What is Inbound Marketing? A Beginner's Guide

Updated: April 27, 2024

Inbound marketing is a business methodology that helps your business grow by building lasting relationships with consumers. Customers are attracted by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. Long-term customer relationships are inspired by creating valuable content that aligns with the needs of your target audiences. The solutions that your target audiences are searching are provided in many different content types across all your different channels. SEO, content marketing, social media, video marketing and more are used to pull the  prospects to your brand.

Stages of Inbound Marketing:

Inbound marketing is divided into four stages including attract, engage, convert and delight.

Attract:

Attract is the first stage of inbound marketing which is all about finding and attracting your target audience.

You can attract more of the right customers with relevant content at the right time to generate leads and ultimately happy customers.

Right content strategy can be used to build your authority in search and rank for the topics which matter the most to your prospects.

Right social media strategy can be used to publish your blog post or video content across social networks.

Ads can be created to increase awareness of your brand with your target audience.

You can rank higher in Google search and be more visible in the social media feed of your desired audience to attract more customer to your website with right content, adding relevant keywords in your blog posts and using targeted hashtags in social media post.

Engage:

Long lasting relationships with customers can be created on the platform they prefer through email, bots, live chat or messaging apps.

Brand loyalty can be created by targeting specific audiences with your social content or ads.

Convert:

The goal of marketing is not only to find new users but to convert them.

Conversion optimization such as CTAs, lead forms & magnets  can be used to capture the information of customer visiting your site and all these customer information can be used in the CRM to personalize the website experience using personalize content and the entire buyer's journey using email and workflows.

You need to be reporting on and analyzing all these efforts to stay informed on what is working and where you need improvement.

Delight:

Delight is the last stage of the inbound marketing strategy in which you reward customers for buying from you.

Actions like sending a thank you message, personalized follow-up emails, offering discounts, and more can be included in this stage.

Email and marketing automation in conjunction offers can be used to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time, every time.

Testimonial & case studies content can be created that can be shared by your prospects with their friends and family by using a variety of content formats

You can also receive comments and gain insight into potential problems to fix early on if surveys and feedback forms are included at this stage.

Working of Inbound marketing:

Inbound marketing is entirely based on the requirements of your customers and what they are looking for at the moment. It is all about being there, and being ready, when they are looking for the things you offer. You just can not put your brand in front of customers. Reasons are created for the customer to come to you instead of advertising to the customer. The chances of buying from you increases when you engage them by providing insights and solutions that align with their goals.

High-quality content that your intended audience really engages with should be produced for brand awareness. Genuine interest in your brand can be created by answering to your customers questions and connecting with them at different stages of the buying cycle.

New leads and customers are then nurtured through the purchase pipeline by integrating inbound marketing with marketing automation which then delivers a steadily growing collection of qualified leads to engage further with personalized content.

You can delight your customer by providing help and support that empower them to find success with their purchase and a self-sustaining loop will be created when customers find success and share that success with others.

People will be more likely to buy from you once brand awareness and long-term trust are established.

Usually, Inbound marketing doesn't work as effectively as it could when it is used as the only marketing strategy. It works great when it is combined with an outbound strategy.

You need to create excellent content that will also be promoted through outbound tactics so that you will have a library of engaging and relevant content across all your platforms. So that, it can be found through searches by your customer and is also available for you to promote if you need to.

You can inspire customer engagement that leads to buyer journeys and recurring customer relationships through Inbound marketing.

Everyone who wants to build a long lasting and more engaged relationship with their customers should use inbound marketing.

Some Facts About Inbound Marketing:

Valuable content is one of the ways of attracting and retaining visits of your customer. The most common types of inbound marketing content are Blog Posts, E-books & White Papers, Infographics, Videos, Webinars, News Articles, Research, Social Media and Slideshare. Compelling content can come in many different shapes, sizes and styles even within these types.

Value can be provided first to convert customers as customers prefer those companies who provide value throughout their interactions rather than only during the buying process.

Growth in repeat visits and user engagement is possible by providing high-quality content consistently.

The success of inbound marketing depends on the platform you are using for your content, and the audience you are aiming it towards.

You can always use one topic to create different types of content across multiple platforms.

More personalized content with product demos, explainer videos or posting videos on social as it puts your face in front of prospects and customers.

Videos can be used all across your inbound marketing and sales to help create more qualified leads.

Blogs and articles can be used as content that focus on solving problems and offering information rather than just trying to sell.

Blogs that answer questions of your visitors will drive more traffic to your site and your business can be turned into a go-to resource for the prospects and customers.

A pillar page can also be a part of your content which forms the basis of a 'topic cluster strategy'. It covers every aspect of a particular topic and answer questions at a high level and open up the possibility of creating another article which expands on the answer on the pillar page.

You can have a main pillar page as an authoritative source of information with a series of topic cluster articles and all of these individual articles linking back to the main pillar page, and vice-versa.

Importance of Inbound marketing:

Although Inbound marketing can be used by small as well as big businesses, small businesses with small budgets can use this to their advantage by making a big impact with right content that answers questions and solves problems for their key customer groups and help established them as thought leader in their field.  Perception among your target audience can be built, day by day with more visits. It is the most customer centric way for people to find, learn and know about your brand.

It can be seamlessly integrated with marketing automation and can perfectly complement your existing outbound marketing strategy by allowing you to segment your audiences.

Users are more likely to buy from you when you present your company as an authoritative source in your industry. This is because most of the customers do online research before deciding what to buy.

The need for you to go out and request new users can be reduced and you do not have to spend a lot of time and money chasing potential buyers when they come to you organically.

Inbound Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business:

Inbound marketing strategy starts with everything you need to know about the people you want as your customers including who are they? what are they searching for and what you can offer them to retain and build a long lasting relationship with them.

The best inbound marketing strategy will be when you are helpful to your target audience by answering their questions

Audience Research

An in-depth knowledge of your market is required for you to create inbound marketing strategy.

You can learn more about who your audience is, by reviewing your Facebook Page Insights.

You can get to know your target market through a survey.

You need to understand the problems faced by your targeted customer to create compelling content that targets their deepest interests.

In-Depth interviews can be conducted to inform your Inbound Marketing efforts.

Great content can be created by understanding the customer journey and their needs.

Inbound Marketing Content For Attracting Customers

The most important part of creating the right content is understanding what your target customers want to learn.

Engaging inbound marketing content can be created by the help of writers, designers, and web developers as well as an SEO visibility tool that connects with your audience and keeps them coming back for more.

Time should be spent on writing an attractive headline that appeals to your most targeted customers.

Images, charts, and graphs can be included to make your content more appealing. It is likely to improve your inbound marketing efforts with more visual content.

Extensive research should be done to produce in-depth content instead of writing short posts as more page views, leads, and more social media shares can be generated with long-form content than short-form content.

Your articles should be a few thousand words long and supported by lots of data and analysis which is not only better for your SEO rankings, but also helpful for your customers.

Your readers will more likely share it with friends, recommend your site to others, and implement what you say if the quality of your content is better.

Storytelling should be used in your content. Articles should have a story to create an emotional connection with your audience.

Your results can be maximized from SEO with Keyword Optimization.

You need to find specific long-tail keywords that can be used for targeting your content as long-tail keywords have higher click-through rate than generic searches.

You should conduct free webinars to encourage customers to learn in real-time. Your leads can be increased in this way as visitors must enter their first name and email address to access the training.

You can increase the number of people that link back to you by promoting your content to other relevant influences. A relationship can be built with the influences you would like to promote your content. You can reach influences through targeted communication on social media and let them know will they be inspired to write.

The complex, multichannel campaigns required by inbound marketing can be managed by Marketing automation.

The demands of generating content and managing campaigns can be fulfilled by using a robust marketing automation platform.

Invaluable insights about how your audience is engaging with your content can be provided by data analytics powered by marketing automation, so that you can adapt your strategy in real time.

Marketing Automation for Inbound marketing:

Your inbound marketing strategy can be improved by Marketing automation.

You can automate your marketing and sales engagement to generate more leads, close more deals and accurately measure marketing success with Marketing automation.

The gap between real conversion and the engaged audience that is created by inbound marketing can be filled by Marketing automation as sales or prospects can not move along the buying journey by itself with inbound marketing.

Sales teams can respond quickly when a lead created through inbound marketing is ready to close on a sale as you can keep your sales team in the loop about all of your leads with marketing automation.

Use of Inbound marketing with Account-based marketing:

Better and more personalized experiences can be created for customers with both inbound marketing and account-based marketing (ABM).

Additional content and engagement opportunities can be provided for your target accounts with Inbound marketing efforts for your ABM strategy.

Inbound Marketing Versus Outbound Marketing:

Inbound and outbound marketing techniques differ in the way they approach the customer.

You need to proactively reach out to potential customers to gauge their interest in your products in case of Outbound marketing whereas the customer will be attracted to you by creating content that resonates with your desired audience in Inbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing focuses on sales campaigns and on converting new users whereas Inbound Marketing focuses on high-quality content and generates brand awareness for building long-term relationships.

Outbound Marketing requires money for sales campaigns where as Inbound Marketing saves money spent on marketing costs