The 101 Guide on Inbound Marketing

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. 

The Power of Silent Videos on Social Media

How Do You Watch Content? 

You’re going through a late-night dive in through TikTok or Instagram Reels, so many of us don’t have the sound on. Without sound, you can ensure you are not waking up others in your house, or you are simply feeling lazy and don’t want to get up and find your headphones. Creating content that is consumable without sound will not only cater to a wider audience but ensures accessibility for many. 

Do You Need to Keep the Sound Off? 

Not at all! Keeping in mind the idea that your viewers may not necessarily have their sound on is essential to creating content that many people can access. Constantly relying on music or your voice to convey a message means you are not able to reach everyone in your audience that may be interested. 

3 Key Benefits to Creating Silent Videos 

1. Accessibility

2. Encourages You to Create Clear Content With a Strong Message 

3. Your Sounds Can Make an Impact 

Accessibility 

Using the idea of silent videos, we are trying to convey that you should not solely rely on speaking to be heard or understood. Not everyone is able to hear your content - we highly encourage you to introduce closed captioning on your videos. Within the video, you can use subtitles to capture the main points of your message, then you can use the description or caption section to ensure viewers who cannot necessarily hear you, are able to read or see what you are striving to communicate.

• CLOSED CAPTIONS 

• SUBTITLES 

• TEXT BOXES INTEGRATED WITH YOUR VISUALS 

Silent Content Encourages You to Create Clear Content With a Strong Message 

When you stop to take the time to think about how your message is going to be received by the masses, you are putting thought into how you are going to clearly and concisely deliver your message. The videos you are making will have substance and reason behind them - which elevates the level of quality of your work. This will make all the difference in the long run. Using sounds or relying on music/your voice, means you are able to snap out content that may not truly resonate with your audience. Instead, keeping in mind that different people may view or consume the content, focusing on ensuring your visuals are engaging and exciting, will be representative of the creativity and innovation you have. 

The Audio You DO Use Can Be Impactful

Making your video content accessible and ensuring there is reason behind the messages you share with your audience means the audio you do use will be impactful. Reframing the way you create while emphasizing visuals and using audio as a form of exaggeration or emphasis will allow you to diversify yourself among the crowd. We are often flooded with videos that heavily rely on sounds or audio, thereby taking a different approach means you’re being unique, thoughtful, and strategic. Using audio to emphasize a key point in a video can truly make the impact you are looking for. 

In Conclusion: Silent Content Can Elevate the Impact on Your Audience 

Combining the strong appeals to creating thoughtful content that focuses on dynamic visuals, while allowing audio to take a back seat has the opportunity to pull in an audience that better receive you and your messages. Not only is the accessibility aspect key to showing your audience members that they can feel comfortable having an interest in your organization, but it also allows you to rethink the way you communicate your messages.

ISU Corp understands navigating this new way of thinking may be difficult, but you do not have to be alone on this journey!

We are here to be a guide, contact us!

The Pros and Cons of Marketing Automation

What is Marketing Automation? 

Marketing automation is the process of using technology or software to complete marketing tasks. Marketing automation often looks like sending out email marketing to target customers, automating social media postings, or even organizing advertising campaigns. 

What Does Marketing Automation Aim To Do? 

Simplifying these tedious practices, like email marketing, not only does it promote efficiency for businesses, but it also means there can be a more personalized experience for target customers. Automating an email to include the user’s name with a sweet ‘Hey You, This Would Be Great For You’, can create quite an impact with your audience. This can be the difference between them deleting your email the moment it arrives in their inbox and taking the time to see if the products truly capture their attention.  

Identifying the Pros and Cons of Marketing Automation

In theory, marketing automation sets out to capture your audience’s attention and helps to build rapport. In action, many businesses rely on marketing automation as the ‘be-all, end-all’, and neglect to just use it as a tool on the path to creating a long-standing customer base. Sending personalized emails out are not enough, instead, your customer should be at the center of what you do. They should not be an afterthought or merely captured through a software process. 

The Pros: 

1.Seamless Interactions With Customers & Personalized Customer Experiences 

Customers get to be at the heart of what your marketing automation hopes to achieve. By automating email marketing processes, your company is able to build a personal connection in the eyes of your customers. They are receiving emails geared towards them and their interests - they are able to identify that your business fits their wants/needs while you are boosting their perceived image of your brand. This can extend far beyond adding a name into the intro of an email, this can be sending individualized content out to users based on their previous interest points, sending text messages about fresh, new deals, or generating ads in their timelines on Instagram. 

2. You Can Use the Automation to Understand The Needs of Your Leads

The wonders of marketing automation mean every clicked link, and targeting process is created with your target consumer in mind. You have the ability to gather data that can be refined and adjusted because you have implemented automation that allows you to understand the analytics behind what your customers like. Notice your customer base has a greater interest in one product over another? This is extremely useful information to not only maintain your current customer base, but this is strong information that can help to pull more leads in. 

3. Strong Long-Term Strategy 

Success in marketing automation is found when brands slow their rollout of content. Staggering launches, testing the waters, and constantly reflecting on the points of failure, improvement, or success are crucial for utilizing marketing automation to its fullest extent. Not only does this mean you can put time and thought into your marketing process and flow, but you also get to develop a stronger content strategy. The importance of data and feedback is at the right hand in creating content that is interesting, captivating, and energizing to your audience. 

The Cons: 

1.Relying Solely on Marketing Automation 

Marketing automation is meant to be an asset and a tool in the entire marketing process. Automation alone is not enough to build your customer base or capture the leads you need. It acts as a stepping stone to keep your audience engaging and further interested in what you have to offer. 

2. Missing a Significant Database of Leads 

This ties with not only relying on marketing automation, for automation practices to be successful, but businesses also need to have a large database of leads. Marketing automation focuses on keeping or further interesting your audience, but first, you need to have a set of leads to follow, reach out to, and capture. 

3. Full Effectiveness Needs to Have Various Channels 

To be truly effective, marketing automation should not simply just be personalized emails. Though this may be one of the most common marketing automation practices, there are other ways to appeal to your customer base. Having various channels like delivering ads to certain potential customers or sending out text messages at specific times are essential for using marketing automation extremely effectively. 

In Conclusion: Marketing Automation Can Elevate Your Business 

The capabilities offered by automating your marketing processes can shift the way your customers view your business, can generate stronger connections with your leads, and can be a method that works in collaboration with your other marketing practices to reach your target customer.

HubSpot dives into the 101 on Marketing Automation at HubSpot Marketing | What is Marketing Automation?. Starting the marketing automation journey without guidance can feel stressful, confusing, and complicated. ISU Corp is here to be a guide while you develop the right marketing methods for you.

Contact ISU Corp to get started now!