Inbound marketing is a dynamic buyer-centric solution that's focused on the consumer's needs, desires and buying journey. What it's not is an expensive solution that serves the seller.
The methodology identifies a fitting buyer persona's pain points and aims to provide a solution through enticing engagement. Its various steps account for the different stages of a buyer's journey. Through these steps, tailored content is served to targeted buyers in order to attract, convert, nurture and delight them throughout their buying lifecycle.
The inbound methodology places emphasis on a content/context understanding. Ideally, you should be focusing on creating content that's fully optimised for search and social media, and that attracts your relevant prospects. Context refers to understanding which content is most engaging to prospects and what is most likely going to pull them through your sales funnel – that context should be understood and mastered to personalise messages, emails and various other promotions.
Inbound is focused on attracting the correct customers, nurturing them to a conversion and then continually delighting them. Traditional marketing is outdated and doesn't attract the modern buyer anymore. This is where and why inbound marketing has stepped up and filled the gap.
The idea of sales without selling is based on promoting your knowledge of your services, products and industry. But how do you grow your sales without selling then? By growing your brand, establishing yourself as a thought-leader/industry authority, and thereby curating those accurate leads.
Effective inbound marketing looks at holistic marketing and is focused on delivering tailored content to target buyer personas at the right time, equipping them to make informed, educated decisions without feeling pressured to make a purchase.
Advertising is interruptive. There, we said it.
While it's still one of the most widespread media landscapes; televised, broadcast and print advertising is largely a noisy channel. We are bombarded by advertising everywhere we look and everywhere we go. As such, we've become accustomed to tuning out the noise and filtering it into the background.
Consumers have also become jaded by so many false claims, resulting in a lot more research being done before making a purchase, regardless of what flashy advertising promises. Coupled with a disinterest in noisy advertising, technology has helped consumers to evade intrusive advertising with tools like Caller ID, Spam Filters, Ad Blockers, etc.
Technology has also helped the modern buyer to seek out their solutions, and to research products and services that they're interested in.
Inbound marketing exists to serve these modern buyers. The philosophy aims to reward their time and energy spent searching, with helpful and valuable information, and to guide them into an action (depending on where they are in their buyer's journey) through the use of engaging content. The inbound marketing process aligns this content with buyer's interests to appeal to the right types of customers who are most likely to become customers. It also weeds out buyers who are not ready to purchase yet, and enriches them with further lead nurturing, until they are ready to convert.
Simply put, inbound marketing is "buyer-centric". This shift is due to information becoming more and more available to consumers who can make their own, informed purchasing decisions. Inbound is a focus away from the traditional WHAT that a company sells and focuses on who the company is, and WHY it sells.
Traditional marketing is "seller-centric" – it focuses on what the seller sells and the features of its products or services. The most significant shift between the two is that inbound marketing businesses reach out with information and content, proving themselves to be thought-leaders and innovators in their industry. The inbound approach is both patient and active, never aggressive and never trying to force a sale – inbound businesses are more concerned with solving a buyer's problem and building a relationship.
Through traditional marketing's barrage of advertising, it costs a great deal to acquire a new customer in comparison to inbound marketing's more organic methodology. Inbound's focus on creativity, talent, effort and putting you in touch with knowledgeable people, stands in contrast to traditional marketing's focus on budget and repetition through bulk, impersonal advertising.
The inbound methodology moves the buyer through, not a funnel, but a flywheel.
Your inbound marketing tactics and channels attract prospects and customers to your website. Then, you continue to help, support and empower them at every step of the engagement: from first-touch to well after they have become a customer. This positive relationship will, in turn, attract new visitors and accelerate the conversion to customers through referrals or earned marketing. The focus is always on how to help existing and potential customers.
The flywheel consists of three stages: Attract, Engage and Delight, which helps your business grow.
Every methodology has strategies in place needed to carry out each step. Inbound marketing is no different.
The simple and transparent strategy sees strangers attracted to your brand with useful, appealing content, aimed at building brand awareness and reaching new audiences. There are very specific means of attracting these prospects, and very specific tools to drawing them through the sales funnel, namely…
Tools to marketing to your buyers is just one aspect of inbound marketing, formulating just who those buyers are is one of the most integral steps to Inbound.
Marketing research dictates who you wish to sell to with traditional marketing focused on developing a target market list. This list is made up of a set of buyers who all share common needs or characteristics. Remember though, that with inbound marketing, you're not trying to market to everyone and so, casting such a wide net is a waste.
Inbound marketers refine their target market using demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics. A target market might include information on:
Inbound marketers further utilise this information to formulate buyer personas. These personas are used to streamline your marketing approach and help you to group your target customers based on actual statistics by creating semi-fictional characters that better affect your approach to marketing.
Buyer personas help you form a semi-fictional identity of your ideal customers. If an accurate description is set up, you should be able to determine exactly where to focus your time, encourage and guide product development, and create better integration through different business functions. This information is necessary for the creation of engaging content. Setting up personas helps you understand your buyers better, aids you in anticipating certain behaviour and helps you create targeted content that draws in the people you want to be talking to.
Creating a persona profile is just a matter of asking the right questions that lead to the most accurate description of your buyer persona. The more in-depth your questions, the more accurate a persona you can draw up.
Your questions should be directed at actual people made up of either customers, prospects, referrals or third-party networks who closely resemble your ideal customer. Incentivise these interviewees in order to get accurate and honest responses. A good group-size to interview is around 3 – 4 people per buyer profile. Once you can start predicting what your interviewee's answer might be, you've succeeded in creating an accurate buyer persona profile.
If on the other hand, you are not able to conduct interviews, seek out alternative methods of reaching out to potential persona guides. These include compiling surveys which may be posted on their company websites or interviewing your internal sales people and supplementing your results with sufficient research. Reaching out through social media is a valuable means of gaining persona insight, use LinkedIn to do some accurate buyer persona research.
There are at least seven categories you need information on, be sure to highlight these and get enough information for each:
With information from all of these categories, you can begin to create a picture of what your buyer persona looks like, and start to identify what their specific pain points are. Source an image (you could search Shutterstock for a picture) of what your buyer persona might look like, so your team can have a visual representation. Then draw up a template with all the information you have gathered.
Lastly, name your buyer persona appropriately – such as Marketing Mark, Finance Manager Francis, Owner-Manager Owen, etc. - to clearly depict who you are targeting and what role they fulfil.
There's no point going ahead with planning and preparation without monitoring your success and failures. Analytics help to measure your growth and reveals where you can improve efforts and emphasise optimisation. Google Analytics is the most popular source for accurate reporting. Some CRMs, like HubSpot, allow you to include tracking codes on buttons and links so you can measure your entire marketing funnel from acquisition to close.
Beware of bot traffic which may skew your data and results – follow this handy guide on how to detect bots, and successfully exclude them from your reporting.
Creating targeted content with intent and purpose is the quiver in your inbound marketing arrow. It guides content, leading it straight to the right user, and provides them with a solution.
Follow the Content Marketing approach to make sure that you're targeting's on point.
What's better than being number 1? Being number 0, of course!
A featured snippet is the small box above the top rank of your search (called Rank #0), this space is very often occupied by the number 1 search result – effectively giving more click-through potential to that specific page – but it's not always the case.
Short answer, yes! HubSpot's February 2016 study uncovered that high-volume keywords ranking #0 showed a CTR increase of 114%, even though they already held the #1 position organically. This research, like much others are anecdotal, but reflects that Rank #0 does indeed affect click-through rate.
Now that you know that you can score yourself a featured snippet position – how exactly do you go about getting there?
First up, you'll obviously need to be ranking organically on the first page of search results. Next, your content needs to directly, and effectively, answer a targeted question.
What you don't need, is to be ranked #1 for the question – although that certainly helps your chances of a Rank #0. Here you can see the percentage of featured snippets as they occur by ranking position on the first page:
Although there are opportunities across all of Page 1, they predominantly come from the first position, which makes sense considering that Rank #0 involves a solution that fully satisfies a search. A differentiating factor often boils down to relevance rather than ranking/authority, making a Featured Snippet, a very welcome SEO shortcut if you're looking to dominate a search but are struggling to rank first.
So, Rank #0 relates specifically to inbound, as marketing is solely aimed at providing users with the best solution to their problems. Being the most accurate solution to a customer's pain point is what Rank #0 is summed up as, and gives inbound marketing teams another factor to look at when considering how best to reach the right personas.
To get great inbound results, you need to ensure that your website is inbound-ready. Every page and every internal link should be designed to lead a visitor through to some conversion point. Whether it be through landing pages and forms, or email subscriptions, your website should entice each and every visitor to keep coming back for more. Follow the Growth-Driven Design principle to ensure that your website is inbound marketing ready.
Now that you've attracted the right personas with your targeted, performance-driven marketing, how do you go about moving them through the sales funnel and identifying a quality Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) from a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)?
This is where inbound sales comes in. Follow our Sales Enablement Guide to get your sales and marketing teams working in tandem, and getting the most out of your inbound sales effort.
One definition is that digital marketing is concerned with the isolated tactics which you can use to reach your user. These digital marketing tactics may be comprised of page banner creation, designing logos, various branding, optimised site pages, etc. Another definition is that digital marketing is the encapsulating term for all your company's online marketing efforts.
We've mentioned that cold-calling and bulk advertising are outdated methods of engagement, and so digital marketing, as a component of inbound marketing is largely about maintaining your online presence. Marketing, especially inbound marketing, is all about making a connection with the right customer. With people increasing the amount of time they spend on the Internet and most of us using our smartphones for pretty much everything, it makes sense that to make that connection, your approach has to be a digital one.
Digital marketing is a component of an overall inbound marketing strategy.
Digital marketing doesn't differentiate between inbound or traditional, outbound marketing tactics. Digital marketing may be employed to serve both these principles with outbound focused on getting its message across to as many people as possible, regardless of whether it's relevant or welcome. Inbound differs in that its digital marketing is more tailored and precisely aimed.
Examples of an outbound approach would be online flashing banner ads. Inbound marketing's digital approach is divided into owned, earned and paid media. By separating your digital inbound approach into these three categories, you can segment your channels and streamline different tools across your digital marketing framework.
Owned media refers to all the elements, content and resources created by you and your team. These may be used and leveraged at your discretion, and you are free to distribute it as needed. Examples of owned media is:
Simply put, earned media is word-of-mouth exposure. It is the coverage you receive from interaction with others within your industry and throughout. Earned media has both a positive and negative impact on your business: a bad review, for example, could prove hazardous to your brand, whereas great customers service feedback my boost your appeal to potential customers. Examples of earned media include:
Paid media refers to the tactics you've paid for. It generally revolves around "rented space" on a platform, like a banner ad (Display advertising) on a website that's popular with your targeted users. By using Google Ads' Pay-per-click functionality, you could potentially appear at the top of Google search results, whether you rank well for a specific keyword or not. Paid marketing assets are:
Media convergence refers to pooling your resources and getting your paid, owned and earned media working together. What is known in marketing circles as hitting the trifecta, is when you take a converged POEM (Paid/Owned/Earned marketing) approach.
With inbound marketing techniques being more of a strategic and well-planned methodology, your inbound toolkit is highly specified to target your buyer persona and keep them engaged. Use these tactics to highlight and target your ideal personas and lead them through each of the Attract, Engage and Delight stages.
The value of inbound marketing tools extends beyond just simple automation. The right tools allow you the best means of targeting your reach and improving your content strategy implementation.
These tools simplify your efforts when focusing on distribution (social or other), lead recording and management, and measuring your ROI. An effective Content Management System (CMS) lets you curate and schedule your content, distribute across social channels and set up your company blogs or newsletters. Here are a list of the most important inbound marketing tools, and what they do:
Moz, a great tool for inbound marketing and analytics has shifted away from inbound tools, to rather focus on SEO. They now provide amazing optimisation insights to business intent on broadening their "search-optimisation" horizon.
Free from Google, Google Analytics lets you track various website metrics, such as duration of visits, bounce rate, the number of visits and pages per visit. These categories may be tracked by geography, platform and more.
The partially free to use social media management tool, Hootsuite allows you to neatly arrange all of your social media channels under one easy to manage hub. From here you can compile, compose and schedule your posts with its handy automation features. Spending a little extra gets you reporting efficiently, with Hootsuite's analytics tools.
While not a direct social media management tool, BuzzSumo may be leveraged to gain insights into the content and context of your social media messaging. When used as a tool to measure the most shared content and key influencers, BuzzSumo is handy in helping you create targeted messaging that works, as well as giving you enough data to build your content around.
A free to use Newsletter Program (provided you have under 500 subscribers), MailChimp is a great way to reach out to prospects and implement your delight phase with regular, informative mails. Best of all the handy program reports back with analytics which measures bounce rates, clicks and more.
A great all-around tool for checking everything from forms, and CTA's to analytics. The strength of Optimizely lies in its A/B testing ability allowing you to measure iterate and improve. Run multivariate testing on your websites, landing pages and mailers to help your chances of improved conversion rates.
A free content management system, WordPress powers over 44% of the world's websites. The straightforward layout and functionality allow you to modify themes and plugins to suit your website needs. A great tool for small to medium-sized businesses, most WordPress plugins are free and most themes are designed to be mobile-friendly.
The HubSpot CRM and CMS have been cemented as the go-to platforms for your marketing, sales, service and website needs. Integrated and used as a central platform, you can create exceptional experiences for your visitors, prospects and customers. They've recently launched their CMS Hub, making website management easy to do for your marketers, and giving your developers a powerful platform to create web apps or tools.
HubSpot's workflow functionality is regarded as one of the most powerful inbound tools, allowing you to create granular workflows or broader lead nurturing programs. What differentiates it from other workflow tools is its focus on personalisation. With the use of Smart Content elements, you can create that one-on-one experience in emails and communication tools that virtually reaches out to your reader.
The platform lets you create pages with relative ease and full tracking capability. It's a competent SEO tool, as well as offers expert videos and tutorials on how to use the software. All this while being one of the most affordable options on the market.
While many tools, including HubSpot, may cost you; the investment is a fraction of what traditional marketing might set you back. Being a HubSpot Diamond-Partner, we can help you get set up with HubSpot. Chat to us, if you're looking to implement HubSpot for your Sales, Marketing and Customer Service alignment.
With successful inbound marketing campaigns being more of a strategic and well-planned methodology, your inbound toolkit is highly specified to target your buyer persona and keep them engaged. Use these tactics to highlight and target your ideal personas and lead them through each of the Flywheel stages.