What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing method aimed at attracting visitors and potential customers, rather than pushing brands, products or services outwards to potential customers in order to attract potential customers or customers.

In terms of digital marketing, this means using a combination of marketing channels (most commonly content marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, and social media) to attract people’s attention through creative use.

The purpose of a successful inbound marketing campaign is to use “profit” and “own” media to expand coverage and improve quality traffic, engagement and conversion rates.

Inbound marketing software provider HubSpot coined the term “inbound marketing” as early as 2006. By using a variety of content at different stages of the buying cycle, the “inbound method” is “the best way to turn strangers into customers and business promoters.”

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

The name is a clue to the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Inbound marketing focuses on attracting potential customers, while outbound marketing is about selling the business outward. Inbound marketing is about attracting attention, while outbound marketing usually involves buying.

Inbound Marketing: Owned And Earned Media

Inbound marketing uses owned and acquired media to attract potential customers in creative ways.

Owned media is a channel that companies can control. For example, your website, blog, brand social media profile, product landing page and YouTube channel. You can choose what to publish, how to publish and when.

Winning the media is the coverage of your hard work. When offline, this includes traditional reports from newspapers and magazines. On the Internet, things like getting reports from news sites often through digital public relations, but also mentioned on social media, using campaign hashtags, conversations in online forums, and online comments.

You have less control over earning media, but this should be a reward for your work in inbound marketing activities.

Outbound Marketing: Paid Media

On the other hand, outbound marketing is easier to associate with paid media. This could be traditional offline advertising, PPC and display advertising or paid email. Paid media also includes social media advertising, such as Facebook ads or Twitter recommended posts.

Although usually associated with outbound marketing, it is worth noting that social media advertising is often an effective way to increase the effectiveness of inbound marketing campaigns. For example, advertising on Facebook allows you to promote your content and campaigns to your target audience, no matter how niche it is.

Benefits Of Inbound Marketing

Reach the right audience in the right place to generate quality traffic

By focusing your inbound marketing strategy on attracting the right audience in the right place, you can attract target customers and thus achieve your digital marketing goals. This is not about spending money to attract traffic from people who are unlikely to convert.

Increase trust

Inbound marketing is about providing potential customers with the information they are looking for in a potentially creative and attractive way, even if they don’t know it. This is not to seize every opportunity to bring unnecessary sales.

Use inbound marketing to showcase your brand as a useful and reliable resource, hoping that they will come to you when the time comes to buy.

Protect from over-reliance on one channel

By referring high-quality traffic from a variety of sources (organic search, social media referrals, other sites referrals to your excellent work), you can reduce your dependence on one channel, thereby reducing the associated risks.

Reduced expense

In addition to being very ineffective in this digital age, large-scale marketing is costly and risky. It is like putting all the eggs in one basket. Or shoot the (expensive) arrow in the dark and hope it will hit the target.

By spending more streamlined and more focused advertising expenditures on inbound marketing, your business can save money and achieve higher ROI over time.

Quality traffic and leads

Inbound marketing is more than just building brand awareness. This is to attract the right potential customers and traffic. With a more targeted and comprehensive approach, you can attract potential customers who are more likely to be interested in your solution.

Opportunity to learn and evolve

Interacting with customers on social media and listening to their conversations, questions and feedback can help you better understand how to improve products and services.

Inbound marketing strategy

There are many ways to perform inbound marketing. However, if you want to solve the problem, you need to develop a strategy.

Developing an inbound marketing strategy involves understanding what your customers want at some point in the journey so that you can create content that meets their needs and take them to new heights.

The four stages of an inbound marketing strategy are:

• Attract visitors to your content
• Convert visitors into leads
• Nurture leads into customers
• Delight customers

Considerations

Measuring the impact of inbound marketing in a way that proves understandable ROI has always been tricky. The key is to figure it out from the beginning.

It may be that you cannot track the number of potential customers directly generated by the campaign, but you can track the downloads of resources, the average length of time people watch the video, how many new social media followers you have gained, etc.

When planning your campaign, clearly state what you want to achieve and measure it honestly. In this way, everyone’s expectations are set and therefore more likely to be met.

A successful inbound marketing campaign will not happen overnight. They need time to plan, implement and improve. This can also take up a lot of labor-you may need content creators, designers, developers, outreach experts, social media marketers and event managers to put things into practice.

That is, if you put your time and energy into the right evergreen campaign, then you should have something that can continue to provide value for the foreseeable future.

Examples Of Inbound Marketing

• Content center, providing video guides, blogs, case studies, webinars, white papers and related product information

• User-generated content and social media marketing activities, such as photo contests or review collation

• Interactive online content created in collaboration with related companies to increase digital PR and promotion opportunities

• Create high-quality content for the target audience by blogging on the company blog

The Importance Of Analysis & Refinement

If you remember one thing about inbound marketing, it is important to track performance and improve your methods accordingly. This is also the place to test-find out which messaging, valuable content types, images, calls to action, etc. are most effective for your target audience and make sure you implement it permanently or in your next campaign.

See Also: Email marketing strategy and tips for successful campaigns