We live in the era of Marketing 3.0 – the value-centric marketing. Thinking as a consumer, not a marketer is now more important than ever before. Marketing 3.0 has to meet consumers’ both emotional and rational needs. Your marketing strategy needs to center on consumers, not on your company.
What is Inbound Marketing and why do you need it?
Inbound Marketing focuses on building relationships with prospects by providing the valuable content they are looking for, engaging them on all online platforms. They will eventually become customers, and even more, promoters of the brand.
Adopting an Inbound Strategy means getting to know your customers to have a complete picture of their needs, preferences, behavior and offer them the solutions, advice and content they need. The marketing strategy has to be consumer centered. And it does pay off - according to HubSpot, Inbound Marketing cost per lead is approximately 60% lower than Outbound.
Inbound Marketing Methodology – The Steps
- Attract customers
- This starts with great and unique content, meaning blogging. The more blog posts you have, the higher the chances to rank higher in search engines.
- Social media – the next step is to share your valuable content and other relevant information from your industry via social media, online communities and directories. Also, spend time on these social networks to discuss with prospects.
- Pages – optimize your pages both for your ideal buyers and for search engines. After you created unique and relevant content to promote, focus on SEO – otherwise, it won’t bring the value you are looking for.
- Convert visitors into leads
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- Calls-to-Action – add as many buttons or links as possible to encourage your visitors to take action, meaning downloading an eBook or a white paper or attending a webinar. In this stage it is highly recommended to offer your audience more specialized content, including videos, white papers, case studies, tutorials.
- Landing pages – when a visitor clicks a CTA, he should be directed to a landing page. Make sure you have clear, concise landing pages and that they meet the visitors expectations. The visitor will submit on a landing page the information that the sales team needs in order to start a conversation with them.
- Forms – visitors become leads when they fill out a form and submit their information. Make it easy and simple!
- Contacts – keep your database well organized and always try to extend it.
- Help visitors become leads
- Email – send several email with focused information and relevant content to build trust with a lead and help him become more ready to buy.
- Lead Nurturing - use software that allows you to nurture your prospects and educate potential customers about your products and services by sending useful information in a continuo’s stream. Organize your contacts or database so you send every category the type of content they need – it is important to have a personal interaction with everyone. Use software tools which allow you to customize your emails with as much personal information as possible, including name, surname or headline. Add to marketing automation the human touch.
- Charm your customers
- Smart CTAs – think about your customer and try to understand the point in the buying cycle where he is now. Maybe he needs more personalized content, such as a case study to better understand how your solution would fit his business. Try to offer the audience this kind of personalized content. This is a great way to build consumer loyalty.
- Social media – at this point, you can use social media platforms to provide real-time customer service, not only promote your content.
Have you integrated Inbound Marketing Methodology to your marketing strategy? What are the benefits of this approach? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
