What is Inbound Marketing?
In the most straightforward terms, inbound marketing is the need of the hour.
Inbound Marketing is an effective way to connect with your audience and keep them engrossed back for more. Content on websites, blogs, social media pages, and other sources will help you educate your market and inspire them to buy.
As dramatic as it sounds – it’s true. In a world that is almost wholly digitized, any marketing strategy is incomplete without an inbound program. This strategy is focused on the kinds of content that help solve problems or solve buyer pains. Through advertising, promotion, and other tactics, you can generate leads and close sales.
If you’re someone who has no idea about what inbound marketing is, and how you can use it for the long-term success of your business – worry not! This article will answer all your questions, so keep scrolling!
Defining the Job of an Inbound Marketing Agency
Inbound marketing simply refers to the process that personalizes the buying experience for your customers. As opposed to outbound marketing, an inbound marketing company focuses on forming a deeper connection with your target audience by providing solutions to the existing problems with your products or services. It uses compelling content and other means of communication to attract the consumer and to retain them.
It utilizes a range of different strategies to boost brand awareness and to get the brand message across different platforms. The most prominent of these strategies include search engine optimization, content marketing, events, blogs, and social media. It gets organic and qualified leads, and hence is focused on appealing to the brains of the consumer rather than the pockets!
Clearly enough, inbound marketing has an advantage over traditional marketing. Unlike conventional forms of marketing, inbound marketing synchronizes your goals with the benefits your prospective customers will get through you. On the outside, it prioritizes the customers and puts them in charge. However, it does so while simultaneously bringing benefits to you as well!
When the customer perceives your brand as reliable, caring, and trustworthy, they are likely to prioritize you over other options. You will be a thought leader – the better you connect with your customer, the more your expertise will be valued and sought after. It also does wonders for your sales funnel and overall marketing efforts. It is ultimately a win-win situation for everyone involved (apart from your competitors!)
Therefore, an inbound marketing company is invaluable when it comes to evolving your strategy like never before.
Putting Inbound Marketing to Action
There are three central tenets to inbound marketing. They are:
1) Attracting the right customer.
You can put inbound marketing to action by using valuable content to attract potential customers who completely resonate with your brand message. You can determine your target audience by understanding their buying journey and developing buyer personas.
2) Engaging the audience.
Through addressing your customer’s fears and pain points, you can directly manage the problems they encounter and hence, provide valuable solutions. This is one way you can build trust. Add compelling calls to action to encourage action.
3) Delighting your buyers.
Inbound marketing, at the end of the day, is based on making meaningful relationships with your customers through relevant content. As long as you’re being a source of satisfaction for them and gratifying their needs, you’re on your way to the perfect implementation of inbound marketing.
An inbound marketing company will typically focus on all three of these simultaneously, as all three of these are of the essence for your marketing strategy.
Tools for Inbound Marketing
Let’s look at the tools in reference to the aforementioned ways of applying inbound marketing.
Tools for attracting:
● Ads
● Video
● Blog post
● Social media Posts
● Landing pages
● Testimonials
Tools for engaging:
● Email marketing
● Conversational bots
● Lead flows
● Marketing automation
● Social media
Tools for delighting:
● Email marketing
● Direct messaging
● Contact information
● Smart content
● Marketing automation
As you can see, these tools overlap! For example, email marketing and content marketing can be used to both engage and delight the comment – it all depends on how you use it. Usually, an inbound marketing company will try to use as many of these tools as possible so that they can solidify the success of your venture. The ultimate choice depends on the case study, though.
The denominator for all these tools is their purpose: they exist for a brand to be there for its clients, address their needs, and fix their problems. Incidentally, this underpins the core objective of inbound marketing as well.
How does a B2B inbound marketing agency help businesses in Canada and US?
A B2B inbound marketing agency provides businesses with digital marketing support and expertise to engage today’s prospects and create tomorrow’s customers. An agency supplements your market teams to give you all the necessary resources to deliver a solid inbound marketing strategy.
There are several components used by a B2B inbound marketing agency. A full-service inbound marketing strategy covers topics such as:
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- Blogging
- Content creation
- Search engine optimization
- Social media sharing
- Customer relationship management
- Marketing automation
The best way to understand the function of an inbound marketing strategy is by exploring how they impact success in every part of your business. This aspect helps you understand better, so you know how to plan and create a solid inbound marketing strategy.
You must clearly define your vision and goals before you start working with a marketing agency. With clear goals, an inbound agency will successfully cater to your marketing needs and establish a strong marketing strategy.
Inbound marketing helps your business by aligning your marketing and sales teams. An inbound marketing strategy aims to prove a return-on-investment figure. When you align your market team with sales, you will clearly illustrate the marketing strategy’s impact and the results on your entire business.
Key Takeaway
This mini guide is merely the tip of an iceberg – inbound marketing is a fascinating facet of digital marketing as a whole and comes with a plethora of benefits. However, I hope you now know what inbound marketing is, and how you can use it to your advantage.
Like I said in the beginning, an inbound marketing strategy is the need of time. Get in touch with us today to get a professional overview of your digital marketing strategy or building the next steps for an inbound marketing campaign.