What is an Inbound Marketing Strategy? – Full Guide, FAQs, Advice & More
Table of Contents
We’ve always stressed how you have to keep your audience’s needs in mind if you want your brand to succeed.
That’s why we’re excited about this post since that’s what inbound marketing is all about.
If you can develop an effective inbound marketing strategy, it can keep your brand relevant for many years to come.
Quick Summary
In this post, we will discuss:
- What is inbound marketing?
- How does it compare to other marketing strategies?
- The different types of inbound marketing strategies
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What is an Inbound Marketing Strategy?
Inbound marketing strategies involve creating content that directly addresses the needs of your target audience. It serves to clear any concerns that they have as well as provide solutions to any problems they may face.
It’s important for you to recognize that as a brand, your success is entirely dependent on your customers. Your customers will remain your customers as long as you continue to serve them and provide value for them.
That’s where inbound marketing strategies excel.
You can create many different types of content as part of your inbound marketing strategy. The point is to provide that content to different types of audience segments that are at different stages of the buyer journey with your brand.
Find the complete guide on how to create marketing strategies, HERE.
The ultimate purpose of inbound marketing strategies is to create long-lasting relationships with customers.
You can utilize inbound marketing strategies in three different ways:
- Attract: This refers to content that intrigues potential customers. It’s content that will intrigue them and solidify your position as a trusted, credible source of information within your niche. This will encourage audiences to interact with your brand.
- Engage: This involves providing insights and communicating how your product or service can meet their unmet needs. When audiences realize that your brand can address their pain points, they’ll be much more likely to buy from you.
- Delight: This is after a customer has made a purchase from you. Provide them with help and customer support so that they can use your product or service to its fullest potential.
If you are able to satisfy customers at different stages within their buyer journeys in this way, many of them will become loyal customers. As a result, they may tell their friends and peers about your brand and bring new prospects to you.
Difference Between Inbound and Outbound Marketing
We’ve already established how inbound marketing involves intriguing the customer so that they interact with your content and possibly make a purchase from you. An example of this would be to create content that resonates with them and pushes them to engage with it.
It’s also a strategy that focuses on building long-lasting and long-term relationships between your brand and your customers.
On the other hand, outbound marketing involves actively reaching out to customers and trying to understand how interested they are in your product or service. This can include marketing campaigns, door-to-door sales as well as cold-calling and cold-emailing.
Find out more about marketing strategy and its types, HERE.
Outbound marketing is more concerned with increasing sales and bringing new customers to a brand. On the other hand, inbound marketing focuses more on increasing brand awareness and recognition. It’s more concerned with the brand image than it is with sales.
Difference Between Inbound and Content Marketing
It can be very easy to confuse inbound and content marketing since both of them involve content creation. Not only that but both of them also involve creating content that can provide value to potential customers and encourage them to engage with your brand.
That being said, there definitely is a slight difference between inbound marketing and content marketing.
Content marketing is a specific marketing strategy that solely focuses on providing helpful content to potential customers. This can include informational blog posts, Q&A live streams, FAQs, and more.
On the other hand, inbound marketing contains content that encourages consumers to interact with your brand. Examples of this would be sign-up forms, contests, giveaways, social media posts that ask questions with open-ended answers, etc.
For example, if you write an informational post on how to use your product correctly, that’s content marketing.
On the other hand, if you include incentivized email newsletter sign-up forms, surveys and other effective CTAs with your content, then that would be an example of inbound marketing.
Different Types of Inbound Marketing Strategies
We mentioned above how you can use inbound marketing strategies in three different ways: To attract your audience, to engage your audience, and delight your audience.
Let’s delve deeper into these three types and check out how exactly they work:
Inbound Attraction Marketing Strategies
As you can probably imagine, marketing strategies that serve to attract your audience are closely linked to content creation.
Examples of content that will resonate with your target audience include any informational content that addresses their pain points and concerns.
These could be:
- Informational posts on how they can use your product or service effectively
- How your product or service can solve different problems and meet certain unmet needs of your target audience
- Past customer testimonials
- Informational posts regarding giveaways, limited discounts, and the latest offers
Learn more about what is target marketing and how you can make the most of it by clicking HERE.
To achieve a higher level of reach and discoverability, it’s very important that you conduct search engine optimization on all of your content. Ensure that you have an extensive SEO strategy to ensure your content ranks higher on search engines.
An effective SEO strategy will take into account different keywords and phrases that your audience typically searches for. You can include these keywords within your content in an organic way to ensure that your page shows up when they search for those keywords.
Inbound Engagement Marketing Strategies
When it comes to inbound marketing strategies that deal with customer engagement, you must pay close attention to how your team deals with leads.
It’s important that your customer services and sales teams know how to handle customers and encourage long-term relationships with your brand.
When you deal with potential customers, ensure that you provide them with information on how your brand can continually help them in the long term.
Focus closely on how sales and customer support representatives deal with customer calls and what information they disseminate.
Ensure that you sell a solution to customers rather than a product. Make sure that you effectively communicate what unmet needs your product or service can meet for them. You must also ensure that you communicate how you can do this better than your competitors.
Social media marketing techniques are also something that can invite customers to engage with your brand.
You can make social media posts that invite customers to engage with your content. Examples of these can be giveaways, contests, and even just posts that ask simple questions.
Make sure that these questions have open-ended answers so that you can have meaningful conversations with your customers about your product or service. You can even ask for suggestions and improvements that could be made.
When you market your brand on social media, always ensure that you keep it concise and well-formatted.
You can also include a link to your brand website and online store in order to bring traffic to it.
It’s a good idea to use a link shortener any time you include a link within social media posts as that can keep things short and sweet.
To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register yourself and log in.
Step 1: Once you log in, you’ll be at the dashboard page.
You can check out analytics and metrics from previously shortened links on the dashboard page. This is something you should always monitor to determine which strategies are working and which ones aren’t.
As for link shortening, you can do that with the fast shortener box located at the top of the dashboard page.
Step 2: Copy and paste the URL that you want to shorten into the fast shortener box and you should automatically be taken to the next page.
If you aren’t, click on the Shorten button to manually go to the next page.
Step 3: On the next page, you can copy the shortened URL that is provided and use it wherever you want for your inbound marketing tactics.
Inbound Delighting Marketing Strategies
As you may have already guessed, delighting strategies deal with customers long after they have made a purchase from your brand. They serve to stay in touch with customers and ensure they remain loyal to your product or service.
For this, you would need a team of experts that would assist customers with any problems they may face with your product or service. This goes without saying that your team should know your product or service inside out.
You don’t want customer support representatives to come off as incompetent.
Apart from actual people, you can also consider setting up chatbots or surveys for existing customers. These chatbots can assist customers with different facets of your product or service.
For example, let’s assume that you just added a new feature to your product that your existing customers would like to take advantage of. However, it’s new to them and many of your customers don’t know how to get it to work.
You can program your chatbot with solutions to the common problems that customers are facing when they try to use the new feature.
How do you know what the common problems are?
Well, that’s where surveys come in. You can conduct surveys to become acquainted with the problems that customers are facing when they try to use that new feature.
With this information in mind, you can program the chatbot to provide solutions to customers.
Satisfaction surveys are also fairly common and can be an extremely effective tool for improvement. You can send these out a few months after a customer has made a purchase from your brand.
The purpose of the survey is to get the buyer’s thoughts on your product or service and whether or not they are satisfied with it. Ask for suggestions and any improvements that can be made.
Also, ask about any problems that the customer ran into while trying to use your product or service.
With the answers that you receive, you can tweak your product or service to ensure that the customers’ needs are heard.
When you make your customers feel heard, they will feel valued. As a result, they will not only stick with your brand but also recommend your brand to their friends and peers.
As you may already know, word-of-mouth is an extremely powerful marketing tool and in this way, you can bring new prospects to your brand.
Wrapping Things Up…
That’s how inbound marketing efforts can really provide a boost to your brand and ensure that you have loyal customers for many years to come.
Inbound marketing strategies are extremely important for any brand which is why you should definitely invest the time and resources to set them up properly.
Check out our blog for insights on effective marketing strategies with complete guides.
If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know in the comments section below.
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