What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategy used to reach your audience by forming long-lasting and meaningful connections with them. This style of marketing strives to raise brand awareness, generate relationships with your audience, and create meaningful leads. As outlined by What is Inbound Marketing? by Marketo, inbound marketing can use many forms of pull marketing such as content marketing, blogs, events, social media, or search engine optimization.
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
The key difference between the two is that outbound prides itself on reaching out to customers, while inbound wants to increase visibility so that potential customers come to you. Outbound marketing can be referred to as “renting attention” - which helps to capture the idea that this form of marketing is using funds to try to capture someone’s attention. Inbound marketing can be a useful strategy because it can avoid people feeling like you are just trying to sell them a product, instead, you are focusing on showing them your brand and it can truly resonate with your customer base.
Attract, Engage, Delight: The Foundation of Inbound Marketing
HubSpot has highlighted an extremely useful tool to break down how to create a successful inbound marketing strategy. There is an emphasis on how your brand makes your customer feel. When the customer feels like the product has succeeded for them, this will trickle down to creating a long-lasting customer base and thereby builds a cycle of success within your business. Hubspot’s Flywheel outlined in What Is Inbound Marketing? explains how together they promote growth for your organization.
ATTRACT
You need to attract people who will resonate with your organization and all you have to offer. You can do this by creating content that represents your brand and communicating with your audience. Establishing yourself as a guide is crucial to building trust and proving your product will make a difference in your audience’s life. Putting out the right content and face of your organization ensures your brand and what you represent are on the right page. When you practice consistency, the people who are interested in the work you put out will truly take an interest in what you have to offer.
ENGAGE
You may be able to attract the right audience, now think about how you are keeping them engaged. This plays into the idea of remaining consistent. The content you put out needs to be addressing the concerns or problems your target audience is facing. This means when they ‘Google’ their problem, you should be a presence that can resolve said issues. Communicating your value is essential to meeting your audience’s needs and keeping them engaged with your brand.
DELIGHT
Impress them. You have established yourself as a guide, and are providing educational resources to them surrounding their problem, now prove you are their solution. You need to connect with your audience and ensure you are going to find the right product that pertains to that individual and convey how you can be the solution to their specific problem.
Imagine - Your Organization is a Skincare Brand
Perhaps you are a skincare brand, you may have been reached out to by a potential customer - they recognize that you have a range of products that strives to improve skin. Now, you need to communicate and talk to them about their specific needs. Maybe they want to solve their acne problems - point out the products that are designated to solve their problems to try to guarantee their success with your brand. Following the mentality that you want to be able to ensure each individual’s problems are being solved does not solely need to be done by having one-on-one conversations. Instead, maybe revamp your organization’s website to create categories based on the most common problems your target customers may face. You want each individual’s experience to feel special and unique to them.
In Conclusion: Strive to Create a Long-Lasting Customer Base
At the end of the day, inbound marketing is most successful when an organization is striving to show who they are and increase brand visibility. Using search engine optimization and creating content that a potential customer would be attracted to means the audience that finds you will resonate with your message. Understanding the strategies to strong inbound marketing can feel confusing or difficult to navigate, that’s why ISU Corp is here to support you!
Reach out to start your journey to creating a strong and long-lasting customer base.
