Inbound Marketing: Stages And Benefits
With the presence of the internet and digitization, entrepreneurs aim to take their businesses to heights and it’s no surprise that utilizing proper strategies can do wonders. However, we must admit that each sector needs to incorporate a few strategies based on user persona into their ongoing marketing techniques. One such effective strategy is inbound marketing; dig in to learn more about it.
What is Inbound Marketing?
In general, it is a type of advertising technique that attracts your target customers by utilizing various marketing campaigns, social media channels, video marketing, content marketing, SEO, and more. It’s usually seen that the marketers who work harder on providing high-quality content to their users may notice user engagement and also retain them.
So, we can say that the entire idea is to offer value first through various channels and then convert its customers.
To Get Retain And Engage Your Customers, You Must Follow The Below-listed Varieties:
- PPC
- Press releases
- Blogs
- Social Media
- Influencer outreach
- Web optimization
- Video content material
- Ebooks
- Pillar pages
- Custer Content
- E-newsletter
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Reviews
- Analysis reviews
Read about Google Digital Marketing Courses
The Stages:
The main question that arises for any business is how you can convert strangers into your potential customers. Understanding the components or stages can surely help you attract the right customers faster and easier.
Four Stages Include: Attract, convert, close, and delight.
Attract
The first stage is attracting. It is all about finding and attracting your target customer, or you can also say converting strangers to potential customers. The very first thing to do is make people aware of the company, services, or products you offer. It can happen only through valuable content that simply provides answers to the customer queries.
These generally include price, product reviews, and comparisons. Naturally, many companies are hesitant to publish this kind of information, but let’s be very clear that customers only believe in unbiased and true reviews.
Also, find answers to your questions like how will you attract customers to the new site? What are the different services you offer your users apart from those that your competitors offer? What kind of keywords are you using? Are you using appropriate hashtags? It can help you rank higher in the Google feed.
Things to Do:
- Blogging
- Social media posts
- Utilize keywords
- Optimize your webpages
2. Convert
The second stage is all about turning leads into customers. When we talk about marketing, we’re sure we can’t miss the term lead conversion that means after attracting the customer, there is a need to convert them into buyers.
You would need your visitors’ contact information: name, email address, contact number, or another way to contact them. Once you have all this information, congratulations, you now have an inbound lead! But, here’s a catch, why would anyone give their email address for the fun of it (we’ve all been spammed at some point, Am I right?).
So, you need to offer something to grab their personal information. For example, a free quote, freebie, 5% off on signup, or an invitation to a 20-minute consulting session or more.
Things You Can Use to Have An Official Inbound Lead:
- Sign-up forms
- Effective calls to action (CTAs)
- Newsletter signup Incentives
Learn the secrets of inbound markting with the Best Digital Marketing Course
3. Close
We must agree that in some cases converting a user is not a cakewalk as it’s quite difficult to set hopes that a user may give their personal information and join the community. However, it does not matter how many leads you have. It’s always how many leads are converted into paying customers.
So, the secret weapon to close your leads is CRM software. Marketing Automation software that sends automated emails that remind users of their abandoned carts can prompt a busy customer to return to your site and complete their purchase within a few minutes.
Things You Can Do:
- CRM
- Emails
- Workflows
4. Delight
The last stage is the delight phase, wherein you turn your customers into promoters and reward them for buying from you. Delight is the most ignored step, as seen in many cases where companies hardly look into it.
Referrals can be seen as the major growth support of any business so try including messages like thank you messages, emails, offers and discounts, personalized follow-up, offers on previous purchases, engage with them on social media, and more. Customers are your king, so make them special for choosing your company and its services.
It will be beneficial for the business if they choose to include surveys and feedback forms at this stage, as this can help you gain insight into various problems faced by customers and ways to fix them.
| Inbound Marketing | Outbound Marketing |
| Focus on high-quality content | Focus on sales campaigns |
| Focus on brand awareness for building long-term relationships | Focused on converting new users |
| Saves money spent on marketing costs | Requires money for sales campaigns |
| Time-efficient | Time – consuming |
| Uses owned media and earned media | Uses paid media |
Benefits:
The Results Speak for Themselves, And The Benefits Include:
- Generate qualified leads.
- It helps to reach the user at the right time.
- Offers potential users the right information which they need.
- Increases website traffic.
- Have your content that helps the company to portray itself as an expert in a particular domain and is simply profitable for the future.
- Have your contacts that may grow over some time.
- Have a huge community around the brand.
In today’s fast-moving world, the last thing you may ever want to do is stop the power of learning and innovating new ideas. Know the strategies and move ahead:
- Search Engine Optimization: SEO is one of the best strategies to optimize your website’s structure and content to rank organically on the search engine results page. When you have a website with SEO-optimized content, it allows web crawlers to identify and index your website’s content to reach users all across the globe.
- Content Marketing: Content marketing turns out to be another strategy that helps marketers create brand awareness through various marketing strategies. Creating a blog with useful and valuable content may help engage and convert your leads.
The type of content you provide to your website visitors should be unique, engaging, and interesting. It may come in multiple forms, like blog posts, how-to guides, quizzes, customer reviews, surveys, and more. Influencers are growing rapidly, and your content needs to stand out, be different, and should break the clutter.
Remember, don’t just write content; instead, put yourselves in the shoes of your customers and then write you may feel a huge difference in the type of content you are producing as it would have a purpose.
- Pay-Per-Click Marketing: Though PPC marketing is a paid tactic. The ad appears when users search for something of their choice online. With PPC, you are eligible to be at the top by paying for specific keywords to attract high-quality leads. Pay Per Click marketing is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness.
- Social Media Marketing: With increased social media platforms, businesses can generate new visibility by employing various strategies. It provides you an ongoing platform to connect with any person, business, or group in the world. So, by sharing onsite and offsite content, you provide your users with value, and they will continue to stick around your brand without compromising their shares.
Let’s dive deeper and know various tools to help your business grow and earn you profitable outcomes.
Facebook Groups: Never underestimate the power of social media, and yes, Facebook is one of them. One of the free tools that will help you connect a targeted community for generating prospect leads and may convert it into buyers at some point in time. It’s a free tool, so do not miss it.
Google Analytics: One such tool that can help you save all digital marketing efforts and startups with the best methodology to survive in the digital era. Again the usage is free so try not to miss it. Used to track website performance, create marketing campaigns as per the visitors.
Quora: Online forum that can help target your potential buyers. Users have lots of questions that they ask on quora, so why not use this platform to portray your services or brand name in front of them by answering their questions. So, create your brand account and get to work. It’s free.
SemRush: We must agree that this is one of the best tools as it can track keywords, helps analyze competitors’ websites, view viral posts, suggest keywords, track website traffic, organic search, and much more. Awesome tool for inbound marketers. It’s not free, and the plan starts from $99/mo
Hotjar: It is helpful for UX optimization. This tool is just too useful for optimizing your user experience (UX) and click-through rates. Fun to use for the inbound marketers.
HubSpot: Without any further thought, Hubspot is not just one tool; it has various automation tools combined into one user-friendly dashboard. It is your one-stop solution for all marketing efforts.
MailChimp: Mailchimp is one of the best marketing tools a marketer could have to prepare marketing campaigns. You can use it for free. And yes, more power to the chimps for carrying out your strategies. Mailchimp offers free and paid features.
Buffer: One such tool to manage social media efforts as social media is considered the backbone. It helps you improve the marketing plan and lets you schedule posts on all social media platforms as per active users’ desired time and location. In addition, the tool automates social media management, so you save time and money.
Let’s move further to know more tips and tactics that help improve your brand value and grow your business.
Do your homework – There is no doubt that doing your homework to reach a greater audience is the best tactic anyone could have. Remember, before implementing any specific strategy, it’s better to know what exactly you want to accomplish or set your goal instead.
Know your competitors well – It’s always a great idea to watch your competitors’ marketing strategy or know how they are reaching visitors to convert them into potential customers. With a little bit of effort, you can uncover your competitor’s marketing strategy and leverage them into yours with a bit of variation.
Identify your target customers – There is no point in planning any marketing campaign targeting the wrong customers. So, to reap fruitful results, it’s necessary to identify your target customers before you implement any marketing plan. We would suggest you create a buyer persona that should include as much detail as possible like personal info (age, sex), pain points(what is the problem), value your product will offer them, or how it will solve your customer’s problem, and more.
Build marketing funnel – It will help move customers through different sales process stages as a suspect, prospect, potential lead, opportunity, client. In the entire customer journey, not all the prospects will become buyers. Only a few of them will end up becoming leads, and then the process continues.
Content marketing – It’s always a great idea to reach your target audience through various types of content that may include audio content, video content, podcasts, case studies, infographics, blogs, memes, and more. Remember that your content strategy is the pillar of your marketing efforts, so get your creative minds on work and start developing a plan that will help your business grow. Build your website, create SEO-optimized content and start moving ahead.
Email marketing – It depends on the prospect. Don’t miss to follow up your lead, send special offers or free trials for the products to retain and engage your customer. Get your email communication so valuable that your buyer may want to read all you have for them with you.
Marketing automation – Never miss a chance to automate your marketing efforts once the inbound strategy is all up and running. Automate your emails as this is the most important bridge between you and your customer. If, in any case, you are unable to reply, then set an autoresponder series.
Ask for reviews – Last but not least, collect reviews from your customers. It is genuinely the most powerful way to build customer’s trust. Take detailed reviews from them in terms of videos as well, if possible. Gathering feedback can never be unwanted or undesired because potential buyers would search online for reviews before purchasing anything.
With the business growing its online presence, these strategies tend to improve daily to offer more brand value and success. Many marketers today may have experienced a traditional shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing, which is all because of changing customer behavior.
So, tighten up your seatbelts and start investing in creative yet engaging strategies.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is an inbound marketing strategy?
In simple language, it’s nothing but a process to help customers find your brand. The process may include content like blogs, forums, social media posts, infographics, videos, and a lot more. It helps build brand awareness and attract potential customers.
2. What is the purpose of inbound marketing?
It is a marketing tactic designed to draw visitors and potential customers in the hope of customers.
3. Does inbound marketing prove to be effective?
If we gather results from various studies, we may say that if properly implemented, inbound marketing is 10% more effective than outbound marketing to attract users and is cost-effective.
4. Can SEO be considered as inbound marketing?
Yes, as both rely on attracting customers through good SEO-optimized content. SEO completely focuses on improving web traffic from various search engines to help customers decide well.
5. Are there any tools for inbound marketing?
To name a few, let’s get started, i.e., buffer, Ahrefs, keyword planner, Mailchimp, SendGrid, Marketo, Jotforms, GatherContent, Buzzsumo, Hubspot, Hubspot CRM, and many more.
6. What is an inbound marketing agency?
It is an agency that offers you all the digital marketing support using specific methods to engage your prospects and convert them into customers quickly.
7. Does inbound marketing work well to attract users?
Yes, it works if you are implementing the right marketing strategies at the right time that would empower and attract customers.
Conclusion:
Now that you have gathered information about the strategies you have to follow for capturing the leads and increase your brand awareness, start implementing these techniques to grow your online business.
