Marketing is more complicated than people used to think because it involves a lot of elements that people usually do not understand. But, sometimes the failure of the marketing of the companies is more because they do not take the time to find the best marketing options for their companies.
It happens because with the increase of the digital era thousands of companies think that the simple fact to have a Facebook account is what they need. In this process, they ignore that there are different methodologies and types of marketing we can use according to what we want.
Marketing is more than only create a campaign on a social network because it is about knowing your product or service and know your audience. If you are not able to do this, you always are going to have problems with your marketing strategies.
For this reason, we want to talk to you about one of the most popular types of marketing, inbound marketing. It is the main reason why we make this easy guide so you can understand unbounded marketing and count on all the tools to apply it to your business.
Knowing inbound marketing, you are going to be able to apply all the elements and tools of this kind of marketing in your business. It involves the growth of your business and the increase of your earnings for the good use of inbound marketing.
What is inbound marketing?
The first step every company should follow before implement any new methodology is knowing more about it. For this reason, we want to tell you what is inbound marketing and the main features that make it different from other kinds of marketing.
Inbound marketing was born from the minds of Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2005 like a friendlier kind of marketing. Inbound marketing uses different kinds of strategies and tools to attract the attention of the audience with the creation of content.
However, this content is not each kind of content because it has to be creative, unique, and useful to catch the attention of potential customers. In some way, inbound marketing takes the hand of the customers from the beginning of the process of buy until the end and beyond.
The main goal of inbound marketing is to sell a product or service, but this process is not intrusive. It means that the company tries to use content and different strategies to attract the audience, convert them into potential customers, and then make them your promotors.
As you can notice, more than a magic trick to increase your sales, inbound marketing is a friendly way to get more clients without use annoying strategies that end on spam. For sure, inbound marketing requires more work and time than other marketing types, but the results are more prolonged.
Elements of the inbound marketing methodology.
The inbound marketing works under a methodology with different elements to make it work. The consecution of these elements is which make inbound marketing something special.
Depending on the sources you look for knowledge about inbound marketing, you are going to get different results. Once organizations say that inbound marketing is based on five main elements. Those elements are:
- Attract the traffic.
- The conversion.
- The marketing automation.
- The loyalty.
- The analysis.
However, another organization describes three elements of the inbound marketing. Those elements are:
- Attract the audience.
- Interact with the audience.
- Delight the audience.
If we analyze both elements of inbound marketing, we can notice that they are almost the same. The only difference is that the first model divides the elements of the second one. For this reason, we want to explain to you the second model because we think that synthesize better what is based the inbound marketing.
In this way, it is going to be easier for you to remember and apply only try elements or steps to your business. The key to inbound marketing is to make the thing simple. But unique and personalize.
Attract the right audience.
The first element or step of inbound marketing is attracting the right audience. We cannot forget that inbound marketing-based its activities on the customers and not on the product. In this way, to be able to attract the right audience, first, we need to determine which is the audience we want to attract.
The selection of your audience is going to be vital in the process of attracting potential clients because, according to the audience, you decide what is better for your business; you can use different strategies.
After you choose your audience, you have to start to work on creating the proper content to attract them. There are different media you can use to catch your audience like social media, independent blogs, even videos on YouTube.
But, you should remember that all the content is not based in promote your product or service, if not on give to the audience content that they would like to read. With this objective, you can reach it is a solution for a common problem.
For example, if your business sells electronic devices, you can write content on a blog about how different devices work or a top of the best electronic devices according to different necessities.
For sure, another way to catch the audience is making a tutorial because there is a big part of the audience that can have confusion or problems at the time to use a product. In this way, you are going to get your goal which is to attract the audience.
However, create the content is just part of the work on the process to attract the audience because we also have to apply the SEO. The SEO is Search Engine Optimization which is a process by which the writer finds the way to be on the first list of the search engine in an organic way.
To get a good optimization of the content, you need to use the proper keywords, unique images, and the best meta title and description. In the beginning, it could be a little bit difficult to find the right keywords and all that, but several pages offer you a service to find the right keywords.
Besides, you have to know that post just one blog, video, or another kind of content is not enough. You should post even a daily post to do not lose the attention of your audience. If you do good this step, you are not going to have any problem attracting your audience.
Interact with your audience.
The second step is based on the interaction with your audience because there is nothing worse than your audience tries to get in contact with you and find an empty place. We can separate the interaction with the audience into two parts.
The first part is based on a simple interaction with your audience on the different social media of your business. Your no one is a secret that people most of the time have some doubts or opinions to do about your content or product. It is the moment when you must interact with them and guide you to the purchase of your product or service.
To make you understand better the importance of the interaction with the audience, we want to give you an example. Let’s suppose that you post an article on your blog about the importance to keep the keyboard of your laptop clean, and you share it on Facebook.
When some user read the article felt curiosity and make you a question like is it happen with any laptop? At this moment, you have the opportunity to get a new customer, so always have activated the notifications of your social media.
You can tell to this person the information like “yes, it is important to any laptop” or “yes, it happens to all laptops, but there are some laptops that have protection systems” and there is the moment where you can tell that if she/he is interested to know more about these laptops, she/he can visit your website.
In this way, you are going to have a potential buyer on your website, and then they can subscribe to your website to keep having more information. It is when the second part of the interaction comes to the action.
The second part of the interaction happens when the users that visit your website subscribe to it. It will let you create a database to convert all those subscriptions into potential customers. With this database, you can send emails to your subscribers with useful information or promotions to impulse them to acquire your products or services.
In this way, eventually, those people who at the beginning only follow you for your content, are going to start to follow you for your products or services.
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Delight your customers.
The third part of inbound marketing is about delighting your customers. Despite it could sound like something an innovator, his part of the inbound marketing is part of the old fashion customer attention.
From the beginning of the times, on business always tell things like customers are always right, and in some way this mantra is right. After all, every business depends on the receptivity of the clients.
The audience can back you up and support your business. For this reason, we have to try to always keep them happy. It is why there are different strategies or techniques that you can use to check the satisfaction of your clients.
However, it does not only involve the satisfaction with the product if not with the whole service. From the approach of the client to your website, he/she needs to receive the best attention. For this reason, we can create surveys about their opinion about the service you give them.
But, you also can send these surveys with the pass of the time to know if they are satisfied with the product they acquire from your business. Besides, the fact that a client has bought some product does not mean that your work end. After all, all those clients can buy products of your business again and be promotors of your brand.
It has happened to all of us that a friend recommends us some brand because she/he tried and they loved. In this way, you can create an image of the business of your brand around a good product and good service.
The key is to concentrate all our efforts on our clients and not on our product. If we are sure of the high quality of our product, we only need to present it to the world, and inbound marketing is one of the best ways to do it.
Differences between inbound marketing and outbound marketing.
At this moment, you already know all you need to know about inbound marketing. However, we had not talked about outbound marketing which is the opposite of inbound marketing.
For this reason, it is essential to handle the difference between these two types of marketing to avoid confuse it. The first difference we already told you, the inbound marketing is based on the customers while outbound marketing is based on the product or service of the company. It creates a lot of disadvantages around outbound marketing.
Besides, outbound marketing is old fashion style of marketing because it only uses traditional media like radio and television while inbound marketing is open to use other media like digital media.
Also, in outbound marketing, there is not a chance to interact with the audience in real-time as we can do on inbound marketing. For sure, this real-time interaction also involves the analysis of the performance of the different campaigns.
In this way, inbound marketing is an improved version of outbound marketing because its creators notice that it was necessary to change the approach we had been using. However, at the end of the day, the decision about which marketing is better for your company is all yours.