So we’ve been preaching endlessly about Inbound Marketing, but where do you start? Fret not, we’ve put together this short guide for you.
What is Inbound Marketing All About?
To put it simply, Inbound Marketing is marketing with a magnet (and not a megaphone as in outbound marketing). You focus on creating content that educates your target prospects, provides value, and answers their concerns or questions.
By positioning yourself as a reliable source of information so your prospects can come to your website on their own terms, you can build their trust in your brand and create a steady stream of interested prospects you can convert into leads and customers.
Source: SparkEvolution
Create content to give value to the reader, not rudely interrupt the reader.
Why Inbound Marketing?
You’re reading this and going “okay, content is good, but why should I adopt this methodology in the first place?”
There has been a fundamental shift in power from the marketer to the consumers. In the 20th century, the marketing and advertising industry was dominated with interruptive advertising.
Source: Amazon
Think cold calls, spam emails, pop up advertising, giant billboards, TV commercials, etc.
But now in this current day and age, consumers have tools to evade interruptive messaging.
- 26% of desktop users and 15% of mobile users use ad blockers (Source)
- Many countries have laws protecting people from spam email (Source)
- 2/3 of young millennials use an ad blocker to watch TV (Source)
- Individuals can register with the Do Not Call Registry in Singapore to block unwanted telemarketing calls and SMS messages
The signals are loud and clear: consumers don’t want to hear messages they don’t want or ask to hear! Time to reconsider your outbound marketing campaigns.
Furthermore, with the Internet, consumers actively search on Google for answers to their problems or information that they want to find. This is where Inbound Marketing can come in for a win-win marketing experience. When you align your published content with your customers’ interests, you can attract the types of people who are most likely to become your customers.
How Inbound Marketing Works
The Inbound Methodology can be summed up in 4 steps:
Source: HubSpot
1. Attract strangers and turn them into website visitors
2. Convert website visitors into leads
3. Close leads into customers through lead nurturing
4. Delight customers and turn them into natural evangelists of your brand
When prospects search for something on the Internet, they usually follow the following Buyer’s Journey. Consider the graphic below and corresponding questions.
Source: HubSpot
From HubSpot:
1. Awareness Stage: Buyer realizes they have a problem
2. Consideration Stage: Buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it
3. Decision Stage: Buyer chooses a solution
In a nutshell, Inbound Marketing is using all these different channels to help your company provide content in the right place and at the right time, to move people along the buyer’s journey and hopefully land you sales!
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