What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is creating one-to-one relationships that have a lasting impact on your audience and your brand. You attract prospects and customers by creating valuable content that helps solve their problems. You engage with them by communicating in a way that builds long-term relationships. And you delight by ensuring customers are happy and supported by becoming advisors and experts. This attract, engage, delight, and repeat methodology forms the basis of inbound marketing.
It all starts with your buyer personas – semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers to help you understand their needs and challenges and focus on producing content that is tailored to them and their stage in the buyer journey.
Once your buyer personas have been identified, a content audit is performed to identify any gaps and map content offers to the buyer’s journey.
You don’t want just anyone visiting your website – you need to attract those that are most likely to be become leads and customers by attracting qualified visitors. Attracting prospects involves content, SEO, blogging, social media, online ads and creating pillar pages and topic clusters, which all contribute to you becoming a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage with.
Now that your website has visitors, you need to engage them by presenting insights and solutions to their challenges to convert them into leads and ultimately nurture to become a customer. Engaging includes email marketing, conversational bots or live chat, call-to-actions (CTAs), landing pages for content offers, forms, lead flows and marketing automation.
Once you’ve gained a new customer, you want to delight them by providing help and support long after they make a purchase. Happy customers will fuel future growth through referrals, testimonials and repeat business. Delight tools comprise of smart content, email marketing, conversations inbox, marketing automation and social listening.
