Inbound marketing has its own unique ability to connect you with potential clients who are genuinely interested in your brand.
Apart from brand awareness, inbound marketing plays an important role in your ability to retain customers and increase brand loyalty.
This marketing method gives consumers the exact answers they are looking for at the same touchpoints they searched for. If you want to know more about how to implement inbound marketing works and its best practices, just keep on scrolling!
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a business strategy of attracting potential customers by creating customized content for them. This type of marketing method utilizes content marketing, blogs, events, and search engine optimization (SEO).
The work that revolves around inbound marketing does not end with the acquisition of a customer. Its marketing tactics further seek to use informative content so that existing customers will want to share it with their peers, via social media, or other channels.
In this scenario, your customers themselves will be advocates of your brand if they find your content entertaining and tailored to their specific wants and needs.
What’s the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?
We’re pretty sure you’ve already heard of inbound and outbound marketing. To give you an idea of how these two marketing strategies differ, we’ve defined both of the terms for you:
Inbound marketing defined
Inbound marketing, such as social media ad posting and SEO articles, seeks to reach and attract new clients by providing them with relatable content.
Inbound marketing generates content to encourage customers themselves to reach out to the brand instead of directly selling them products and services.
Businesses that use inbound marketing nurtures the future customer through each phase of their buying journey by utilizing promotional techniques.
One marketing survey from HubSpot found that 33% of respondents confirmed that brand awareness is one of the main goals for paid display advertising techniques.
Outbound marketing defined
Traditional outbound marketing, on the other hand, directly advertises a product or service to their potential clients.
In this approach, sales representatives typically reach out to clients to determine if they are interested with their offerings. This marketing strategy seeks customers’ interests and proactively offers options for them.
While outbound marketing seeks out customers, inbound marketing focuses on getting more reach to acquire more customers.
Best practices in implementing inbound marketing
Companies that employ inbound marketing efforts focus on new approaches that are geared toward building brand awareness and establishing stronger relationships with their clients.
To give you a head start, here are some of the best practices you can do in implementing inbound marketing strategies for your business:
Identify your buyer personas
First things first, define your business goals and identify your buyer personas. Identifying your target audience will prepare you for planning your marketing techniques.
You’ll find out what content is more informative and relevant for them, their service or product preference that would all help in mapping your content management system.
Map your content management system
It’s important to answer questions that your customers are likely to have at each stage of their buying journey. To do this properly, you have to map your content management system.
Upon creating a content management system, you have to provide transformational content that will attract and retain customers throughout their entire buying journey.
Since you’ll have several customers that have different preferences, it’s a must to put a greater emphasis on personalization and relevance.
Choose your delivery platforms
After mapping out your content strategy, the next thing to do is to choose your delivery platforms.
After creating relevant and most-searched content, you have to determine where to post them. You have to identify the best way to reach them, it can be on any social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, your own website, or through search ads.
If you know where your target audiences are located, it will be easier for you to communicate with them and have your materials get noticed and shared.
Analyze data and results
One of the most important practices in implementing inbound marketing is to analyze your data-driven results to optimize your inbound marketing program.
Whether it’s SEO rankings, the number of social media reach, these data will provide valuable insight into the performance of your marketing campaigns.
With a comprehensive amount of data, you’ll be able to tell how effective your inbound marketing efforts have been and what areas call for improvement.
Optimizing your inbound marketing campaign
These best practices make your brand attractive to customers because it doesn’t feel like you’re pressuring them into buying your products and services. You are simply posting relatable content where it can be caught by their interest.
Generally, all campaigns that marketing teams publish should be informative and relevant for them to be welcomed by their target consumers.
When consumers find your business through your marketing efforts, you’ll have a stronger influence on their future buying decisions. If your strategies were done properly, your inbound marketing strategies can draw you great results.
