This methodology is first described in the book “ Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs ” written by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the two founders of HubSpot .
Inbound Marketing represents a paradigm shift in promoting your business and allows you to fully exploit the opportunities offered by digital technologies, both to find new customers and to retain current customers . It is about creating real value , starting with your website, which must not talk (only) about you and your products, but contribute to solving problems and answering questions of your potential and current customers.
Explore Inbound Marketing through the following key points:
What is inbound marketing?
How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy
Buyer persona
Lead Generation
SEO & Social Media
Marketing automation: email marketing and lead scoring
Measuring the effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategy
Data Driven Optimization
Fundamental tools and instruments
Why rely on an inbound marketing agency
Inbound Marketing Examples
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on attracting customers through the creation of quality content, rather than interrupting them with intrusive advertising.
On the comparison between inbound marketing and outbound marketing, read also ” Inbound and outbound marketing: which one to use? ”
The concept is based on the idea that if we provide customers with quality content that addresses their needs and questions, they will be more likely to engage with us and purchase our products or services. In other words, instead of interrupting customers with advertising messages, inbound marketing attracts them through quality content.
Also read our article on the basics of inbound marketing methodology and what it means .
Inbound Marketing Scheme
How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy
To create an effective inbound marketing strategy , it is important to start by creating a detailed plan. The plan should include short- and long-term goals, buyer personas, content planning and lead generation, promotion channels, and tools to execute tactics and strategies.
The Buyer Persona (BP)
The Buyer Persona is the key element of your Inbound Marketing activity. Whether you operate in B2C or B2B, today companies try to establish a ” Human to Human ” relationship with the customer (H2H Marketing), guiding him and helping him in solving his problems.
The precise and detailed profiling of your BP serves this purpose: it allows you to understand the problems and challenges that your customer faces, and create the right content to solve them . You must provide “valuable” information, truly useful to your potential customers.
Not only that, even if you have a clear understanding of what your customers need, you need to know when and how to make your content available, in what format, how they would like to receive your help, and all of this needs to be as simple as possible.
Want to learn more? Read ” Buyer personas are our soulmates. How to find yours? ”
Inbound Lead Generation: Creating Quality Content to Attract Customers
Creating quality content is a key element of inbound marketing. Content should be informative, useful, and interesting to the target audience. Additionally, it is important to create content in different formats, such as blog posts, e-books, infographics, videos, etc.
All this will help generate leads .
The Lead is a visitor to your website who, “fascinated” by your content, decides to give you some of his personal data by filling out a form (or contact form) to download, for example, a PDF guide, a video tutorial, or to directly ask for contact. A lead must be managed with care.
Inbound Marketing is what you need to generate leads and manage them in the best way.
For your website visitor to become a lead , he must:
find useful, educational content that solves your problems
have a pleasant user experience (usability, ease, clarity, …)
have the opportunity for conversion (a damn “button” or CTA where you can click to “learn more”, to download a guide, an e-book, etc…)
The user must leave your website with the awareness of having received the information he wanted, and with the clear understanding that your company is the perfect partner to solve his problems, along the so-called Buyer’s Journey .
The lead generated in this way is much more cost-effective: according to a 2018 survey, 53% of marketers achieved a higher ROI with Inbound Marketing, versus 16% who use Outbound Marketing . The rest have not measured their ROI (18%) or do not use any of the marketing strategies (13%) (Source HubSpot).
Read also “ Lead generation: key elements and how it works ” to learn more.
Using SEO and social media to spread content
Once the content is created, it is important to use SEO techniques to increase the visibility of the content on search engines and promote the content through social media to reach a wider audience.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Doing SEO well can bring huge benefits to your business: being able to rank higher and more frequently on Google leads to new jobs and opportunities.
Start by defining the keywords you want to be found for. Focus on the things your potential customers might search for in search engines related to your business.
Create a long list of (short) keywords that explain what your business offers and the problems you can solve ; then branch out from these into “long-tail” keywords, which do the same things, but in a much more specific way. Try to be very specific so that you have a better chance of being positioned in search engines if someone searches for that term.
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Once you have created this list you need to create content based on those keywords
And then don’t forget about buy cell phone number database the Topic Cluster and the Pillar Page , the new big players in SEO: the Topic Cluster is a “cluster” of topics (i.e. web pages) with different content on a theme. The Pillar Page deals with the topic in detail, and is in turn connected to the “cluster” with related topics.
Find out much more about this topic on our pillar page “ SEO Strategy buy lead and Search Engine Optimization ”.
Social media
Today you can’t not be present on social media, where your potential customer most likely spends a good part of his time. Don’t you use Facebook or Instagram because you think they don’t work?
No matter, it is still worth being active on all of these channels, to reach the widest audience possible. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok have different audiences, and obviously you will get different results from each of them.
But how can social media marketing activities be reconciled with Inbound Marketing activities?
First of all, you should always create a dedicated post for each channel . Don’t write one post to use on all channels. One for Facebook, one for LinkedIn, and maybe a video on Twitter or a high-quality image on Instagram, always with the same topic.
Then don’t forget to monitor performance constantly, checking what works best and what doesn’t. Understanding why a tweet got the most clicks, or which Facebook post got the most likes is crucial.
Dig deep into your top social media posts: What time was it posted? How many users were engaged? Was it an image or video? What was the topic?
Understanding what works best, by analyzing the data, allows you to set up your next campaign with a greater probability of success. Using a “social media matrix”, helps you better see what is happening and plan your posts precisely across all channels.
Paid Social
If you use social media, you will have already seen that organic traffic is almost never directed to your Buyer Persona. You must precisely “target” a specific segment, profile or organization.
“Paid” social media allows you to do just that.
For example, if you work in B2B and have already identified the companies to which you want to send your offer, you can choose to target people who work in a specific company. These are very powerful profiling tools, it would be a shame not to take advantage of them.
Want to see an application example? Read ” Facebook advertising: how to quickly achieve a concrete goal ”
Using Marketing Automation to Build Customer Loyalty
The number of different activities that need to be managed in managing a company’s Inbound Marketing is remarkable.
It seems like a vague concept, but if we try to make a comparison with and without, your agents/salespeople will have no doubts: with marketing automation you close with the customer faster and better.
If you want to know more, read also “ Marketing automation: what it is and why it is essential ”.
Two fundamental inbound marketing strategies , linked to marketing automation, that you absolutely must keep in mind to improve lead management and customer loyalty are lead nurturing and lead scoring .
Email marketing: lead nurturing campaigns
Obviously, not all visitors to your website are ready to buy as soon as they arrive. You need incentives, processes to encourage users and “push” them down the Content Funnel (this one, the famous funnel).
lead_nurturingWhat happens to the user who comes to your website and fills out a form, or subscribes to your blog? Are they left alone, with the hope that one day they will come back and talk to you?
You have to ” feed ” your leads once they have shown interest, step by step, with useful and valuable content , to improve their opinion of your business. Through the techniques made available by Inbound Marketing, it is possible to monitor these users and try to “cultivate” them to make them become customers, creating “value” for them.
This is how Inbound Marketing differs from Outbound Marketing : helping what will become a customer right from the first approach, without forcing the sale, without sending spam emails, but by responding to specific requests, useful to those who will have to buy and those who will have to close the sale, with mutual satisfaction.
Also read “ How to Create an Effective Lead Nurturing Campaign ” to find out more.
Lead scoring (Score)
But if you already have a large number of leads coming in through your website.
Who to prioritize?
Lead Scoring is a technique used to give each lead a score based on their behavior and interaction with your activities.
For example, a user who regularly visits your website for several days, viewing your pricing page and clicking on your emails is much more “qualified” than a contact who last visited your site three months ago. It is essential to set up a “scoring” system, so that you can prioritize how, when and who to try to “hook”, in a specific order.
To learn more about lead scoring, also read “ What is lead scoring and why is it useful ?”
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
To evaluate the effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategy, it is important to use the right metrics . In this section, we will see how to use metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy and how to optimize your strategy based on the data collected.
If you are a marketing manager you must always keep under control the main Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of your digital activities:
Website Visits
Landing page views
Lead
This list is an example of some KPIs . You need to be able to quickly get this information and easily translate it into custom reports at least once a month. Try to dedicate time to this activity, because from here you can get the information to continuously improve your activities.
Make reports quick and easy to generate. Spend time understanding what data is relevant and how to generate it quickly. For example, if you use Google Analytics , learn how to configure it so that every time you log in (once a month or a week) you can instantly pull up the reports you need.
Optimize your strategy based on the data you collect
Once you have collected the data, it is important to use it to optimize your inbound marketing strategy. For example, if a particular page on your website has a high bounce rate, therefore a suboptimal conversion rate, you may need to make changes to the content or design of the page to improve the user experience.
Read also “ Conversion Rate Optimization: what it is and why it is important ”.
The fundamental tools
The tools you use for your Inbound Marketing are crucial. As your business grows, you need more tools.
Starting from the website and social media, you then need tools (software) for Marketing Automation and a CRM (customer relationship management software) to bring together the data, and that all these “tools” integrate well with each other . There is no point in running large campaigns if you are not able to know what the customer has seen and what he has downloaded from your site, or how he has interacted on Facebook.
Then there are emails, landing pages , forms, CTAs (Call To Action) and more. If all these Tools have different suppliers, it generates a great complexity of management (different logins, different dashboards, different invoices, …) that do not help those who have to manage everything.
