Master the inbound marketing strategy to succeed
The future of digital marketing lies in strategies that not only attract new customers, but also captivate them, educate them and turn them into loyal followers of a brand, your brand.
In this scenario, inbound marketing emerges as a philosophy that not only seeks to sell, but also to connect in a meaningful way with the target audience. Don’t take your eyes off the screen and learn how to implement it in your company!
Fundamentals of inbound marketing
It’s more than a technique: it’s a mindset that seeks to engage potential customers by offering relevant and useful content. As opposed to the traditional interruption approach, where brands actively seek out consumers, inbound marketing allows customers to find brands naturally.
It aims to make negotiation more human and establish meaningful one-to-one relationships with strangers, prospects and customers. It aims to make negotiation more human and establish meaningful one-to-one relationships with strangers, prospects and customers.
It’s also a better way to market, sell and help customers. What’s good for the customer is also good for the company and because of this, your business can grow better in the long run. Increase your brand recognition and the trust of your target audience.
Remember that your company must offer value in every experience people have with you.
To create value, you always have to provide the right information to the right person at the right time.
- Articles with solutions posted on Facebook.
- Product reviews you find after a quick Google search .
- Sales reps who help you solve a problem at just the right time.
- The quick response you get from a representative on the company’s website.
The first step is to attract, which means that during this stage, the goal of an inbound company is, as the name suggests, to attract prospects and customers with useful and relevant content.
It is a demonstration that your information and products are trustworthy.
For marketers, like SUBE, this means creating useful content and experiences that demonstrate your knowledge.
For sales reps, on the other hand, it’s imperative to always be available to answer all their questions in meetings, calls or live chat.
On the other hand, for service reps, it is necessary to use briefing documents and chatbots to simplify the search for content.
The second step is to interact and it starts when a user completes a desired action: read an article, schedule a meeting, talk to a chatbot, etc.
The important thing is to build trust, answer questions, offer solutions and strategies for your prospects or customers to reach their goals and provide them with information about concerns they didn’t even know they had.
This is where interpersonal relationships are born by offering contextual, clear and creative solutions. You become a trusted advisor! Offer solutions, not a sales pitch.
Some examples:
- A marketing rep might use blog article retargeting to target different segments of your audience.
- For a sales one, you could use one-on-one follow-up or hold a series of phone conversations to define a customer’s specific needs.
And for the customer service team, you could focus on an inbound channel and use support tickets to organize and answer each new question. - How you build trust with your contacts will depend on your specific business needs.
The third step is delight and is based on providing an exceptional experience every time a prospect or customer interacts with your company. It is about making your clients so satisfied that they want to tell their friends and colleagues about the excellence of your services and your great commitment to your growth, and the best part is that later they will be your promoters on social media!
Therefore, it is essential to align all your teams so that everyone’s goal is to offer an extraordinary service in their content, conversations and interactions.
- Make sure people can find the answers they are looking for in the easiest way possible.
- Understand exactly what your prospects’ and customers’ motivations are.
- Find opportunities to offer more information or recommendations.
- All prospects are potential customers.
A true customer is one who has the opportunity to leave you and chooses NOT to. If you follow these tips, you will achieve sustainable growth by focusing on the things that matter to your customers.
Why should you implement it in your business?
by developing quality and useful content. This approach does not only seek to sell products or services, but focuses on providing help and solutions to people.
The goal is to build a relationship based on trust, which leads to consumers believing and trusting the brand and what it offers. Once this trust is established, it becomes easier for customers to choose to purchase the products or services in the future.
less expensive compared to other traditional marketing strategies. It requires minimal investment, mainly to purchase web hosting, a domain and the creation of a page.
This affordability makes it an attractive option for companies of all sizes.
Unlike traditional advertising strategies, which tend to interrupt the user experience, inbound marketing allows users to approach the brand voluntarily, consuming the content they want and showing a genuine interest in what it offers.
While their implementation requires time and ongoing effort to create and maintain relevant content, once a solid foundation is established, the results are often long-lasting and scalable.
This means that once a certain level of effectiveness is achieved, maintaining it does not involve significant additional expense.
Developing buyer personas
The heart of inbound marketing lies in a deep understanding of who you are targeting. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers that are based on real data and observed behaviors. Developing detailed profiles of your audience allows you to customize your strategies and messages effectively.
It is important that you create a profile of your ideal customer if you want your business to grow better.
How to
- Add information about a specific type of person in your target market.
- Find an avatar that represents her.
- Give it an easy-to-remember name, for example, Emilio for employee or Gerardo as a manager.
If you manage to create a single profile so complete that you can base your marketing campaigns , sales conversions and service activities on it, customers will have an excellent experience from start to finish and your internal teams will enjoy the benefits of being well aligned and in sync.
Who should create it?
Ideally, your marketing team; however, it should include input from as many perspectives as possible within the company.
How to create it
- Define the information you want to include.
- Identify the best sources for that information.
- Get to work!
If you know exactly what your company’s problem is, try to solve it (that will be the basis of your buyer persona). Once you know what the problem is that your prospects want to solve, start thinking about general categories of individuals who may have that problem.
Now, could you ask your service team to identify similarities among your best customers – what characteristics are closely related to the success of your product?
Another relevant aspect is to talk to customers to ensure that your information matches people’s actual experiences.
To do this, you need to interview 15 customers for each buyer persona, for example:
- How did you discover our company?
- Why did you make the decision to buy our products?
- What positive and negative experiences did you have throughout the journey?
- How can we improve the overall experience we offer you?
To make your strategy more grounded, you can try different types of buyer persona, pay attention!
Buyer Persona Decision Maker
This is the person who can make the final purchase decision. This is usually the most common, especially in the B2C environment.
Buyer Persona Prescriber
This is the person who recommends the product. A clear example could be a doctor who can be the prescriber of a certain medicine.
Influencer Buyer Persona
This is the person who, with his or her opinion, can positively or negatively influence the purchase decision. It is very important to know who our influencers are, as this will help us to decide which blogs and social network profiles are worth contacting to obtain some kind of collaboration.
Advantages of including a Buyer Persona in your strategy
Just as you already read its differences with respect to the target audience model, it’s time to review its main advantages:
Creation of attractive and relevant
content
Content is the engine of inbound. From blogs and videos to infographics and podcasts, engaging and relevant content attracts potential customers to your brand, positioning you as an authority in your niche and building trust over time.
More than just filling space, content becomes an invaluable asset that nurtures, educates and captivates potential customers.
Valuable content is not just about including keywords or images, it is about providing meaningful solutions, answers and experiences: from being more than just an advertisement, it must tell a story, provide knowledge and, above all, add value to the consumer’s life.
For content to be effective, it must be relevant. This means thoroughly understanding the needs, wants and challenges of the target audience. From informative articles to educational videos, social media, automated emailing , among others.
Thanks to the diversity of media, these are the key to creating relevant and engaging content for your audience.
The various platforms mentioned above are just some of the channels that brands can leverage to effectively reach their target audience.
Each medium offers unique opportunities to deliver messages, interact with the audience and encourage engagement.
A content marketing plan is a detailed plan that not only specifies what will be created, but also how it will be created, distributed and ultimately used to attract, retain and convert readers and viewers into customers.
Ultimately, engaging and relevant content not only attracts the attention of potential customers, but also builds strong and lasting relationships with them. By nurturing and educating your audience through valuable content, brands establish their authority in the marketplace and become trusted sources of information and solutions.
Based on the B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends study , it is estimated that the main challenges faced by content marketing teams are related to:
- Creating content that attracts multilevel roles within the target audience.
- Accessing subject matter experts to create content.
- Budgetary issues.
According to the report, many organizations have used collaboration, calendaring and workflow tools for content creation while working from home. In addition, it mentions that the use of internal technology changed during the pandemic, which improved collaboration skills and mindset.
In terms of content distribution, it is highlighted that more than 50% of the surveyed users used blogs, email newsletters and email to distribute content.
Each aspect of your content marketing strategy has unique details and particularities that should not be overlooked.
How to build your strategy?
Therefore, you will learn about each phase of the process and for a more detailed understanding on how these content marketing strategies are developed for companies like LinkedIn, Google, Zendesk, Quickbooks, Adobe and more:
SEO strategies for
Inbound marketing.
SEO is the foundation upon which a solid inbound marketing strategy is built. Optimizing your content for search engines increases your brand visibility and improves your organic rankings, allowing customers to find you when they need you most.
And that’s precisely the essence behind it: your audience doesn’t know they need you until they find you.
For this, it is possible to consider that SEO is the basis of inbound marketing; where your job will be to create quality content for your potential customers through your own media such as your website or blog section , how to make content?
Social media in
inbound marketing
Social media is an integral component of inbound marketing, providing channels to interact with your audience, promote content and build community around your brand.
This is where active participation in social platforms allows for two-way communication and the opportunity to generate meaningful conversations in inbound marketing by actively participating in the customer journey.
Throughout the different stages of the conversion funnel, social networks can influence and participate in different ways, adapting to the changing needs and behaviors of users, such as:
- Awareness stage : in this phase, social networks act as important channels to increase brand visibility and generate awareness of your products or services.
- For the consideration stage , communication becomes more educational and oriented to resolve users’ doubts and concerns. Success stories, product comparisons and buying guides can be shared.
- For the decision stage, communication focuses on persuading users to take action, using testimonials, exclusive promotions and clear and direct calls to action.
Metrics and analytics in
inbound marketing
Both are critical factors for the ongoing success of inbound marketing. Through specific tools, brands can evaluate the performance of their campaigns, identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions in order to optimize their strategies in real time.
In the realm of inbound marketing, analytics serves to evaluate performance and make informed decisions. Here are some relevant metrics and KPIs:
Best of luck and success in your inbound marketing analysis !
Tools you can use for your web analytics.
- Google Analytics
- Kissmetrics
- SEMrush
- Amplitude
- Adobe Analytics
- Clicky
- CrazyEgg
- SimilarWeb
- Finteza
- Chartbeat
History of inbound marketing
Inbound marketing has evolved over the past few decades in response to changes in consumer behavior and the advancement of digital technology. It emerged as an alternative to the intrusive approach of traditional marketing, focusing on creating value for customers through relevant content and meaningful experiences.
The history of inbound marketing dates back to the early 2000s, when Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, co-founders of HubSpot, coined the term and laid the foundation for this methodology.
The concept emerged in response to changes in consumer behavior and the transformation of the digital landscape.
Prior to inbound marketing, companies relied heavily on traditional marketing , which included tactics such as TV ads, billboards and cold calling. However, these strategies proved to be intrusive and ineffective in a world where consumers were increasingly empowered thanks to the Internet and social media.
Inbound marketing proposed a more customer-centric approach based on creating and distributing relevant and useful content that would engage consumers organically. Rather than interrupting, the goal was to attract, engage and delight potential customers throughout their buying journey.
HubSpot’ s launch in 2006 marked an important milestone in the history of inbound marketing, educating thousands of companies about the benefits of this methodology.
Over time, inbound marketing has become a philosophy widely adopted by companies of all sizes and industries. It has proven to be an effective strategy for generating leads, improving brand visibility, increasing customer loyalty and ultimately driving business growth.
Today, inbound marketing continues to evolve with the development of new technologies, changes in search algorithms and the emergence of new social media platforms. However, its essence remains the same: deliver value to customers through relevant and personalized content, and build strong long-term relationships.
Difference between inbound
and outbound marketing
The main difference lies in the approach. While outbound marketing actively seeks to interrupt consumers through unsolicited ads and messages, inbound marketing focuses on engaging potential customers organically, offering quality content and solutions to their needs.
To understand the topic a little better, these are the key differentiators:
Inbound marketing success stories
Numerous companies have achieved success through well-executed inbound marketing strategies. From small startups to large corporations, those who understand and apply the principles of inbound marketing have managed to generate engagement, increase conversions and build lasting relationships with their customers.
Here are some inbound marketing success stories and best practices:
- HubSpot
This is one of the best examples of a successful company that has successfully used this methodology to grow. It offers a variety of marketing and sales tools, and uses its own software to attract leads through blogs, downloadable content, webinars, and social media. HubSpot also offers a wealth of free educational resources that help businesses understand and apply inbound marketing best practices.
- Buffer
This company offers social media management tools. They use inbound marketing effectively through their blog, where they share tips and strategies on social media and digital marketing. Their focus on transparency and high-quality content generation has helped them build a loyal customer base. Check them out! - Airbnb
This company uses user-generated content, such as travel stories and experiences, to attract new users to its platform. It also uses SEO strategies to make sure its content is easily discovered by people looking for accommodation. - Neil Patel
Neil Patel is a digital marketing expert who has built his personal brand through blogs, videos, podcasts, and social media to share his knowledge on marketing and entrepreneurship. His focus on creating high-quality content and his ability to reach his audience has made him a benchmark in the digital marketing industry. - Zapier
This platform allows the integration of different applications and online services. It uses inbound marketing through its blog, where it shares use cases, tutorials, and guides on how to use its platform effectively. It also uses email marketing and social media to keep users engaged and educated about new features and updates.
What did you learn after reading all this?
The secret lies in creating high-quality, relevant content for your audience, understanding their needs and challenges, and providing useful and valuable solutions through various digital marketing channels.
Inbound marketing best practices
Through quality content creation, SEO optimization and customer-centric focus, these companies have succeeded in not only engaging their audience, but also converting them into loyal brand advocates.
Read the following recommendations on what to do:
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