Inbound Marketing Activities: why it helps your Business

In this article we look at why inbound marketing activities can greatly grow your Company’s Business opportunities.

It is based on a very simple concept: give every potential customer valuable content that is in line with his or her expectations and position in the path to purchase.

If we want to be romantic, it is a kind of courtship of users.

Inbound marketing definition

Inbound marketing is a 4-step marketing strategy that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them.

It allows you to create a trusting relationship with your contacts and turn them into loyal customers.

In fact, the entire inbound methodology is built on one pivotal element: the Buyer Persona.
The ideal type (or rather, the ideal customer), who has all the characteristics that our potential customers should have.

You can imagine your Buyer Persona and give it a name, demographics, passions, fears, favorite IT tools, buying habits, etc.

Through the strategy of lead generation and lead nurturing you increase people’s interactions with the brand.

This helps you to have up-to-date and accurate data to enrich your buyer personas and provide more and more inline content.

If you were intrigued by this preview, you don’t know how much you will enjoy the inbound methodology. Read more!

Inbound Marketing Activities

It is a marketing technique for attracting, engaging and retaining customers.

It is a strategy to build trust, credibility, reputation for the company. It creates a strong bond with the customer.

Unlikeoutbound marketing, where strategies aim to make the brand and its products or services known through traditional communication channels, theInbound Marketing helps companies get found by potential customers by using relevant and quality content developed based on the real needs of users.

It is a noninvasive technique using various forms of marketing:

• Blog
• SEO
• Social media
• Website
• Online (webinar) and live events
• Content marketing

Inbound marketing activities: why are they so important?

Inbound marketing helps companies build trust and credibility in the eyes of consumers, primarily through the creation and production of quality content to solve and address the problems and needs of the typical target audience.
It is a real draw for qualified leads who are looking for more information.

The rationale ofinbound marketing is to accompany the customer at all touch points of his or her journey(customer journey): from when he or she comes into contact with the brand to retention and conversion.

It is not just a Marketing strategy but rather the philosophy on which to build the growth of one’s company.

It is a philosophy based on helping people. Doing right by one’s customers means, doing right by one’s business.

Inbound marketing is all about sharing your knowledge with the world, we can say it is literally the monetization of knowledge.
Sharing knowledge leads us to be useful to people. This generates attraction to our brand, the best way to build lasting relationships.

For this reason, inbound is not a business strategy but rather a marketing and communication strategy.

Inbound Marketing Activities: the 4-step strategy

Inbound Marketing responds to two major “revolutions” in contemporary marketing: niche strategy and the ability to “give away” something to trigger a new need in the consumer’s mind.

Niche strategy is to address a niche of target people with characteristics such that they are potential customers.

There is no longer the concept of mass marketing, which is totally ineffective today because consumers are becoming more and more savvy and attentive.

Giving away something to trigger a new need in the consumer’s mind is not deception. Inbound Marketing proposes content to the user that is truly useful and valuable to them.

They can be SEO articles, which he simply gets to through a search.

From there on, the goal of the Inbound strategy is to continue to give away useful insights (articles, pdfs, guides, videos, webinars, podcasts) in exchange for, say, an e-mail address or newsletter registration.

This interchange creates a lasting relationship between the brand and the potential customer. Even after the purchase, it is important to continue to nurture the relationship in order to retain the new customer and make him or her feel pampered.

This dramatically increases the likelihood that you will buy from us again and speak highly of us to other potential customers.

Step 1. Attract

Step 2. Convert

Step 3. Close

Step 4. Delight

Inbound marketing activities in 8 steps!

If you have read the whole article up to here, then you are no longer wondering what inbound marketing is!

You really care! To create your own effective strategy, try following these steps.

1. Define buyer personas

The first thing to do is to define your target audience. Who are the people interested in your products or services? What are their needs, problems and wants? How do they behave online?

Answering these questions will help you create valuable content for our target audience.

On the Factory blog we talk about this often. We repost an article where you can find questions to ask yourself to build your Buyer Personas: read it here.

2. Create valuable content

Once you have defined your target audience, start creating valuable content for them. This content can be articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, or any other type of content that is useful to your users. The important thing is that the content is of high quality and addresses their needs and problems.

3. Distribute the content

Again thanks to Buyer Personas, you can more easily identify the channels where your potential customers are. Depending on their habits, you can use different online marketing techniques, such as SEO, social media marketing, online advertising, etc.

To attract new users to your site, use eye-catching and effective Call to Action. How to write them? Read the dedicated article for lots of tips.

4. Generate leads

Lead generation is one of the turning points in inbound strategy. Once they have arrived on the site you have to make sure that they turn from users into potential customers.

Lead magnets are an incentive to be offered in exchange for their contact information. In marketing, by the term lead magnet, in fact, we refer to content such as ebooks, guides, webinars, etc., that are offered free of charge to users in exchange for their contact data.

Download forms are usually used where the user leaves his or her contact information and agrees to the processing of personal data. Contextually, you agree to marketing consent, giving you permission to send further communications.

5. Lead nurturing

Now that you have permission to do so, send content that is useful and appropriate to the stage of purchase the customer is in (discovery, insight, evaluation, decision).Lead nurturing is really about pampering the lead, bit by bit, unhurriedly, with engaging and valuable content.

In this respect, email marketing campaigns perform particularly well because they open a direct line of communication. Personalization is very high, especially if you use platforms for Marketing Automation to deliver the right campaign, to the right person, at the right time.

6. The moment of prospecting

And now let’s talk about prospecting i.e., before they become customers, leads become prospects. A prospect is a potential customer who has made a conversion that demonstrates an actual interest in buying.

To turn a lead into a prospect, as we have already mentioned, you can up the ante. Offering dedicated discounts, one-to-one calls, free consultations, service or product demos are great ways to win over a prospect.

7. Sell.

You are at the finish line. You have completed the sale with your prospect who has finally become a beautiful customer. Even in the sales phase, try to provide the best brand experience for your customer.

8. Builds customer loyalty

Building customer loyalty is key. You can continue to do this through content and communications, as we have already mentioned, but also and most importantly by engaging them and turning them into true fans of your brand.

Do you want to hold on to customers? We recommend:

1. Continue to use inbound marketing to offer tips, guides, valuable content, new purchase propositions in line with their tastes and preferences, etc;
2. Work on community marketing to build a real community of people orbiting your brand;
3. Involve customers by asking for reviews, opinions, suggestions for improvement, etc.

How do you build a trusting relationship with customers?

We need to work on two models.
On the one hand, there is what we call the “Flywheel,” which sees customers at the center of our strategic assets: marketing, service and sales.
On the other hand, there is the marketing funnel, the famous “funnel” that takes interested leads through a process of information, decision and purchase.

How does the funnel work in Inbound?

We are looking at traditional funnel marketing, but it is “promoted” through valuable, targeted content.

You have to give before you receive. And that’s why Inbound helps us attract, satisfy and retain customers: it weaves a relationship.

At a very early stage we have unknown users, whom we attract to our brand through content that intercepts their searches.
If we can bring them to our “touchpoints,” for example to our site, they will become visitors.

At this point it is important to invite them to do a small conversion, that is, an action that allows us to have a way to contact them and learn more about them.

Free downloadable guides, through a registration form, or other similar lead magnets are useful.

Once we have the contact, these visitors become leads. We can reach them with direct marketing actions such as newsletters or SMS, depending on the permissions they have given us.

These permits must be respected not only for legal issues, but also because it is a ground on which trust on the part of the potential client is played out.

The next step is the sale. When the lead completes a purchase, it becomes a customer. One of the real problems for many companies is that they believe this is the end goal and leave out the whole post-sale and retention part.

Can we build customer loyalty with Inbound Marketing activities?

Certainly yes. There is another step after the sale and that is the “engagement” or loyalty phase. Those who have purchased one of our products or services are an invaluable resource.

The goal of this marketing methodology is not to squeeze the customer, but to pamper them.

Then after the sale we should continue to give the customer the content they need, to entertain them, to tell them more.

Guides to the use of the product he or she purchased, or lists of tips, stories of other customers, and tales of initiatives and values the company is associated with are useful.

At this stage we are walking on strategically important ground: that which transforms customers into promoters and advocates and thus also transforms our company into a real brand.

Implementing inbound marketing activities is not just about the marketing department!

There is a reason Inbound Marketing for attracting, satisfying and retaining customers works so well: it is that it allows us to get inside people’s minds.

An inbound marketing agency can carry out the strategy that enables the creation of stable relationships that accompany the user toward the purchase , turning them into customers and, above all, brand loyalty.

This methodology is outstanding at every stage of the buyer’s journey, from lead generation to post-purchase retention.

An additional element to keep in mind is that inbound is not just about the marketing or sales department but about the entire company as it is based on 3 basic elements: attract, engage and delight.

This determines that in order to have a relationship of total trust between the consumer and the company, each department must work hard to maintain the highest standard of customer experience or customer lived experience.

The Marketing department must be efficient to attract new potential customers. Then the ball passes to the sales department, which passes to the technical department, customer support, service etc…

Each of these steps is extremely important and can undermine the good relationship between customers and brand.

Inbound marketing is generated through planning a proper strategy involving the use of Marketing Automation, Sales Funnel and related services and technologies.

Factory Communication is an Inbound Marketing Agency.

Want to find out how inbound marketing activities can help your Business? Contact us