Can Inbound Marketing Help My Business?

How can you reach your audience in a digital world where consumers are sick of being sold to? Attract, convert, and delight your customers by incorporating an Inbound Marketing strategy for your business. 

Inbound marketing is a method that attracts potential customers to your brand through engaging content, while emphasising providing value and building trust, instead of just selling. This methodology isn’t anything new, but unfortunately not used enough in marketing. 

The foundation of inbound marketing are three phases: attract – engage – delight, which means inbound is not only about attracting the customers, but supporting and empowering them even after they become your customer. Inbound follows the long-term growth rule: ”good-for-the-customer means good-for-the-business!”

Inbound marketing is different from other marketing strategies since it has a goal beyond just attracting new customers or making a sale. The inbound methodology is designed to create long-lasting relationships that grow together with your business. Therefore, inbound marketing ensures that you are growing optimally and applies to businesses of any size. Regardless of whether you are a big corporation or a start-up, here are some benefits inbound marketing can bring you.

Utilising social media, creating quality blog posts, infographics and PPC (pay per click), are just some of the tools you can use as part of your inbound strategy to spread the word and raise awareness of your business. 

With inbound marketing, you can educate your prospects and change the perception that people have about your business by offering them something they need, and nurturing this relationship. And no, we don’t just mean a special discount to your e-shop. Use engaging content to share valuable information with your customers, and through time, it will result in more leads and sales. 

Your audience won’t even notice that you are leading them through the buyer journey, and will subconsciously put your brand in front of many others as you continue to nurture your relationship with them.

Inbound is executed purely online, enabling marketers to reach diverse audiences whilst running a variety of different campaigns simultaneously. Aside from reaching new markets and audiences, inbound also allows you to specifically target people who are actively searching the internet for the products and services that you offer. One of the most effective examples is using PPC campaigns. 

PPC campaigns allow you to target users looking for keywords relevant to your business on search engines and social media channels. Although this seems like a simple strategy, it is proven to increase ROI (return on investment) and help deliver your content to your target audience.

Another way to reach new audiences is by targeting your content to relevant audiences using Facebook and Instagram ads. Check out this article for 5 things you should know when getting started with Facebook Ads Manager.

Naturally, when having a business, costs are an important factor that you always need to consider. For businesses of any size, inbound marketing is proven to be more cost-effective and generate more leads with less money than outbound marketing. Especially when it comes to start-ups or smaller companies, inbound marketing only requires a third of the price of traditional marketing costs to generate the same number of leads.

One of the most important factors of inbound marketing is building long term relationships with your customers. In today’s digital world, inbound encourages you to provide support and the best possible experience for your customers. Using this innovative approach in your marketing strategy will help you keep your customers happy and nurture your relationship with them. 

In the end, what matters is having satisfied customers who would refer your business to their friends and family and eventually become ambassadors of your brand. Lastly, with little effort, inbound allows you to retain clients while attracting new customers, which is the key to a cost-effective marketing strategy.

Sales and marketing have a common goal – to generate revenue. However, in traditional marketing strategies, these two teams would usually work independently towards the same goal. Here’s where inbound methodology brings the two together by mapping a clear path from marketing and sales to align their efforts. 

Inbound empowers collaboration of these teams through every aspect of the buyer journey – marketing provides valuable insights about a lead’s experience and interaction, while sales create the middle and bottom of the funnel offer to address customer concerns. Finally, inbound marketing techniques are more measurable as you can easily calculate how many leads you need for each customer you want to earn.

As an endnote, taking care of your prospects and staying with them through the entire buyer’s journey through the attract-engage-deliver method should be a priority. If you are present online you already have the basics to start creating your inbound marketing strategy.

Although inbound is more cost-effective than traditional outbound marketing, it takes time and a lot of effort to understand your customers and engage with them. It’ll surely be worth it when you ensure that you are providing a valuable experience from the beginning until the end of the process.

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