Are You Doing Inbound Marketing Correctly?

Every business wants more and more customers. The name of the game is growing your brand awareness to establish a large base of passionate, loyal customers. Traditionally, businesses have had to go out and find their customers through “old-fashioned” forms of advertising like radio and television commercials, billboards, and even cold calls. With the right inbound strategy, however, your customers will come to you! With techniques like automated personalized messages, personalized product suggestions, and optimally-relevant content, you can attract, engage, and retain customers at all points of the purchase journey. Best of all, inbound marketing helps you work smarter, not harder. Are you doing inbound marketing correctly?

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing includes blogs, events, social media, and SEO. It’s how you help your audience navigate the saturated marketplace to find content that appeals to them. More importantly, it’s how you help your audience stay interested in everything your brand has to offer.

It also typically includes software designed to help marketers manage digital content and campaigns. For example, software like Hubspot can help create and monitor digital campaigns, personalize messages, set up email automation, execute SEO, and more. The primary focus is to attract and retain customers at every step of the customer journey, from awareness to purchase. 

This software can also help with the analysis and integration of customer data. Not only can marketers use this data to tweak campaigns and content, but the data can be used to gain further insight into customer behaviors. Using these data, marketers can break down customers into segments, which can then be further analyzed and used to determine social media strategy, email marketing strategy, and more. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it can help with attribution. If you have multiple campaigns aimed at driving sales, it’s important to be able to figure out which platforms are most successful-and which ones you can eliminate. Inbound marketing software allows you to attribute which platforms are driving folks to your website, as well as how they interact with it. 

Inbound vs. Outbound

Whereas outbound marketing attempts to push content onto consumers with the intention of driving purchases, Inbound marketing allows marketers to deliver relevant, quality content that aligns with their interests along the way. Notably, inbound marketing educates customers, while outbound marketing sells to customers. What’s the difference?

With the right strategy, you deliver the right content at the right time. That content can help drive the right traffic to your website! In other words, you don’t want everyone to go to your website, you want your target audience to go to your website. The right inbound strategies can help optimize KPIs like click-through rate, average time spent on site, bounce rate, and so much more. 

When properly executed, inbound marketing can be 10 times as effective for lead conversion. Perhaps that’s why  41% of marketers agree that inbound marketing produces measurable ROI. Still not convinced? According to Hubspot, inbound leads cost 62% less than outbound leads, a margin that is projected to grow as technology like ad blockers and spam filters mitigates the effectiveness of traditional paid ads. 

Give Your Customers What They Need

So how do you formulate an effective inbound strategy? It starts with delivering the right content. However, in order to create the right content, you have to understand who your customers are. Start by creating customer personas. Look at things like demographics, psychographics, and social technographics. Where are your customers spending their time? What do they do in their free time and what are their ambitions?

That insight will help you further develop more personalized content. From product suggestions based on past behaviors to automated emails based on feedback, your customers crave personalized experiences. More than 90% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides relevant suggestions, and a further 80% are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences. 

Let the data do the work and trust your customers; the best indicator for future performance is past performance. If you’re doing inbound marketing correctly, you can work smarter, not harder. What’s more, you’ll be able to deliver more personalized, engaging content. That’s the content your customers want, and it will help build brand loyalty far more than traditional forms of advertising. Start optimizing your content-and your strategy-with the right inbound marketing techniques today!