Inbound Marketing: Understanding this New Methodology

Are you having difficulty attracting new customers and retaining their attention? Do you need a more efficient way to promote your company or business? Do you want to grow your brand online, but don’t know where or how to start? Inbound marketing may be the solution to your marketing lead generation problems.

Why Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is the methodology or technique that uses a customer-centric approach to attract, retain and persuade online customers into purchases through blogs, podcasts, videos, eBooks, newsletters, search engines, social media marketing or any other digital marketing resource. In January 2016, Forbes released an article, “Why Inbound Marketing is Essential in 2016”, that refers to inbound marketing as “an effective means of brand promotion… a relatively new tactic that’s almost exclusive to the Internet” because it targets a market that cannot be reached with traditional outbound marketing. Since the first public interaction with the internet in the early 1990’s, the internet has been growing exponentially with new, active users increasing daily by the thousands. Having the ability to tap into this market is critical to the survival in this new generation of marketing. The process to tapping into this market is called the inbound marketing methodology, where online content attracts customers to your brand and build customer rapport in order to gain a successful sale. Here are the stages of the inbound marketing methodology:

Attract

Attract is the basic foundation of inbound marketing. This interaction can be for the first time or a returning customer to the brand. Attraction is where a marketer entices the online visitor from an external path like a blog, e-mail campaign, search engine, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to their brand or company.

Convert

Convert is where the magic happens in inbound marketing; where marketers transform visitors into a lead and leads into customers. During this step, a digital marketer uses free or promotional offers like eBooks, newsletters, or web content to persuade the visitor to completing a landing page or online form to gain essential, specific information like an e-mail address from the visitor. Once the information is completed and logged, now the customer has been converted from a visitor into a lead.

Close

Closing a sale is vital to any marketing professional; therefore, this step is essential to inbound marketing. This is where the company or brand makes its revenue. Using the data from the conversion leads, marketers can create dynamic e-mail content that will be used to drive the lead into a customer. The interaction with the lead can be created in different ways. For example, a digital marketer can use segmented groups to create personalized or individualized content that will further entice the customer to completing a sale.

Delight

Now that you’ve completed a sale, the final stage is where the marketer analyzes the data, in order to, continue growing their marketing strategy, brand and revenue. This includes monitoring the data from social media, e-mail campaigns, and search engines to determine the success of the targeted marketing. Depending on this data, a marketer will be prompted to edit, improve, or continue with the current approaches to promote long-term growth and revenue. The advancement of the internet is nonstop; therefore, marketers will continuously seek out new ways to attract and retain customers. Inbound marketing is the simple solution that is the wave of the future because it has the ability for short term and long term success. Understanding the in and out of inbound marketing will give marketers an advantage in the digital world; which will lead into increased return on investment and customer retention.

Tags: Inbound Marketing • Marketing Automation