What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is all about pulling visitors in to your brand rather than pushing messages out. It’s a dynamic, buyer-centric approach to demand generation that's focused on the customer's needs, desires and buying journey. It’s not for the short-term since, like any brand, it takes time to build value and image.
This is not to say outbound marketing is a no-no. Outbound - or interruptive marketing - has a tactical role to play within an overall inbound strategy. It’s more readily associated with paid media like traditional offline advertising, PPC and display advertising or paid emails. It also encompasses social media advertising, like Facebook advertising or boosted Twitter posts.
Social media advertising is often an effective way to boost the performance of inbound marketing campaigns. Advertising on LinkedIn with sponsored content, for example, allows you to promote your content and campaign to your target audience, no matter how niche it might be.
Inbound identifies a targeted buyer persona's pain points and aims to provide a solution through compelling engagement. Its various steps account for the different stages of a buyer's journey. Through these steps, tailored content is served to targeted buyers in order to attract, convert, nurture and delight them during their buying lifecycle.
The inbound methodology places emphasis on an understanding of both context and content. Ideally, you should be focusing on creating content that's fully optimised for search and social media and that attracts your relevant prospects. Search has enabled customers to regain control of the buying process, making them less receptive to intrusive outbound tactics, like cold calling and bulk emailing.
Context refers to understanding which content is most engaging to prospects and what is most likely to pull them through your sales funnel – that context should be understood to personalise messages, emails and promotional activity.
What are the benefits of Inbound Marketing?
Inbound is focused on attracting the correct customers, nurturing them to a conversion and then delighting them.
Effective inbound marketing looks at holistic marketing and is focused on delivering tailored content to target buyer personas at the right time, equipping them to make informed, educated decisions without feeling pressured to make a purchase.
The Inbound Marketing Philosophy
Customers have become wiser to filtering out ‘advertising noise’ and now do a lot more research before making a purchase. 90% of B2B customers begin their journey with search.
Technology has also helped the modern buyer to seek out their solutions, and to research products and services they're interested in.
Inbound marketing exists to serve these buyers. The philosophy aims to reward their time and energy spent searching, with helpful and valuable information and to guide them into an action through the use of engaging content. The inbound marketing process aligns this content with buyer's interests to appeal to the right types of customers who are most likely to become customers. It also weeds out buyers who are not ready to purchase yet, and enriches them with further lead nurturing, until they are ready to convert.
The Inbound Marketing Methodology
The inbound methodology moves the buyer through, not a funnel, but a ‘flywheel’. Inbound marketing tactics and channels attract prospects and customers to your website. Then you continue to help, support and empower them at every step of the engagement: from first touch to well after they’ve become a customer. This positive relationship will, in turn, attract new visitors and accelerate the conversion to customers through referrals or earned marketing. The focus is always on how to help existing and potential customers. The flywheel consists of the following three stages: Attract, Engage and Delight, which helps your business grow:
The Inbound Marketing Strategy
The approach sees cold audiences attracted to your brand with useful, appealing content, aimed at building brand awareness. There are very specific means of attracting these prospects, and very specific tools to drawing them through the sales funnel:
1. Creating a Target Market and Buyer Personas
Tools to marketing to your buyers is just one aspect of inbound marketing and formulating just who those buyers are is one of the most integral steps to Inbound.
Inbound marketers refine their target market using demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics. A target market might include information on gender, income, age and location.
This information is then used to formulate buyer personas consisting of semi-fictional characters. These are used to streamline your marketing approach towards target customer segments, based on actual statistics and behaviours.
What are the Benefits of using Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas help you create a semi-fictional identity of your ideal customers. If an accurate description is set up, you should be able to determine exactly where to focus your time, encourage and guide product development and create better integration through different business functions. This information is necessary for the creation of engaging content. Setting up personas helps you understand your buyers better, aids you in anticipating certain behaviour and helps you create targeted content that draws in the people you want to be talking to.
How should you develop a Buyer Persona?
Creating a persona profile is just a matter of asking the right questions that lead to the most accurate description of your buyer persona. The more in-depth your questions, the more accurate a persona you can draw up.
Your questions should be directed at actual people made up of either customers, prospects, referrals or third-party networks who closely resemble your ideal customer. A good group size to interview is around 3 to 4 people per buyer profile.
If you are unable to conduct interviews, seek out alternative methods of reaching out to potential persona guides. These include interviewing your internal sales team and supplementing your results with online research. Reaching out through social media such as LinkedIn is also a valuable means of gaining persona insight.
2. Analytics
There's no point going ahead with planning and preparation without monitoring your success and failures. Analytics help to measure your growth and reveals where you can improve efforts and emphasise optimisation. Google Analytics is the most popular source for accurate reporting. Some CRMs, like HubSpot, allow you to include tracking codes on buttons and links so you can measure your entire marketing funnel from acquisition to close.
3. Targeted Content optimised for Search
Creating targeted content with intent and purpose is core to your inbound marketing success. It guides content, leading it straight to the right user, and provides them with a solution. A useful guide to search optimising your content is here
4. Inbound-ready Website
To get great inbound results, you need to ensure that your website is inbound-ready. Every page and every internal link should be designed to lead a visitor through to some conversion point. Whether it be through landing pages and forms, or email subscriptions, your website should entice each and every visitor to keep coming back for more. Follow the Growth-Driven Design principle to ensure that your website is inbound marketing ready.
Now that you've attracted the right personas with your targeted, performance-driven marketing, how do you go about moving them through the sales funnel and identifying a quality Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) from a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)? Our next blog on Inbound Marketing Tactics covers this.
If you’d like to re-appraise your marketing growth strategies and implement inbound or Account Based Marketing - do get in touch:
BRAND INSIGHT, POSITIONING AND PROPOSITION DEVELOPMENT Our experienced researchers conduct brand perception and insight surveys for clients. We also conduct brand sprint and proposition workshops to help build effective marketing strategies.
DEMAND GENERATION CAMPAIGNS & RESOURCING We work with companies to develop B2B prospect personas, inbound marketing strategies, brand propositions and campaigns. We also offer campaign management and HubSpot martech implementations.
INTEGRATED DIGITAL SERVICES We assist clients in a range of digital areas from UX design workshops and web design and development to conversion optimisation, SEO, PPC, B2B ecommerce and social sellling.