Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a set of strategies that aims to
voluntarily attract consumers to the company’s site. is it
contrary to traditional marketing and is based on the relationship with the
consumer instead of advertisements and interruptions.
What is Inbound Marketing
The concept of Inbound Marketing officially emerged in the United States and was
began to popularize from 2009, after the launch of the book
“Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs”, by
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.
Since then, Inbound Marketing exploded and every day more companies
different sizes are joining the method to conquer more clients,
generate more sales and strengthen your authority with the public.
In a free translation, the expression Inbound Marketing can be defined
as attraction marketing. The main difference between marketing
traditional – which we call Outbound Marketing – and Inbound is that,
in the second, the one looking for the company is the client, not the other way around.
That is, actions are carried out with the aim of attracting the customer
potential towards your blog or site and, from that attraction, it becomes
a whole relationship work with that client. That relationship develops
through personalized and authored content.
That content is a way to educate the public and potential customers
on the segment of your company, turn your company into a reference on
certain issue concerning your market and influence the decision of
purchase of future customers.
What is inbound marketing for?
Every year, the difference between the real and the virtual becomes more tenuous,
between offline and online. It is no longer said “access the internet”, because
the internet is already almost everywhere.
That is why all companies can use Inbound Marketing concepts
as method. They can be adapted and used in any company, using
content for entertainment/utilities and doing brand reinforcement.
Despite the slight difference, Inbound Marketing reached levels that the
traditional marketing failed to achieve. The main one is that in
Inbound Marketing the marketing area of the company is a center of
investment, not costs.
The reason for the above statement is that all Inbound actions
Marketing can be measured. It is possible to know exactly how many people
viewed, converted, or purchased in each campaign via
web analytics tools.
That is, having the knowledge of this important information,
campaigns can be optimized to have a better ROI (Return On
the investment).
For the same reason, the most innovative companies in the market have used the
Inbound Marketing aggressively as a marketing strategy. In sum, the
Inbound Marketing serves for 5 great actions:
-Increase the visibility of your business;
-Decrease the cost of acquiring your customers;
-Attract potential customers;
-Generate distinguished content;
-Optimize the sales process.
Inbound Marketing: why your company cannot be left out
Inbound Marketing has its advantages and brings results
The market is buying the idea of applying the Inbound methodology
Marketing, mainly because it is 62% cheaper than Marketing
conventional – or Outbound Marketing – that we were used to doing.
Not having an Attraction Marketing strategy for your company can
be a determining factor for you to stay behind your competitors
who are already applying the methodology.
We can demonstrate the advantages of Inbound through countless
success stories that we have already elaborated on our RD Station website.
We have successful cases of companies in the software segments,
health, education, legal, industry, services, real estate, ecommerce
and others.
The simple fact that people are always looking for solutions to
their problems in the search engines, reading more emails in
different devices and browsing more time on social networks are
prerogatives so that your company is not left out.
The stages of Inbound Marketing
The Inbound Marketing methodology follows a logical sequence of stages.
Any successful strategy must go through the following phases: Attract,
Convert, Relate, Sell and Analyze.
They are stages that complement each other intelligently. Let’s explain
each of them in detail below.
If you prefer, you can attend a video that explains what the
Inbound Marketing methodology
Attract
In Inbound Marketing, the equation is simple: a site without visits does not
generate leads. Without the Leads there are no sales and, consequently, you lose
every reason to work that strategy.
For this reason, the first stage of Inbound Marketing is «attract» and not
there is no doubt that it could not be different. The genius of that stage is
simple: instead of spending energy looking for people who might interest you
in your business/market, energy is spent on building something worth
legitimate attention and, in this way, many people are attracted who willingly
spontaneously would be interested in the subject. The result of that is to have a
public much more committed and really inclined to consume the product.
There are many ways to make that magic happen and you have to know a
little of each:
Blog
The blog is normally connected to a Marketing strategy of
Content, which is one of the main pillars of Inbound Marketing.
Contrary to what might seem, using a blog as a tool for
marketing is not just posting loose texts about your subject on a site.
You have to plan.
A well-done blog produces quality content based on your desired audience.
and in the stages of the purchasing processes in which that public occasionally
may be.
Despite this, having a blog does not only cover working and guiding the
user in the purchase process, but it is also about creating a relationship of
identification with your audience. Even because there you can address topics
looser, which on the site you would not normally be able to talk about.
Convert
The conversion stage fully complements the previous one: The visitor
you need to become a Lead in order to move forward in the purchase process.
In that context, when we speak of conversion, we refer to the action
of the user to pass on his information in exchange for a reward or benefit,
as an offer of rich material, which we will talk about next.
Having a site with many visits and no conversion is not advantageous in the
field of Inbound Marketing. There are several ways and elements that can
help you convert your visitors into leads. Here are some:
Creation of offers
One of the ways to make a visitor become a Lead is by
means of producing offers.
They can basically be classified into two categories:
Direct offers:
those that are most directly connected to the purchase,
such as quote requests, software demo, free trial,
among other;
Indirect offers:
those that, in general, are focused on phases
less advanced in the purchase process, that is, they have the objective of
educate and solve specific problems of the Leads. some formats
Common offerings are eBooks, webinars, tools, etc.
Be related
As we know, not all potential clients are at the moment of
make a purchase. When we look at each purchase process, we clearly see
that there are well-defined phases that must be respected to the point where a
person is “ready” to receive boarding.
To get an idea of the proportion in which they are found throughout the
process, Chet Holmes author of the book «The Ultimate Sales Machine», brings
the next approach
In short, only 3% of your potential market is looking for a solution,
that is, it is in the Purchase Decision phase.
By bringing that approach to the day to day, within a base of Leads, we can
consider that the scenario is not very different: from the production
of content focused on various problems and phases of purchase, we attract
also Leads in various phases.
That is where the relationship phase in Inbound Marketing comes in: through
of some strategies that we will present below, we identify the
phases in which the Leads are and we make them advance in the
process, that is, we accelerate the purchase process.
Email marketing
Although it is not the fashion issue in Digital Marketing, Email
Marketing continues to present itself, and increasingly, as a channel that offers
great ROI (return on investment).
The reason is that, for a few years, email has evolved a lot.
and, by doing a good Digital Marketing job, you get a
good level of segmentation of the campaigns, that is, it is achieved
identify the interest of your Leads, segment them and send only
relevant messages.
Another reason for its effectiveness is the ROI that channel has proven: the cost
to reach your entire base is less when compared to other means, such as
social networks, and each campaign, if done well, tends to bring
palpable and short-term results (according to the offer).
How to sell the Inbound Marketing service
