Inbound marketing is the ideal strategy for generating qualitative leads and conversion to customers. But what exactly is inbound marketing, and what makes it so effective? We summarize it for you and explain what it means for your company / business.
1. What is inbound marketing and what does it mean for your business?
Inbound marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to maneuver your product (or a service, brand or yourself) conveniently on the purchase path of your future customer.
Inbound marketing creates new content on your website for this, which causes a large influx of the right type of visitors. You can then further convert those visitors into customers. Inbound Marketing does not use expensive advertisements, but content that your target audience does want to view and even share.
A successful inbound marketing strategy therefore stands or falls with the content it generates. That content must be engaging, relevant and authentic, otherwise your visitors will drop out.
Complicated? Not necessary! Take the test: type in a few questions on Google and count how often you find the answer in an article or an ebook from a company or consultant. Sometimes it is not even immediately clear that the website you land on has a commercial purpose. He is then part of a larger Inbound Marketing web.
Beyond attracting via content, Inbound Marketing has of course only one goal: sales. The marketing strategy puts your target audience at the center to convert it into a customer. That ultimate goal must come first in all your actions.
2. What makes Inbound Marketing so effective?
We no longer have to ignore it: everyone now knows that the traditional advertising model has been hit hard in recent years and is now hanging on the ropes. In the past, the success of a campaign depended on how often you repeated the message (frequency) to as large an audience as possible (reach). That kite is no longer valid today, no matter how big the budgets are. And strangely enough, they are still very high.
What has changed then? The worldwide web. The Internet has reversed power: in the past all power was with the seller, because of the Internet it is now with the consumer. He no longer waits for your advertisement, but takes the initiative to look up a product or service. Their search often starts on Google, where they look up information about your product and your direct competitors. They no longer get advice from sellers, but from other buyers in reviews. They decide for themselves when they buy your product. This is usually the purchase process today.
Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy of choice for responding to this new reality. She takes up the challenge that marketers grapple with: creating qualitative leads and turning contacts into customers.
Via inbound Marketing you forge a relationship with the public. You provide them with the information they are looking for and support them in their purchasing decision. You can’t do that with advertisements, but you can with content that attracts them to your website. This does not only apply to prospects. Even after you have managed to convert someone into a customer, you continue to feed the relationship with attractive content.
3. The success of inbound marketing
Inbound marketing has become the most important marketing strategy worldwide today. This is unmistakably clear from a recent Inbound marketing report among SMEs (0 to 200 employees). Larger companies with more than 200 employees are also increasingly using inbound marketing, although they will continue to combine this strategy with traditional marketing strategies for the time being.
4. The Four Steps of inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing works according to four goal-oriented steps: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight. Or in other words: first you ensure that your website is able to attract visitors, then you convert those visitors into leads and then into customers, and finally you make them ambassadors.
All these steps all rely on your most important tool: content! You create blogs, e-mails, events, demos… all of which you enrich with the right keywords to optimize them for search engines. Then you distribute that content via social media and of course your own website, possibly behind a call-to-action and a landing page.
We take a closer look at the 4 phases of inbound marketing:
STEP 1: Attract – Attract the right audience
Create engaging, relevant and authentic content tailored to the interests of the prospects you want to attract. Focus on visitors who are most likely to become leads, and then customers. Post that content on a blog on your website, optimize it for search engines, and actively promote it on all your social media channels and via email.
You use a content plan to create that content effectively. You set that up on the basis of your buyer personas and their buyer’s journey. Only when you have really understood the goals and challenges of your buyer personas can you create content that resonates with your target audience.
To find relevant topics, you use keyword research: what are your buyer’s personas looking for and how do you want to rank on them yourself. In addition to keyword research, you will often also find good topics in industry news, internet forums or just your own customer and sales department. After all, the latter know exactly which questions prospects and customers often ask.
STEP 2: Convert – Convert your visitors into leads
Congratulations, you have attracted visitors! Now you need to convert them into leads. You do that again with relevant content, such as ebooks, white papers, checklists and so on. They often persuade visitors to leave their data.
For this conversion process you use techniques such as call-to-actions and optimized landing pages. On the thank you page you can then once again offer them different content that sends them towards the next step in their buyer’s journey.
STEP 3: Close – From leads to real customers
Time to get back on track: barely 27% of all B2B leads are poor enough to make a purchase. They are wonderful leads in your database, but in reality they are not yet ready for a purchase decision.
Your mission is to successfully guide you through a purchase funnel. Your main ally at this stage is email. Send personalized emails to your leads, teaching them a little more about their area of interest every time. We call this lead nurturing. Each e-mail is not only a new link in your relationship of trust, but also allows you to further qualify your leads: which of your leads opens your e-mails the most, who clicks on what and which web pages behind are the most popular?
You send leads that are warm enough for a sales conversation to the CRM system of your sales team, with all the information you have collected about these leads. That valuable information will help them make their sales conversations more effective. Are your leads not ready for this yet? Then nurture them for a little longer with specific trajectories and goals.
STEP 4 Delight – Invest further in your customers
Attention, the stocking is not finished after you have managed to convert a lead into a customer, on the contrary. It pays to keep investing in the relationship afterwards. This is where Inbound marketing distinguishes itself from traditional marketing. The idea is that it will cost you a lot more to turn someone into a new customer than to keep an existing one. Inbound Marketing is therefore a long-term strategy.
If you continue to offer existing customers content and interactions that really benefit them, they will purchase additional services or products or recommend your company in their networks. This in turn leads to new visitors to your visitors, which can lead you through your four steps.
5. Everyone has their Inbound Marketing strategy and tools
More than once we have seen companies first purchase a marketing technology (marketing automation), after which they wonder how they will use that tool. Inbound Marketing recommends the opposite: first choose a strategy, then select the appropriate tool.
Those tools form a natural ecosystem tailored to your strategy: you can, for example, combine your website with various tools such as Unbounce (landing pages), HootSuite (social media) or MailChimp (e-mails).
6. Content is the fuel of your inbound engine
If you need to remember one sentence from this page, it’s this: no inbound marketing without content.
Content plays a crucial role in guiding your target audience to the next step of your inbound strategy. Every step relies on content over and over again. It attracts the desired type of visitors to your website, turns it into leads and ultimately converts them into customers and ambassadors.
But to achieve that, you need to create content that is relevant to your ideal customers. The best content is customer centric, relevant, permeates your brand personality and rewards your prospects.
To create that credible custom content, you must first define the Buyer Personas and the Buyer’s Journey. That is where your content plan comes forth: a route with deadlines, publication dates and guidelines for each channel (blogs, social media, videos and e-mails).
Each phase of your Buyer’s Journey requires unique content tailored to your prospect. By dividing this Journey into different phases, you can address each prospect based on his position in his journey. This way you can closely monitor it throughout your funnel and send it to your sales department at the right time. In this journey, a marketing automation proves its worth without any doubt.
7. Inbound Marketing: where to start?
Everyone seems to be busy with content and inbound marketing these days. But not everyone has a plan. However, if you want to do it right, you have to start there.
Effective Inbound Marketing is no more, but no less than a detailed step-by-step plan, with target audience, content, sales qualification and so on as essential elements.
Compiling this plan will undoubtedly take you a lot of time. But that investment will pay for itself in the long run. So don’t plunge headlong into inbound marketing. After all, it is a real long-term strategy. Only if you approach it as such, it will bear fruit.
Our Inbound Marketing projects deliver results within two to five months on average.
Do you want to discover immediately how you can use Inbound Marketing specifically for your company, or are you looking for a new website or strong content? Then contact us.
We are curious about your goals, your specific needs or the point where you might have got stuck today. Tell us all in a conversation. It won’t cost you more than your time. And just as with inbound marketing, it is guaranteed to yield a lot in the long run