What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a way to quieten the marketing noise for your consumers. There are tons of brands out there trying to capture the attention of buyers through ads, promotions, and all of that stuff.

If you want a way to provide value-based and consumer-centric services to your audience, think of inbound marketing.

Tenets of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is the practice of identifying your targets and creating a quiet tunnel (away from the noise of other brands) for them to follow in order to reach your brand. It leverages techniques such as content marketing, lead generation, content creation, audience segmentation, email marketing, SEO techniques, and analytics.

The basic tenets of the inbound marketing methodology are

1. Attract

2. Engage

3. Delight

Attract

To attract your target audience, create high-quality content that is interesting and informative. Content that is tailored to their needs performs best and acts as a hook, line, and reel. Due to the versatile nature of content, your audience can be categorized and targeted with personalized content. The main goal of this approach is to establish your brand as a trusted source of information.

Engage

The aim of this is to keep your prospects within a loop of your own design. Using link building strategies, create an interconnected web of useful information on your owned and paid media channels. The marker of success for this point is when your audience adopts your brand through their efforts in sharing and having conversations about your brand online.

Delight

Here you want to keep your customers happy and satisfied providing for whatever needs or challenges they face. Think of it as a covert way to set up digital signposts leading to your brand's home online. It’s so covert, it’s overt (thanks Sherlock).

You know you’ve succeeded when your customers are empowered to make the right choice of a solution to their problems — choosing your brand.

Inbound Marketing Strategy Template

A typical inbound marketing campaign for a content marketing agency would look something like this:

Awareness level strategies

• Engage in content marketing that caters to the needs of your prospects at the awareness stage; answer questions like what is the importance of content marketing? What are content marketing strategies (with templates)? Who is a content marketer? What is a marketing campaign? What is content democratization?

• Build topical relevance through blogging.

• Carry out case studies.

• Create free courses, ebooks, and templates on technical topics in the industry.

• Organize educative webinars hosted by experts from your brand.

• Analyze and segment your audience for retargeting campaigns.

• Generate leads using lead gen forms to gate your ebooks and templates.

• Regular social media posts to build a following and a community.

Consideration level

• Organize webinars co-hosted with industry experts and influencers.

• Engage in content marketing that caters to the needs of your prospects at the consideration stage; answer questions like why is content marketing important? How is a sales funnel used? Who is responsible for optimizing my content for search engines? A case study. 9 advantages of using a content marketing agency etc. Include CTAs in all your content.

• Conduct surveys using forms to find out pain points.

• Engage in email marketing to keep your leads in your syndicate.

• Post content on social media regularly, to keep your audience engaged.

Decision level

• Carry out retargeting campaigns. Include CTAs in your campaign content.

• Organize interactive webinars and Q & A sessions.

• Create content on topics like; best content marketing platform. How to choose the right content marketing agency. A case study on example-brand’s customer insight software. Include CTAs in all your content.

• Go live on social media to announce upcoming products or services. Play an interactive game or do a quiz session. Give the winners exclusive prices, such as access to your software for free.

Incentives of Inbound Marketing (Audience)

• Provides free and high-quality information.

• Gives specific content that aligns with consumers’ needs, interests, and values.

• Gives your audience a sense of familiarity with your brand.

Incentives of Inbound Marketing (Business)

• It allows you to properly analyze the behavior of your audience and adjust your marketing techniques accordingly.

• It’s an easy and affordable way to generate leads.

• Inbound marketing positions your brand as an industry leader and subject matter expert.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, the purpose of inbound marketing is to simultaneously satisfy a consumer’s needs at every stage of their journey (using content marketing), and drive conversions in a way that positions your brand as a subject matter expert. Inbound marketing strategies can be used by any brand no matter how small or unique your niche is.