What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a business method centered on attracting buyers with content and experiences that are relevant and valuable to them. It focuses on making connections with your current and potential customers, solving problems that they already have and delighting them before, during and after making a purchase.

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

When it comes to understanding the difference between inbound and outbound marketing, the difference is in the name.

Outbound marketing focuses on gaining attention by pushing a business’s offering in front of a large number of people. It is also referred to as “push” or “interruption” marketing because it attempts to garner attention regardless of whether someone is interested in the service or not.

On the other hand, inbound marketing focuses on providing your target audience with useful resources that earn their attention. It is focused on drawing in qualified leads that are already interested in your products or services.

Essentially you can boil it down to this formula:

Outbound = Quantity > Quality
Inbound = Quality > Quantity

That’s why most businesses and marketers see higher ROIs from inbound vs outbound marketing; their efforts are aimed towards targeted leads rather than blasting disinterested audiences.

Examples of outbound marketing:

TV commercials
Radio ads
Print ads
Trade Shows
Cold calls
Email spamming
Direct mail
Press releases

Examples of inbound marketing:

Blogging
Content Marketing
Opt-in Email Marketing
SEO
Social Media Campaigns
Webinars
Video creation

Inbound Marketing Process

The inbound process consists of 3 main stages:

Attract
Engage
Delight

Attract

The first step in your inbound marketing strategy is figuring out how you’re going to attract potential buyers to your website.

There are several different ways you can draw people to your site. The best strategy is one that combines multiple methods that match your brand voice and creates a presence in the areas your target audience is spending time.

In order to come up with a successful strategy, you’ll need to research, experiment and analyze your efforts. Here are the top ways successful companies attract consumers to their domain:

Blogging

Creating an interesting, relevant and optimized blog generates tremendous SEO value, provides your audience with valuable information and can establish you as a leader in your industry.

Social Media

Having an active and engaging social media presence is a great way to meet your audience where they’re spending time. Many consumers turn to social media when they have a question or want to research a brand. It’s also a great way to build your audience and funnel them to your website.

SEO

Your SEO strategy should be tailored to your top buyer personas and contain primary and long-tail keywords, along with local, national and (if applicable) international methodologies.

Online Reputation Management

If a consumer performs a branded search (typing your brand’s name into Google) what do they see? ORM is the practice of taking control of the first page of search results for your brand. It also focuses on gathering positive reviews to make sure you curate a reliable reputation.

Website Optimisation

Your website needs to be engaging, easy to navigate and conversion-driven. Creating clear conversion paths is crucial to the success of your inbound marketing campaign.

Premium Content Offers

Content is the bread and butter of your inbound marketing strategy. If your content is good enough, people will trade their contact information for relevant, premium downloads. This is one way to grow your leads.

Engage

It’s important for you to engage with your audience at every step of their buyer’s journey. The aim of every interaction should be to establish a long-term relationship built on trust.

Engagement is not one person’s job. It should be happening in every department of your company. Marketing, sales and services all need to focus on how they handle each interaction with prospects, qualified leads and existing customers.

Your engagement techniques will depend on your industry, vary across departments and change as technology evolves. Here are the most effective ways to engage with consumers:

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most productive engagement techniques. By segmenting your audience you can create multiple campaigns and strategies based on pertinent data. Due to its low cost and high impact, a meticulous email marketing strategy is likely going to lead you to the highest ROI of any marketing technique.

Lead Nurturing

Inbound lead nurturing is all about providing relevant information to interested prospects designed to move them further down their buyer’s journey. Multi-channel engagement, multiple touches, well-timed follow-ups and personalized interactions will help create a positive experience, establish a trusting relationship and eventually lead them to become paying customers.

Live Chats

Live chats are a great way to provide visitors with personalized customer service whenever and wherever they want it. Consumers love live chats compared to phone calls and emails because they are instantaneous and comfortable. Customize the chat options on different pages to cater to each type of visitor, lead and existing client.

Forms

Forms are one of the best ways to gate your premium content and capture visitors’ information in order to build your contacts and email subscriber list.

Contests

Running contests can get your current customers involved in spreading your brand awareness, or push leads to become customers. Email newsletters and social media campaigns are great ways to run these contests for free.

Surveys

Surveys can be one of the most mutually beneficial marketing strategies. You make your customers feel like their patronage and personal opinions are valued, and at the same time, you gather valuable insight into your own business’s operations.

Delight

Delighting inbound strategies are all about taking care of your customers long after they’ve become paying customers. They make sure that your clients are feeling supported and satisfied with your product or service.

Educating your entire team on your product, industry and customer relations is the best way to guarantee that they will be able to help your customers with any questions or problems they might have.

Making sure that your clients are happy and successful is the best way to turn them into brand advocates and promoters – the holy grail of any inbound marketing campaign!

Engagement Campaigns

Engagement campaigns encourage followers, fans and potential leads to like, comment, share and ultimately help contribute to a brand’s narrative. They are typically run on social media accounts but can also be generated from a blog or email campaign.

Promotions

Rewarding loyal customers with exclusive promotions is not a new strategy. It’s a tried and true tactic to show your customers that you’re still thankful for their business.

Resource Centre

Creating easy to understand, comprehensive and user-friendly resource centers that help your customers understand and make the most out of your product/service is a great way to build loyalty. If your website can help them generate an ROI in just a few clicks, you’re doing it right.

Customer Support

User guides, chatbots, email campaigns, customer service and client success teams are just a few ways that you can provide long-term support for your valued customers.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

There is no single inbound strategy that works well enough on its own; you need to create a system that addresses every new visitor, qualified lead and existing customer.

Designing a successful inbound strategy will require you to research, implement, test, analyze and rework the combination of your marketing elements. The elements you choose to employ should be directly influenced by your industry landscape, target audience, past successes and failures and business intuition.

Every inbound strategy is unique to the company that builds it, however, there are a few things that are essential for every successful campaign. Here are 5 steps you need to take in order to create a successful inbound marketing strategy.

1. Create your buyer personas

As we’ve said, in order for your inbound strategy to be successful, you need to create content that attracts, engages and delights your customers. How can you do this if you don’t know who your customers are?

That’s why creating your buyer personas is the first step you need to take. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They have names and pertinent characteristics that help you define their needs and how your product or service can help solve their problems.

Once you have your buyer personas created, it’s much easier to tailor your content to each one specifically.

Click here to download a free guide + templates for creating your buyer personas.

2. Write your story

Why should your audience listen to you? What makes you interesting, trustworthy and a good place to invest their money?

Content marketing is all about storytelling, so you need to craft your brand story, personality and tone of voice carefully. Creating a brand identity guide/brand style guide is a great way to make sure that every element of your marketing strategies help build a cohesive brand essence.

3. Make a content calendar

Every inbound marketing campaign needs a content strategist at the helm to make sure that there is a variety of content being created specifically for every element of your strategy. This includes website and landing page copy, blogs, emails, social media posts, premium content and anything else you’ll be sharing. They’ll also be analyzing the successes and failures of every piece of content shared.

The only way to ensure a consistent content creation system is to make a content calendar and make sure that every task is assigned, completed, reviewed and put into action on time. This can be done in something as simple as a spreadsheet or a project management software such as Asana, Basecamp or Todoist.

4. Create a distribution system

You’ll also need to set up a system for distributing your content into the appropriate platforms. You’ll need an email marketing software and having a social media management software can be very useful as well.

If you’re not sure where you should be sharing your content, start by sharing it everywhere. Experiment with platforms, hashtags and promoted posts until you have enough data to determine where to focus your efforts.

5. Set up data tracking

As is the case with so many types of marketing, data is absolutely critical to the success of your inbound strategies. Gathering all of your data, sorting it into KPIs and determining what is working and what’s failing is the best way to improve and fine-tune your inbound recipe.

Why Inbound Marketing Works

Inbound marketing forms connections between brands and buyers. It’s a purely digital marketing strategy that aligns with and adjusts to the digital buyer journey that the majority of consumers now take when making a purchase.

Here are 5 reasons why inbound marketing is the best way to help your company achieve success:

1. You have to earn all of your attention

Inbound marketing doesn’t rely on growth-hacking, virality or interruption marketing. The only way to achieve success is by understanding your buyers and creating relevant content that solves problems, entertains your audience and provides real value to them.

This is not a recipe for overnight success. It’s a long-term investment that helps you form lasting relationships with your customers. And in order to do that, you need to be honest, diligent and relatable.

Because you’re working so hard to get to know your buyers, you’ll be rewarded with leads that are much more qualified than those you get from outbound marketing. Plus, your customers will be much more likely to become advocates for your brand when you provide them with great service and resources after their purchase.

2. Your buyers’ journeys are personalized

By creating buyer personas, tracking data and tailoring your campaigns to address specific types of consumers, you create a unique and personalized experience for every one of your customers.

These customized journeys will be the foundation of your relationship with your buyers. Since they already trust you to know and understand their needs, it will be easier to engage and delight them for long after they make their initial purchase.

3. The content you create is unique and relevant

Content marketing is at the core of any successful inbound marketing campaign. This means you need a content strategist and copywriter(s) to create a large portfolio of different types of content.

Instead of wasting time replicating other company’s blog posts, or sending out email blasts with nothing interesting and valuable for your subscribers inside, you’ll be creating branded content that builds a genuine connection between your brand and your buyers by informing, engaging and rewarding them.

4. Inbound aligns sales and marketing

Many businesses can find it challenging to align their marketing and sales department. This is usually due to the fact that the marketing department is (generally) focused on generating leads, while the sales department is focused on closing leads.

Inbound marketing helps align their efforts by uniting their efforts into one seamless, streamlined operation. Since you’ve created buyer personas and traced a lead’s journey, it makes it easy for the salesperson to understand them.

Salespeople will have more information they can use to research and connect with their leads. They’ll also have more content and resources that they can send to them during the sales process.

5. It sets you up for long-term success

As we said, inbound marketing is not a quick and easy win. It’s a long-term strategy that works on creating resources for your customers and employees that define your brand and solve problems.

Inbound marketing efforts reinforce every department of your company, from top to bottom, and provide data, insights and content that unifies the efforts of everyone on your team.

Measuring your Inbound Marketing Success

One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing – and specifically inbound marketing – is that your efforts can be measured through quantitative data. Every landing page, blog post and email delivers valuable insights that can be leveraged to increase the efficacy of your campaigns.

Determining pertinent metrics, setting up trackers and generating reports to help you sift through the immense amount of data is paramount to measuring your successes and failures. While there are plenty of pertinent metrics that you can gather from your website, blog, emails and social media channels, it’s important to identify the most important as well as who is responsible for increasing productivity in each section so that you don’t waste hours sifting through irrelevant information.

Here are 5 of the most important inbound marketing metrics that matter to the CEO or shareholders:

1. Web traffic

A successful inbound marketing campaign will show a month over month increase in web traffic. You should know the difference between organic, paid, direct, social and referral traffic. You can learn which types of traffic are bringing you the best leads and which channels aren’t even bringing anyone to your site.

Your marketing department will need to parse this information further in order to enhance their efforts and ensure that all of their efforts are producing results that affect your bottom line – that’s the job of strategists and SEOs.

2. Bounce rates

You can track bounce rates on your website, blog posts and emails. This is a hugely important metric for your writers and content creators. If your bounce rate is higher than the industry standard, that means that your content isn’t engaging. If no one thinks your content is valuable, you’re not going to get any inbound leads.

3. Social engagement metrics

Your social reach is defined by the number of people who can see your post – your followers. However, in order for your inbound strategy to be effective, your audience can’t just scroll past your posts, they need to engage with them.

Measuring the likes, comments, shares and clicks that each post gets will begin to reveal which types of posts are worthwhile and which you can scrap.

4. Conversion Rates

More site traffic makes a report look great, but the value of that traffic is relative to the number of visitors that are actually converted into leads. Every piece of content published should have a conversion rate attached to it that makes up your traffic to lead conversion rate.

Since you should be able to track every new customer’s complete journey, you’ll be able to determine your lead to customer conversion rate as well.

5. Lead Generation by channel

By measuring your traffic to lead and lead to customer conversions, you’ll be able to identify which channels are generating the most profitable traffic. This helps you determine which parts of your marketing strategy to focus on and which to leave behind.

Examples of Inbound Marketing

Alright, now that we’ve covered every aspect of inbound marketing, it’s time for us to share some of our favorite examples of inbound marketing methods. Some of them are resources we use regularly, some are titans of their industry, while others are just ones we enjoy personally.

But the one thing they have in common: they all have driven results and grown their business through inbound marketing.

Blogging – Copyblogger

Copyblogger has been around since 2006. They’ve assembled a team of top-notch writers and have developed an incredible collection of information, advice and strategies that is useful to all writers and marketers.

Their blogs are easy to read, informative and incredibly useful, which has made them one of the top blogging sites in the business.

SEO – Neil Patel

There are few entrepreneurs who have aligned their personal brand to a specific industry as well as Neil Patel. Neil Patel is synonymous with SEO. He’s the go to person for strategy, tools and industry updates. He is so ubiquitous that sometimes I just head straight to his blog instead of Google if I have an SEO question.

Social Media – Slim Jim

In 2018 Slim Jim had 5,000 followers. They noticed a parody account, @SlimJimsDoingThings had 15,000 followers. So Slim Jim hired Andy Hines, the operator of a their account as a content manager – or “chief doing things officer.”

Speaking the instagram language of memes, emojis, gifs and insults in real time – connecting with and engaging his audience, Andy has taken the account to new levels and reached international prestige as one of the top accounts to follow for Millenials and Gen Z. The #longboigang is now approaching 700k followers and growing at a rate of nearly 100k followers/month.

Email Marketing – HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the best email marketing softwares available (in addition to their many other valuable services). They are also one of the most advanced companies in terms of their own email marketing strategy. They are constantly A/B testing, segmenting their audience, setting up behavior triggers and looking for new ways to get you the information you need.

Video – Gary Vaynerchuck

Gary Vee is a Belarusian-American entrepreneur that has been at the forefront of digital marketing for so long that he is now a high-profile celebrity. His videos are often viral and he has nearly 3 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. His content is engaging and his fans are loyal. Now any business he dips his fingers into is nearly guaranteed to succeed.

Resource Centre – Moz

Moz is an SEO, inbound and marketing analytics SaaS company – but you probably already know that. They’ve been at the top of the digital marketing industry for a long time and were one of the first companies to understand the value of providing free knowledge databases for their audience.

Now their resource center and free courses are some of the highest ranking, most viewed and often downloaded resources on the internet.

What Is Inbound Marketing?