What is Inbound Marketing?

If you are looking for new customers, inbound marketing is for you! Instead of spending thousands of dollars on expensive advertising, you can reach your potential customers with a simple tool: Internet content. Inbound marketing is not about finding buyers, like many marketing tactics. But to find them when you need them. It is a decidedly interesting investment, but above all practical.

This type of marketing is about being found at the right time by the right customers or those who need your product/service. You can attract them through your digital channels (website, social pages, etc.) and drive them to buy.

Here is its particularity: inbound marketing is not only about making customers known, it also leads them to become one of your promoters and to fall in love with your brand!

In this article I present to you the essentials of inbound marketing or inbound marketing. Read until the end.

let's go

🥀 History of inbound marketing

Le terme "inbound marketing” was coined in 2006 by HubSpot co-founder, Brian Halligan. But the basics of inbound marketing strategy existed long before HubSpot.

In 1999, Seth Godin wrote " Permission Marketing: Turn strangers into friends and friends into customers ". Godin encouraged marketers to respect consumers' choice and time.

It is a buyer who must initiate their journey, not the marketer or seller. This is the essence of inbound marketing, although Godin went further by using the term “ permission marketing ».

Godin defines permission marketing as "the privilege (not the right) to deliver early, personal, and relevant messages to the people who really want to receive them." Early on, he recognized that people don't like their inboxes cluttered with messages they never asked for.

When Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah founded HubSpot in 2006, the roots of inbound marketing were already established.

🥀 The basics of inbound marketing

It is possible to find people interested in your products or services, without needing to harass them or bombard them with advertisements. Simply create content for answer their questions, so they can come to you when needed!

In today's world, everyone owns a computer or a mobile phone, which is used on a daily basis to find a solution to any type of problem, so creating content to upload seems like a smart option, for intercept demand from potential buyers.

It is precisely this quality content that is the basis of inbound marketing. It is created for a well-defined audience and to answer specific questions. The goal is always to provide the consumer the product or the service he is looking for, in this case what you offer him.

But what does “quality content”? What exactly is it? This is a web page, which contains text and images related to a specific search key. It aims to provide a solution to a problem or an opinion on a given subject. That's sort of what we were doing on this website.

For example, if someone googles “ personal finances the search engine will provide it with a list of the most relevant web pages with the search key, to better respond to the user's search.

By creating quality web pages, built to answer specific questions, you will be much easier to find via a search engine by those who are already looking for your product/service.

🥀 Steps to setting up inbound marketing

The different steps to follow are:

1. Define the personality of your buyers

In inbound marketing, defining the personality of your buyers is an important step. It's a semi-fictional representation of ideal clients.

2. Create quality content

Content strategy is very important. It includes all content produced internally by the company, or externally, by an external agency or a freelancer. This could be on the website with white papers, blog posts or at the social media level with social media posts.

Quality content allows a company to be credible in its sector of activity. The purpose of content creation is to generate leads, thereby generating traffic and customer retention.

3. Website optimization

Finally, the key step of website optimization. This inbound marketing stage also aims to generate traffic, but also to keep prospects on our site for as long as possible.

This can be implemented using call to action, small buttons placed at strategic locations to push the call to action. For example, "click here"And"register".

🥀 Email marketing is the key to inbound marketing

After creating great content that has brought new visitors to your site, now is the critical time to start converting them into leads!

First you need to make someone who visits your site a prospect, or someone interested in your product and service, who agrees to give you a name and email address.

To get this other useful information for your marketing campaigns, it's usually always best to give users something before they ask for it: a discount, an e-book, downloadable content, etc.

Today, personal data (last name, first name, email, etc.) is seen with more importance, so everyone expects something in return before selling it.

After carefully considering what it takes “donner” to your visitors, you can insert a registration form in your newsletter to convert them into contacts, in this way you will be satisfied with both:

• The potential customer, because he will receive promotions and updates on the product and service that interests him, as well as a gift;
• You, because you will have obtained contacts to send targeted and specific communications, to transform the contact into a customer.

After getting leads that are really interested in your site, it's time to generate a conversion or a purchase. How to do it ? Undoubtedly, there are many ways to pressure someone into buying. But there is only one with the best balance between invested money and profit: email marketing.

🥀 Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

Inbound and outbound marketing are radically different, although they share the goal of increasing conversions and sales. It consists of creating quality and eye-catching content so that it is discovered more naturally. Outbound marketing is about communicating directly with people.

For example, To meet the definition of inbound marketing, offer must-read content like blogs, white papers, emails, social media, and SEO to grab the attention of potential customers.

The content is then distributed by “ word of mouth ", social media shares and advertisements that do not disrupt the overall user experience.

In traditional outbound marketing, marketers captured consumers' attention by " interrupting ". The brand places itself strongly in front of potential customers and hopes they are interested in purchasing.

Some examples of outbound marketing include television commercials, billboards, telemarketing, radio advertisements and direct mail.

Benefits of inbound marketing

There are mainly six benefits of outbound marketing

Reach the right audience in the right place to drive quality traffic

By focusing your inbound marketing work to reach the right audiences in the right places, you can attract your target customers to achieve your marketing goals. digital marketing.

It's instead of spending money to attract traffic from people who will probably never convert.

Increase confidence

Inbound marketing is all about giving potential customers the information they're looking for, even if they don't know it, in a creative and engaging way.

It's not about generating unwanted sales at every opportunity

Use inbound marketing as a way to present your brand as a helpful and trusted resource and hopefully pop up when a customer is close to converting.

Protect yourself from overreliance on a single channel with Inbound

By seeking quality traffic from a variety of sources (organic search, social media referrals, referrals from other websites talking about your amazing product or service), you reduce reliance on a single channel, and therefore the associated risk.

Incoming measurement

Measuring the impact of inbound marketing work in a way that demonstrates understandable ROI has always been tricky. The key is to be clear from the start.

You may not be able to track the number of leads generated as a direct result of your campaign, but you can track the number of downloads of your asset, the average time people watch your video, the number of followers on social networks. Social networks have visited you, how much you have earned, etc.

When planning your campaign, be clear about what you are trying to achieve and measure it appropriately and honestly. In this way, everyone's expectations are set and, therefore, are no longer likely to be met.

🥀 Inbound marketing as a long-term strategy

Successful inbound marketing campaigns don't happen overnight. They take time to plan, implement and refine. They can also be very laborious.

You may need content creators, designers, developers, outreach specialists, social media marketers, and a campaign manager to make this happen.

That said, if you put your time and effort into the right timeless campaign, you should have something that will continue to bring you value for the foreseeable future.

🥀 Conclusion

In short, inbound marketing represents a modern and full approach common sense to develop digital marketing strategy. By focusing on quality content that meets the needs of prospects, we manage to engage them over the long term until conversion, while improving our SEO.

Certainly, this approach requires continuous efforts to produce articles, ebooks, videos and other attractive content over time. But in the digital age, creating value for your audience is the best way to build loyalty.

Thanks to customer journey monitoring tools, inbound marketing also makes it possible to precisely identify the contact points generating conversions to optimize your transformation funnel. An approach directly correlated to business results!

There is no doubt that this strategy, based on attraction rather than advertising interruption, has a bright future. To good understanding !

🥀FAQs

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing refers to all marketing techniques focused on attracting qualified traffic to convert leads and then customers, instead of interrupting Internet users with intrusive advertising.

How is this different from traditional marketing?

Unlike marketing “outbound” based on advertising interruption (display, e-mailing, TV, radio, etc.), inbound seeks to attract prospects by publishing useful content that answers their questions and needs.

What are the main inbound marketing tools?

The 4 pillars of inbound are: natural referencing, social networks, content marketing and automation (lead nurturing). Some also add e-mailing and attractive CTAs on the site.

Is this an effective strategy for generating business?

Yes, because it makes it possible to reach already interested prospects and gradually guide them from awareness of the need to purchase, while improving visibility. The conversion rate is much better than one-shot operations.

Does this approach work for any type of website?

Inbound marketing can benefit most B2B and B2C sites. The main thing is to know your buyer personas well to create truly adapted content. A tailor-made strategy is key.

How do you know if your inbound strategy is effective?

Several KPIs are possible: incoming traffic, leads generated, network subscribers, bounce rate, conversions but also returns on investments. It is essential to clearly define and monitor your key indicators.