Today, we see the era of quality marketing that accompanies your target audience during their buyer journey and leads them to purchase. The main task of inbound marketing is to earn the interest of potential clients, engage them, educate them about the products and services you offer and convert them into satisfied customers.
Did you know that due to the HubSpot study, 43% of all customers come from corporate blogs, which are a part of the inbound marketing system? Also, according to Weidert, 68% of buyers do research before buying. The vast majority – 90% – do not have a clear image of the seller until they detect them in the online world, e.g. get a recommendation, read an article, see an ad, etc.
In this post, we will talk about the basic principles of inbound marketing, the ways it serves businesses, and why marketers should apply this system.
The Difference Between Inbound And Outbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is an innovative way to attract customers to your business. It’s a system that combines various approaches to lead generation from content marketing, SMM, paid advertising, and so on. And this is something you need to use right now if you want to stay afloat.
Inbound marketing is aimed at attracting exactly the target audience, not just showing ads to people who don’t even know what you’re talking about or aren’t aware of your company’s services. The goal is to build brand authority and attract customers through valuable content on topics related to your business. So, inbound marketing is a vital system for B2B companies.
Outbound marketing is synonymous with traditional business promotion. The exact opposite of inbound marketing. It includes:
- TV commercials
- Printed handouts
- Radio advertising
- Mailing
- Advertisement in newspapers
- Outdoor advertising
The idea is to distribute ads to the audience within a particular type of promotion and without any segmentation. However, this way, you can ensure maximum outreach and drive more traffic to the website, which is more important for B2C companies and e-commerce platforms.
It’s pretty hard to find outbound and inbound marketing tools used separately. So, now there is a tendency to combine these two techniques in a system while applying different tactics for various purposes.
Inbound Marketing Tools
Read more about essential inbound marketing tools that can help your business meet consumers’ needs and attract their interest in a lasting relationship:
- Blog. This provides an additional entry point of traffic to the site for highly competitive B2B niches and then takes the user to the service pages.
- SEO. This allows you to raise your website to the first position in search engine results. To achieve this, you need to work properly with semantics – the main queries that describe the content of the page. Insert keywords and phrases into articles organically. They should be relevant and not spoil the text.
- SMM. The great advantage of social networks is that people voluntarily spend a lot of time there, scrolling through the news feed, and looking for relevant content. Content promotes itself, and your community gets new subscribers and potential customers.
- Paid advertisement. This promises better brand visibility and raises awareness to attract a potential audience. Ad campaigns are primarily targeted at the masses searching for products or services similar to the brand being advertised.
- Link building. This growth of link mass can be ensured by placing links to your website on third-party platforms, forums, and sources. Link building can also include the creation and hosting of guest posts.
- On-page optimization. Optimization of meta tags, designed to provide structured data about the web page to search engines in order to increase the click rate to your website.
- The landing page –- is the main converter of inbound traffic into customers, it includes optimizing navigation, brightly presented content, easy-to-read text and implementation of active elements such as Call-to-Action buttons, subscription forms, etc.
Myths About Inbound Marketing
Although there are plenty of inbound marketing solutions and techniques, this approach to companies’ promotion is relatively new. Thus, some business owners and junior marketers still believe in myths connected with inbound marketing. Let’s take a look at some of the most common ones below.
- You need to create a lot of content.
Of course, the more content the better. But this is not the only thing you need to achieve results. Competent analysis of customer journey and scaling through advertising channels – this is more effective than generating a huge number of articles and posts.
- You need to wait for the results for a long time.
This myth comes from the fact that the term “inbound marketing” appeared 10 years ago, when the main channel for attracting customers was SEO. Today, by investing solid budgets in marketing, you can start getting results much faster.
- Users are attracted by engaging free content
Perhaps the main mistake is ignoring paid channels for content distribution. Many companies want to spend budgets only on writing texts and recording videos. With exciting, relevant topics, it is possible to reach very high rates (up to 20% CTR when advertising is done by email).
Wrapping Up
People are looking online for answers to their questions, and your content can help your customers, while converting them into leads. With content marketing, you can provide consumers with the required information at the right time. Your knowledge base will be a constructive solution to visitors’ problems. Moreover, they can take advantage of professional services with the confidence of a positive outcome. Apply these basic principles of inbound marketing to achieve higher metrics and reach potential customers.
