How an Inbound Marketing Strategy Benefits Business

What is Inbound Marketing?

Does your marketing create powerful customer experiences that increase your brand value and grow your business? If not, it’s time for a refresher in inbound marketing!

Simply put, inbound marketing seeks to draw your customer into a relationship with your brand as they discover and engage with your content and your business. Rand Fishkin of Moz and SparkToro describes it as a flywheel, and a “continuously improving set of repeatable, tactical investments that scale with decreasing friction.”

An inbound strategy relies on a foundation of high-quality content that attracts potential customers’ attention.

By paying attention to how people interact with your content, you develop your understanding of their needs and a deeper connection. The focus is on building relationships by being of service, solving their problems, and creating great customer experiences for them to enjoy.

If you think about it, it’s an approach that mirrors how you conduct business with your existing customers. People trust your company’s expertise and value the solutions you provide for them. When you do an excellent job, they talk about you and refer more business your way.

You should aim to create the same experience with your own marketing.

If the golden rule is to ‘show, don’t tell’ - with inbound marketing you’re demonstrating your value and expertise. It’s a way for potential customers to try before they buy, and a way to show people who do buy how much you value them.

What is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? It’s simple - outbound marketing does the opposite. It pushes your offer out to the customer.

In the digital marketing space, this might mean using paid advertising - such as PPC ads, social media advertising, and boosting posts - to get your message under people’s noses.

These more disruptive techniques can steer your audience towards content they ultimately find useful, but the customer doesn’t initiate the connection. If your marketing efforts are poorly targeted and not what people are looking for, your ads won’t hit home. And nobody wants wasted ad spend or to irritate their customers with irrelevant content.

That said, both strategies are valid and have a place in your digital marketing playbook. Used together to build relationships and keep your brand top of mind, you can make customers, and even raving fans, out of strangers.

The Benefits of an Inbound Marketing Strategy

We all know B2B buying journeys are complex. They typically involve longer timelines and multiple stakeholders. Studies of B2B buyers’ behaviour show that your customer has a lot of jobs to do before they ever consider accepting your invitation for a call or demo, or contacting your sales team.

An inbound marketing strategy creates opportunities for you to connect with buyers at each stage of the buying process. From fully defining their issue and shortlisting potential solutions, to evaluating for best-fit, you can build your case for being their trusted partner.

• 56% of respondents listed web searches as one of the first three resources that inform them when researching solutions.

• 65% mentioned access to relevant content as a top criteria they look for when visiting a potential solution provider’s website.

• 79% of respondents indicated that a vendor’s content had a significant impact on their buying decisions.

Source: 2021 DemandGen B2B Buyers Survey.

What makes inbound marketing important, especially to B2B businesses, is this ability to enter into conversation with prospects without a hard sell. When your services are an investment that require the buy-in of people from across the client business, you want to give buyers the space to educate and qualify themselves.

By the time you have a sales conversation, you should be confident that they already know you’re a great fit and are invested in what you can offer them.

The Stages of Inbound Marketing

The three pillars of inbound marketing create a comprehensive framework for thinking about your brand relationships. These stages form a virtuous circle, with delighted customers becoming brand ambassadors who draw more potential customers to your brand.

1 - Attract

Aim: To increase your visibility and brand awareness with your target audience. From here, you can establish yourself as an important advisor who people want to pay attention to.

How: Understand how people find you and create more opportunities for them to do so.

• Create valuable blog posts and focus on search engine optimisation. Make sure your content is rich in the keywords your potential customers are using to search online.

• Share your content with your network and on social media, using the same platforms and hashtags people in your niche use to create community.

• Use visually arresting and engaging formats that stop the scroll and encourage people to dwell on your content. Think videos, infographics, and carousel posts.

• When creating videos, post them on the world’s 2nd biggest search engine - YouTube - and repurpose them on social media platforms.

• Aim for content that is so useful or entertaining, people can’t resist sharing it.

• Encourage your employees to become advocates to increase your reach.

• Amp up your social media presence and have a ‘go live’ strategy.

2 - Engage

Aim: To create engagement with visitors to your website and social media channels so you can get to know them better. This helps you to present them with insights and solutions that are relevant to their needs.

How: Think about the jobs they need to do and what content or experiences you can provide in exchange for their contact details.

• Make sure your website is optimised for lead generation.

• Create premium gated content that people can access by filling out an opt-in form on dedicated landing pages.

• Help your buyer to complete the jobs they need to do. Offer in-depth content. Think original research, webinars, case studies, and truly excellent thought leadership.

• Consider the needs of different members of the buying committee.

• Make sure you never miss a beat by using automated workflows to keep evolving your relationships.

• Track your customer relationships. Learn what people need and then make it your mission to provide it for them.

3 - Delight

Aim: providing help and support to empower your customers to find success with their purchase.

How: Pay avid attention to the needs of your customers and vow to go at least one better than any of the competition.

• Create opportunities for your customers to participate in and co-create your brand.

• Consider ways to transform your website into a platform for deeper experiences.

• Design irresistible online events and experiences.

• Understand the needs of new customers and design a client onboarding experience that generates rave reviews.

• Use account based marketing techniques to retain and expand existing accounts.

How to Spend Your Inbound Marketing Budget

Content Strategy and Content Creation

Clearly, without content there is no inbound marketing.

Unless you’re a brand new start up, chances are you’re not starting from scratch. You most likely have a website and a social media presence.

If you have those two things, you’re already producing content. The question is whether you’re being intentional and strategic in its development and execution.

Marketing Automation

If inbound marketing is a flywheel, data is what greases it.

Every time your customer interacts with your business, you have an extra data point. With each click on your website or like on a social post, every downloaded white paper or conversation with a member of your team, you learn more.

Marketing automation helps you to make sense of that data. It allows you to see what is working, and where to introduce changes to reduce friction and improve the customer experience. It integrates every node of your online presence so you have a complete picture of each lead.

In short, it powers a more iterative and agile approach to marketing, and a strategy that is created in dialogue with your customers.

This is what gives you the freedom to be responsive, creative and experimental and the power to delight.

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We would love to have a conversation about how your marketing can create magnetic experiences that attract, engage, and delight. Get in touch to find out how we can help.