5 Fundamental Aspects of Inbound Marketing

 The fundamental aspect of Inbound Marketing :  As a business doer in the ever-growing digital marketing era, you need to continuously seek for methods and strategies that help you skyrocket sales and grow your profits. Many have jumped into deploying campaigns, impressive advertisements, and promotions to drive shoppers’ psychology, gain a lot of public attraction and then, facilitate people’s spending.

Everything is fine as it’s essential for any business operation. However, only focusing on short-time and period commercials and marketing is not efficient at all. People are more likely to engage with a brand and seek out for its information themself. In fact, 90% of searchers haven’t made their minds up about a brand before starting their searches. 

After all, the only thing that engraves on the customers’ mind is the value of your products, your business. Therefore, besides outbound techniques, it’s critically essential to invest in inbound marketing – a stable and long-lasting, useful way to grow your business. 

What is Inbound Marketing? 

To understand better about inbound marketing, we recommend you to refer to the definition from Hubspot: “Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to customers. Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing forms connections customers are looking for and solves problems they already have.”

Instead of interrupting audiences’ flow of activities to get attention, inbound marketing focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting the audience to build trust and grow business. When it comes to inbound marketing, there is a flywheel you need to remember: Attract – Engage – Delight. 

Use inbound marketing to attract: At this step, you need to keep in mind that content is the key to your business success. It’s crucial to focus on creating and developing content that customers are looking for. That content must be stick to solve certain problems of customers. There is no point in writing only or too much about your products. Instead, telling the readers how your solutions can solve their challenges and the reliable results of those solutions. You can deliver content via multiple forms such as blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, ebooks, social media, etc. Besides, deploy SEO strategies to optimize your content and reach more target audience. 

Use inbound marketing to engage: You need to ensure that you are communicating with leads and customers in a way that they want to build a long-term relationship with you. When engaging with customers, remember to inject information about the value your business can bring for them into the conversion. It’s better to be solutions selling rather than product selling. 

Use inbound marketing to delight: Use delighting inbound strategies to make sure your customers are happy, satisfied, and supported even after they make a purchase. It’s essential to invest in your after-sale services. It’s the time you become supporters and advisors to assist customers whenever they have demands. You can incorporate all the tools you use to connect with customers like live chat, chatbot, or social media to thoroughly listen to what your customers are concerning. 

5 Fundamental Aspects of Inbound Marketing

1. Contact

Having a database of who you are targeting, marketing to, and selling to is essential. Gathering contacts is not just how you keep in touch with customers. It means digging deep into customers’ information, concerns, and shopping behaviors to build a useful database. Afterward, segmenting them into different groups based on their specifications and your suitable products. It helps you determine customers’ demands and needs effectively.

Businessman hand holding wooden cube block with DATA business word on table background. Database, Financial and marketing concepts

2. Buyer’s Persona

Already get customers’ databases and understand them at a certain level? It’s not enough. The game continues with the requirements of identifying precisely the right person to attract and can be your happy customers. 

A powerful weapon that helps you win in this round is the buyer’s persona. It’s created based on the real data collected from the customers’ demographics, behaviours, motivations, and goals. You will understand your leads and customers at a deeper level. Ask yourself some questions that lead you to figure out the features of your customers. When you know every individual has different shopping preferences, it’s easier for you to find a way more specialized to create and execute your marketing strategies. 

3. Buyer’s Journey

Every element you find out in the buyer’s persona is closely related to the buyer’s journey.  A typical buyer’s journey can include three stages: Awareness – Consideration – Decision. 

During the Awareness stage, your prospects identify challenges and problems in their business or a new goal they want to achieve. They may be stuck in ranking the priority of their goals and challenges. To understand what customers go through at this stage, ask yourself questions: “How do your buyers describe their goals or challenges? How do your buyers can realize their goals or challenges? How do they determine which should be priority: goals or challenges? 

At the Consideration stage, your prospects already define their goal or challenge precisely and decide to address it. They start searching for information about possible solutions through a variety of channels such as search engines, friend references, or consulting agency. Next, they evaluate and compare different methods, solutions that are feasible to pursue their goal or deal with the problem. 

Lastly, in the Decision stage, after careful considerations of all relevant factors, they decide to choose a final solution that is the most suitable and effective. 

4. Content

It’s not exaggerated to say that content is the most imperative factor in inbound marketing. Your content creation will come in useful if it provides what your customers are interested in and as a result, empower your inbound marketing to convert more prospects into happy, satisfied customers. 

One of the outstanding effects of content is that it can turn your audience into the promoter. Once the audience gains value from what you deliver, they are more likely to spread their positive words about your company to others. It increases your business’s presence, brand awareness, and build a strong relationship with customers. 

5. Goals

It’s difficult to measure the result of your effort if you do not set a particular goal. A well-defined goal is more like a magnetic needle that guides you in the whole process. Because inbound marketing is a long-term journey, you can not achieve what you want overnight. Setting reasonable goals from the start helps you know at which stage you are doing right or wrong and what you need to do to reach your initial goals as soon as possible. 

Conclusion

To stay competitive in the ever-changing marketing landscape, you need to create inbound marketing campaigns that bring your brand into your customers’ context. Don’t just hang on fixed methods and techniques people are saying online, and you need to be creative to expand the effectiveness of those methods as well as leave your own mark on the inbound marketing landscape. You should be able to solve customers’ questions, address their pain points, offer practical solutions, and generate fresh, original content.