What is an Inbound Marketing Strategy: The Important Things to Know
With 71% of marketers globally using inbound marketing as their primary marketing method, if you aren’t using inbound marketing, you’re falling behind.
If you’re stuck in a rut only using outbound marketing strategies and you need an inbound marketing strategy you can implement right away. We will help you understand inbound marketing further and give you tips for starting inbound marketing.
What Inbound Marketing Is
You’re familiar with outbound marketing strategies like billboard ads, television commercials, and radio spots, but what is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategy that uses pull marketing like content marketing, event, social media, and more.
When you use inbound marketing, you make your company easy to find, and you help the people that do find you.
Looking at outbound marketing, you’ll notice that you rent people’s attention, but with inbound marketing, you earn their attention. If you aren’t providing useful information and helping people, they aren’t looking at your company and what you have to offer.
Why You Should Focus on Inbound Marketing
Understanding how powerful inbound marketing is important because you’ll want to act on it right away.
When you use inbound marketing, you get a higher ROI than you do with outbound marketing. Inbound marketing also helps marketers solve their number one problem of needing more web traffic and leads.
Even if you’re a great salesperson, that isn’t going to any good if you don’t have anyone leads to sell to.
The beauty of inbound marketing is that communication is a two-way street. With outbound marketing, you’re talking at the consumer, and you don’t know if what you’re saying to them is effective or not.
How to Start Inbound Marketing
When you’re just starting out with inbound marketing, you have to change your entire mindset of how you market to people.
Instead of thinking that you have to get them to do something like opt-in, make a purchase, etc., you need to think about how you can help your target audience.
Give, give, give without requiring anything in return. When you do this for long enough, and you have a good product or service that services this target audience, you won’t be able to help but get conversions.
Now that you’re in the right mindset let’s talk about some inbound marketing strategies you can use to start getting results.
Create a Customer Persona
Before you start marketing, you need to have a very specific idea of who you’re marketing to. This customer persona should be built out as a fully rounded person with a name. Creating this customer persona will be the foundation for all the other parts of your inbound marketing campaign.
Generate High-Quality Content People Love
Now that you know who you’re creating content for, it’s time to get started.
When you’re creating content, it doesn’t have to have great production value in the beginning, but it does need to be valuable to the person consuming it. Does it help them solve a problem that is weighing down on them? Does the content inform them on topics they are interested in learning more about?
High-quality content makes a major difference in the way people perceive your company. If your content isn’t well thought out and well presented, you’re not going to get the best results from this part of your inbound marketing strategy.
Start Posting on Other Sites
Guest posting is a great way to get your name out to the masses. If you can land guest posts on websites that are respected and that have a lot of traffic, this can help your brand and influence grow.
Learn and Implement SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization and is when you optimize your content to come up at the top of the search engines. You can do this by off-page and on-page methods.
SEO allows you to get in front of people that are searching for the solutions your content provides. Since organic traffic converts well, this is an important part of your inbound marketing strategy.
Use Influencer Marketing
People love their influencers and using influencers to get the word out about your products and services will allow you to borrow their influence with these people. Since influencers have built trust with their audience, you’ll often notice much higher conversion rates than you’ll get from other means of promotion.
Can You Use Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing?
When you’re having some success with outbound marketing, it might be difficult for you to put these strategies to sleep. The good news is that you don’t have to stop using your outbound marketing strategies.
Many companies find combining outbound marketing and inbound marketing strategies gives them a lot of options and the ability to reach people at different phases of the buying cycle.
Being able to get in front of people when you want to, as well as when they are looking for your solution allows you to be even more in control of your marketing. You’ll find that you can use the information you gather from your inbound marketing strategy to create stronger outbound marketing plans.
Inbound Marketing Strategy for the Win
Now you understand more about inbound marketing strategy and how it can help your company move toward success. If you’re still sitting on the fence about inbound marketing, we have other articles that can help you understand more.
Browse our site, find more articles about inbound marketing and other closely related topics, and get any other information you need to get excited about the prospect of inbound marketing.