketing interruptions per day and is actively trying to figure out more and more creative ways to block them out—including ad blocker browser extensions, caller ID, email spam filtering, and more. Second, the cost of learning something new or shopping online using search engines, blogs, and social media is now much lower than going to a seminar at the Marriott or flying to or attending trade shows across the country.
Inbound marketing is a strategy where you create content or social media tactics that spread brand awareness. This allows people to learn about you, go to your website for more information, show interest in your products/services, and potentially make a purchase. While some outbound strategies take lots of time and effort and may yield no leads, inbound strategies allow you to engage an audience of people you can more easily qualify as a prospect of lead.
Consider this analogy: traditional marketers looking to garner interest from new potential customers are like lions hunting in the jungle for elephants. The elephants used to be in the jungle in the ‘80s and ‘90s when they learned their trade, but they don’t seem to be there anymore. They have all migrated to the watering holes on the savannah – the internet in our case. So, rather than continuing to hunt in the jungle, set up shop at the watering hole or turn your website into its own watering hole.
More Than Leads: Nurturing Relationships for Long-Term Growth
Rather than doing outbound marketing to the masses of people trying to block you out, inbound marketing will help you be visible to people interested in your industry. You need to set your website up like a “hub” for your industry to do this. One that attracts visitors naturally through search engines, blogging, and social media. Most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing, and those ratios should flip if they want to build a self-sustaining marketing channel. To do so, follow the “Attract, Engage, Delight” model.
To attract your audience, develop a strong content strategy. You want to have content for every stage in the marketing funnel. Social media and ads will work great for consumers in the awareness stage to introduce users to your brand and product. Blogging will position you as a credible and trustworthy source within your industry and allow your target audience to find you. During this process, it’s also essential to develop an SEO strategy to ensure your website is optimized for search.
Once visitors turn into leads, you can nurture them through email marketing, conversational chatbots, and automated workflows.
In the “Delight” stage, your goal is to ensure your audience can easily connect with your sales and service teams and resolve their issues quickly. Inbound marketing is all about meeting your audience where they’re at. You’ll quickly find that your marketing efforts are performing better and helping your brand grow.
Measuring Success: Beyond Numbers, Tracking Impact
SMART is an acronym that stands for: Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Time-Bound
SMART is an effective method for clarifying your motivations, setting a clear direction for you and your team members, and ensuring you’re able to celebrate the wins when they come along. Here’s an example of SMART objectives in action:
- Specific: I want to increase the sales of my company.
- Measurable: I will track my progress to ensure that I’m on the right track.
- Attainable: My goal needs to be reasonable and achievable. If my company has only seen a 2% increase in revenue month-over-month, it’s unrealistic to expect a 25% increase.
- Relevant: The actions I will perform to achieve my goals must be relevant. For example, if I want to increase my sales, I should only focus on activities that will achieve the desired outcome.
- Time-Bound: I intend to increase my company’s sales within 12 months. I should set milestones to let me know that my goals are progressing as planned.
ASK YOURSELF:
- S SPECIFIC What do you want to achieve? Does it make sense to your internal audience?
- M MEASURABLE Ensure that your goals are measurable before you proceed with the plan.
- A ATTAINABLE Can this be implemented by your team, in the market environment with resources that you can obtain?
- R RELEVANT Make sure the plan directly relates to your business and its needs.
- T TIME-BOUND Set time objectives based on your needs and your ability to achieve them.
Buyer Personas and the Buyer’s Journey
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real-world data about your existing customers. Buyer personas are essential because they provide structure and context for your company, making it easier to map out content, allocate your team’s time and resources, and achieve alignment across your organization. At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience.
For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging according to what you know about those different personas. Learning about your ideal customer—their challenges, goals, pain points, demographics, and so on—helps you set a strategy aimed at attracting the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business. Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas or as many as 10 or 20. You can use them to inform everything from writing more effective copy to developing better products. Follow this link for a free buyer persona creation guide.
Think back to the last major purchase that you made—the research you did and the engagement and evaluations you have with companies before that purchase. Like you, your customers go through a similar process before purchasing a product or service—this process is called the buyer’s journey. Before making a purchase and becoming a customer, a person will go through the buyer’s journey as they make their way toward a purchase. The buyer’s journey is defined as the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. It’s called a journey because each one of your prospective customers will be at different points in their journey towards a purchase. Every potential buyer focuses on identifying their problem, understanding what options could alleviate their problem, or comparing their top choices when they’re ready to make a purchase.
By understanding your buyer’s journey, you can help give those prospects the information they need to make a purchase. Every interaction your persona has with your business should be tailored to where they are in their buyer’s journey. Using the buyer’s journey will help you attract, engage, and delight your prospects and customers by meeting them where they are and providing the needed guidance and value they’re seeking.
The buyer’s journey consists of the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. These are the three main stages every buyer goes through. These stages are connected to the inbound methodology. To attract, engage, and delight, you need to know where your potential customers are in their buying process. The buyer’s journey is an essential component of your inbound business. Let’s review what each stage means for you and your buyers.
Each stage focuses on different buyer behaviors and actions:
- The awareness stage is when your prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. They’re researching to more clearly understand, frame, and give a name to their problem.
- The consideration stage is when your prospect has clearly defined and named their problem or opportunity. They’re committed to researching and understanding all the available approaches or methods to solving their defined problem or opportunity.
- The decision stage is when your prospect has decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. This is where they might be compiling a long list of all available vendors and products in their given solution strategy.
The buyer’s journey is a powerful tool you can use to personalize your prospects’ experiences with your business. And the buyer’s journey isn’t something only one of your teams can use. It should be used across marketing, sales, and services teams.
Marketers can use the buyer’s journey to create different content at every stage—creating educational content that aligns with the current state of your buyer. Use the buyer’s journey to outline your content and make it relevant to your prospect. You’ll want to have content offers that answer their problems and needed solutions, as well as content about your product or service. The education you provide with your content can help your prospects solve their problems and continue to grow their business.
You can also use the buyer’s journey to segment and nurture your leads by sending them relevant content at specific points in their journey with you. This is an example of how marketers can use the buyer’s journey.
Let’s explore how your sales can use the buyer’s journey to engage with prospects. Salespeople can use the buyer’s journey to understand better how to sell to your prospects and guide them through the buyer’s journey. If you know someone in the awareness stage, you’ll have a different conversation with them than with someone in the decision stage and has already recognized possible solutions to their problem.
Service professionals can think of customers as having their type of buyer’s journey. When you’re looking to upsell, resell, or cross-sell, you don’t want to send your customer back through an entire buyer’s journey. Use this as a way to understand what your customer journey looks like. Your marketing, sales, and service teams need to be aligned on the different stages of your buyer’s journey. Because the buying journey your customers go through will be unique to your business, knowing the buyer’s journey for your personas will be vital to creating the best marketing, sales, and service experiences possible. The buyer’s journey is your model to help keep the buyer’s behavior, information needs, and problems central to anything your business does.
Start Your Inbound Journey: Embracing a Sustainable Approach
Inbound marketing isn't an overnight process, it's a long-term investment in building relationships and growing your brand organically. While Inbound Marketing requires a consistent effort, the rewards are substantial. By engaging qualified leads who are already interested in what you offer, you'll spend less time chasing irrelevant prospects and more time nurturing them into loyal customers who become brand advocates. This cultivates a referral base and community around your brand, fostering trust and loyalty that translates into growth that goes beyond short-term gains. Embrace the power of inbound marketing and watch your business blossom over time!
