Inbound Marketing is the new form of internet marketing that is believed to be one of the most effective marketing methodologies to help businesses attract potential customers. While Outbound Marketing focuses on taking a business to a customer in order to see a conversion, the trending Inbound Marketing concentrates on bringing a target customer to a company and proceeds on making a sale or conversion. As this is about making a customer visit your business and slowly move on to become a lead, it will not be that easy to achieve benefits without the proper knowledge.
And, the rest of this article tends to introduce the top tips for the effective use and understanding of inbound marketing for your business. I hope this article will help many of those who are not aware of Inbound Marketing to understand and make use of the 21st century’s powerful marketing technique.
#1 Improved form of Internet Marketing
Inbound Marketing is about handling popular marketing techniques like content, SEO, email marketing and social media in an improved way. A website with a lot of contents (applied content marketing) written in order to target the relevant customers are the first need. Secondly, it should be well optimized for search engines to attract the target searcher and later on we will use email and social media marketing to stay in touch with your visitors and customers.
#2 Focus on Conversion Process
It is essential to keep your focus on converting a normal user searching for your content into an actual customer and promoter of a particular business. Conversion process must be completely honest and helpful to the visitor. But what is this conversion? As already said, Inbound Marketing helps bring customers close to businesses. To achieve this, there should first be a strong website with quality content which is made ready to attract the searchers (of target keywords). If the site is well optimized (for search engine), then that searcher will probably reach your content and if it answers his question or satisfies his need, he will stay on your site to read the rest of your content and at this stage he becomes your visitor (or user of your content). To reach our goal of making him a customer, we need to collect his information, at least his email. Collecting information from a happy visitor is done through forms, landing pages and strong call-to-action elements.
After you know his email and what he is looking for, you can now send him an email about the right product at the right time and after that, it’s your sales team’s duty to make sure he becomes your customer. This is how in Inbound Marketing, Searchers / strangers get converted to customers and later promoters of a business.
#3 Starts with the Content
Everything in Inbound Marketing starts with the content that is of enough quality to attract a target person who will be searching for it. The content should answer the question of a searcher. For example, consider a mobile company that creates content that can answer user’s question about mobile. And, if properly optimized, that will help them attract their target customer who will probably be looking for articles about mobile phones. Now this is attraction, which is only the beginning of making a visitor, a potential customer. The company needs to proceed further to know their visitor and his/her interest and finally send him/her a product as an offer. In this stage, you are now more likely to make a sale than a competitor who is shouting on the internet about his usual offers and discounts through banners, popup ads and other methods. Statistically, people are less likely to respond to such ads.
#4 Should make People Love Marketing
One of the core concepts of Inbound Marketing is to provide quality content to those who are searching for. It deals with nothing related to spam or irritating a customer or visitor by only promoting one’s own business – which nobody will ever want to hear. When you are providing something your customer wants, he’ll read it. The key to use content in Inbound Marketing is to create relevant and helpful content for your readers.
#5 Let Them in and Stay
Create trust, and let your visitors come in. Avoid spam-like advertisements and link building strategies. Create and keep only the good doors open. Gift your user what they need (an answer to their question) and request them to consider your product or service. Most customers won’t hesitate to provide feedback when businesses approach them with an honest request. So, give a try and make a sale. Maintain the relationship with your customer even after you’ve made a sale. This will help you use the previous customer to promote your business. If a customer promotes or recommends your business it will be much more helpful to bring leads.
This article is written by Saz Reymond. He offers digital marketing training at Zuan Education, one of the leading IT educational institutes in Chennai. Follow Zuan Education on Youtube to stay up-to-date about latest happenings in the digital technology world.