What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the practice of bringing customers to you, rather than you trying to go to them. Its methodology is customer centric and typically includes SEO, blogging, videos, and valuable content. Traditional marketing is typically associated with cold calling, cold emails, and is disruptive in nature. Traditional marketing became so disruptive that customers slowly began shying away from marketers using these techniques, and in turn, lost companies a lot of money. It comes down to customers not wanting to be sold to, they want to be educated. Providing them value rather than showing off your services will go a long way in building trust and ultimately converting leads into business.

 

Whether you’re a B2B company or B2C, inbound marketing should be your go-to marketing strategy. Not to say traditional marketing doesn’t have its place, but it’s outdated. There are better ways to go about your marketing and I’m here to give you some tips on how to approach what should be your new marketing methodology.

The inbound marketing methodology is meant to engage, convert, close, and bring satisfaction to your customers.

So how do I do Inbound Marketing?

1.) Engage

Engage your potential customers by performing keyword research to determine what keywords they’re searching for and what will trigger their interest. Afterwards, focus on social publishing and blogging to create engagement based on your findings during keyword research. Blogging and social publishing is such an important to the inbound methodology due to the SEO benefits, brand awareness, and providing content that creates trust and builds relationships between you and your customers.

2.) Convert

Next, you’ll want to convert your visitors into leads by leveraging your blogs, social networks, and website. You can do this by creating incentive and placing calls-to-action. You can create landing pages with special offers, E-books, and forms to fill out so you collect the most important currency of all in this methodology, emails.

3.) Close

After you convert visitors into leads and gain their information, it’s time to close the sale. Ways of going about this according to the Inbound method is to incorporate your CRM, email marketing, and workflows to bring in the sale. Some leads will close right away and others may need more nurturing so be sure to segment these groups accordingly.

4.) Satisfaction

Once you close leads and turn them into sales, your job isn’t done yet. Actually, it should never be done. You have the sales and customers, but now you want to keep these customers for recurring revenue. You do this by incorporating surveys, reviews, and continuing to monitor your customers. That one customer and sale could turn into many more sales down the road thanks to inbound marketing and the relationships you create from it.

Final Thoughts

Customers want value. The days of traditional marketing is all but over. By providing value to your customers and nurturing those relationships, you will see better return from your investment. Use the inbound marketing methodology by creating relevant content that guides your customer through their buyer journey and into your door!

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