Inbound marketing is no longer just an idea but a necessity for the growth of your business. If you really want your business touch new heights and make some giant leaps then think of this relatively new approach in marketing which enables your brand loved by the potential customers.
Inbound Marketing is popular and widely viewed as an effective method of marketing and promoting a business among the customers by getting the brand found by them and making them stick with the products. This strategy using channels like blogs, search engines, and social media will help you increase the volume and of your leads by attracting more potential buyers.
According to HubSpot, ‘since 2006, inbound marketing has been the most effective way of doing business online. Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be’.
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Why You Need Inbound Marketing for Your Business?
Inbound Marketing is essential for your business for five major reasons.
Reason 1: Without inbound your business may fall behind
To replace the outdated outbound marketing strategies companies are using new methods which help them build awareness to the clients, develop relationship with them and thus, generate more leads. Instead of chasing the buyers companies and industries are now investing time and effort in making them come in search for them. So, if you are still behind some old strategies your business may fall behind.
Reason 2: Content is the king
In this era of information abundance, 70% of customers depend on the contents to know a company rather than depending on ads. So, without producing powerful contents your business may suffer.
Reason 3: Inbound will shape your brand
Inbound marketing will help you shape your brand and promote it effectively. Customers look for quality brands by doing research online to choose products and to let them know that your brand is what they are searching for you will need to create some quality contents which will engage with them on their terms and increase their interest in your brand.
Reason 4: It makes the relationship stronger
In today’s market buyers are more careful and aware than before as they want a more personalized and customized relationship with the business or company they are dealing with. Effective inbound marketing methods will help you create this relationship between your business and customers and maintain it well by providing them helpful information, useful tips, and attracting contents.
Reason 5: Now, Inbound will lead your business
Whether your business is small, midsized or big inbound marketing strategies will increase your website traffic, enhance the sales of products, will generate more leads, and strengthen the customer loyalty. You will not be able to do this with traditional outbound strategies. It is found that companies that blog regularly tend to generate 126% more leads than those that do not blog.
Inbound Marketing Process
As HubSpot explains, there are for steps in the process of inbound marketing; (a) attract, (b) convert, (c) close, and (d) delight.
Attract: With this step of inbound marketing we try to attract the right people to our business by producing an awesome website and creating quality and captivating contents which will answer all the questions customers have regarding our brand.
We can attract the right target people using blogs, social media, search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, and amazing web pages.
Convert: Once you attract the right visitors to your business website you will now convert these visitors into leads by collecting their contact info. This is the second step in the inbound marketing process. Awesome landing pages, effective call-to-action strategies, contact forms will help convert these visitors into leads.
Close: After you have attracted the visitors and converted these visitors into leads, now, in this third step of inbound, you have to transform these leads as customers or new businesses. You can do this by using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, emails, closed-loop reporting, and lead scoring.
Delight: Your job is not done yet. This forth and last step of inbound marketing process might turn as an effective way of taking your business to the future. After transforming these leads to customers you are not going to forget them. You will be in a constant touch with them by further publishing useful contents in forms of tips or something on your products and delight them as your future partners.
Types of Inbound Marketing
As per HubSpot, inbound marketing materials include tactical content formats such as e-books, white papers, Webcasts, blog posts, press releases, video tutorials, how-to guides, SEO and social media marketing.
Most successful inbound marketing methods incorporate the following segments.
Blogging: This is the most common and popular way of inbound. Effective blogging is powerful enough to drive traffic to your business and increase leads. As mentioned earlier in this article, companies that blog regularly generate 126% more leads than those that do not.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization is another most vital part of inbound marketing strategies. Your content, properly structured with SEO best practices, will come to the top search results of popular search engines and will be seen by the right visitors. This will bring in the right leads.
Social Media: Social media is another most popular and powerful tool to promote your brand through inbound marketing methods. Statistics show that around 70% of adult in online use social media sites to share the information. Watsapp, Facebook, Instegram, Twitter, Pinterest are some of the widely popular and commonly used social network sites you can use for the purpose.
Events: Through live events, exhibitions, and webinars, based on your products or topics related to your business, you will be able to take your inbound branding and marketing to the next level. Events must be result oriented and nicely arranged with specific and purposeful objectives.
To sum up, there is not time to be wasted if you are still to start planning an inbound marketing campaign for your business. Now, go and identify your target group, create a compelling and captivating story, choose a platform to deliver, and delight your customers.