Inbound Marketing, the key to a successful business
Inbound Marketing or attraction marketing is a methodology that tries to combine different marketing techniques and non-intrusive advertising.
This methodology is an approach that aims to grow the company by creating meaningful and lasting relationships with consumers, prospects and customers. It basically consists of providing them with elements that allow them to achieve their goals in each and every one of the stages of the journey they take with the business.
The main purpose of inbound marketing is to capture the attention of a potential customer, accompanying him from the beginning of the purchase process until he makes the final transaction.
And outbound marketing? Do we know what it is?
Differences between inbound and outbound marketing
The first thing we have to differentiate these two concepts:
- Inbound marketing is a commercial methodology whose objective is to attract customers by creating valuable content
- Outbound marketing (traditional marketing) is more direct, showing the public content that sometimes does not interest them or does not solve their real problems
Where was the terminology first heard?
In 2005 Brian Halligan, co-founder of Hubspot spoke for the first time of the term “Inbound Marketing”.
“People don’t want marketers intruding on their lives, or salespeople harassing them. They want you to help them.”
Thus, the fundamental idea of the “Inbound” strategy for online businesses is to focus on the customer and not on the product or service.
What exactly is Inbound Marketing?
Internet advertising has gone from being a way for companies to communicate with potential customers, to consumers trying to put up barriers due to its poor segmentation and the little value it brings us.
However, Inbound Marketing is a methodology that approaches the user, adding value through the strategic use of different techniques.
Some of them can be:
- Content marketing
- Search engine advertising (Google Adwords)
- Social networks
- SEO Positioning
- Web analytics through the most relevant metrics
- Email marketing
- Optimized landing pages with calls to action
All this, always under the premise of giving the user attractive content that will finally lead him to carry out a transaction.
It can be said that Inbound Marketing has its main pillar in content marketing, but we should not think that it is the same.
While content marketing consists of developing a strategy to create and distribute attractive content for your users, Inbound Marketing goes further, using various techniques as we have indicated in the previous paragraph.
Inbound tries to ensure that a brand is found by its target audience when it is at the beginning of the purchase process.
How does Inbound Marketing work? Phases of the methodology
We are touching the tip of the iceberg of everything that the concept applied to the company entails; In our Marketing Degree, you will be able to expand more information and how to apply all this to your job.
We talk about the phases within inbound:
- Attraction: where we develop SEO, we use Blogs or Social Networks
- Conversion: we will apply CTA’s, landings, forms and content
- Closing: where we will have to streamline the process, build loyalty, create subscription content and perform e-mail marketing. At this stage, the key is to use what are called “lead nurturing” and “lead scoring”
- Satisfaction: where we ask the client to tell us about their experience, with surveys, on Networks (as in the attraction phase)
Today, even the smallest business with a limited audience applies marketing techniques, even if they don’t want to or don’t need to. As you can see, we have not mentioned the new trend of influencer marketing, what do you think of this new modality to attract customers?
