Marketing 101: Inbound Marketing

We’ve talked a little about this in some of our past posts, like Digital Marketing 101: Digital Marketing vs Inbound Marketing and Marketing 101: An Introduction To The Different Types Of Marketing. But, because inbound marketing is all the rage right now, we thought we’d dedicate an entire post to it. 

What is Inbound Marketing?

Okay, first things first. Let’s just briefly recap the definition of inbound marketing. The inbound marketing experts over at HubSpot define inbound marketing as a marketing strategy that uses digital marketing assets to attract, engage, and delight customers online with the ultimate goal being that this nurturing of leads will eventually lead to sales. 

Goals of Inbound Marketing

While the ultimate goal of inbound marketing is to get leads to eventually convert into sales, the immediate goals are quite different because inbound marketing is all about letting people come to you. It’s not about advertising to potential customers. And, once these potential leads do find your business, it’s important to nurture them until they choose to become customers. 

Goals of inbound marketing include:

• Attract
• Engage
• Delight

Attract

Inbound marketing is all about attracting high-quality leads to your company’s website. The best way to attract leads is to put out engaging content that utilizes SEO strategies, like:

• Blogs
• Newsletters
• Social media
• Landing pages
• Ebooks
• Webinars
• Videos
• How-to guides
• White papers
• Infographics

You want to make sure this content provides value to your readers. And, when creating this content, you need to make sure that you are using SEO keywords and phrases so your pieces will organically appear on the search engine results pages (SERPs). And, the higher you appear on the SERPs, the more traffic your site will get. According to Forbes, the top listing on Google’s SERP receives 33% of the traffic, and the second listing gets 17%.

Engage

Once you get these prospects to your website, you want to engage with them, so they become actual leads. Simple ways to engage with these prospects is to make sure all of your published content has a CTA or a sign-up form, so site visitors can opt into your email campaigns or to receive your newsletters. You can also include a clickable version of your phone number, so prospects can easily call your company. 

According to HubSpot, you can also engage with your prospects by “presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals.”

Delight

Once a prospect has converted into a lead or even a customer, you want to make sure you continue to delight them. You can delight leads and continue to nurture your relationship with them by continuing to offer specialized or personalized content. You can even send this content to them via email or newsletter. 

And, once a lead becomes a customer, it is important to keep delighting them so they will stay customers. According to HubSpot, it’s really important that companies 

“help and support to empower customers to find success with their purchase.”

Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)

Because inbound marketing is all about getting potential customers to come to you without advertising to them, you’re probably wondering why there is a section on PPC marketing in this post. 

According to Forbes, PPC marketing actually falls under inbound marketing because the ads appear when prospects are actively searching for the products and services your company offers. When you create a PPC ad, it will appear at the top of the search engine results pages. Plus, PPC ads can help increase your brand awareness by a whopping 80%!

Benefits of Inbound Marketing 

There are many benefits of inbound marketing. For one thing, it’s pretty cost-effective.

Forbes estimates that acquiring inbound leads cost about 61% less than trying to get outbound leads. 

Inbound marketing also typically generates a higher rate of return than outbound marketing. Plus, inbound marketing is a great way to build brand awareness as well as build long lasting relationships with your customers. 

EmoryDay Can Make Inbound Marketing Work for Your Business

In order for inbound marketing to be effective, it must be consistent, ongoing, and measurable. EmoryDay has the perfect team to help your business use inbound marketing to its full potential. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our digital marketing services, including inbound marketing, and how we can tackle all of your marketing needs. 

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