What is Inbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing encompasses more of the promotional aspects of marketing; cold calling, TV ads, print ads, and even social media ads. Inbound marketing, however, follows a different approach. Instead of blatantly promoting products, it’s much more interactive, as it establishes a relationship between brands and customers. All by providing them with valuable content. Think of outbound marketing as pushing products while inbound marketing pulls customers in.

While outbound marketing is the more traditional way of doing things, inbound marketing aims to nurture relationships with potential customers and build credibility and loyalty. Inbound marketing strategies include social media, paid ads, email marketing, blogs, conversational chatbots, video, etc. To do this, inbound marketing has three stages: attract, engage, and delight.

1. Attract

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At this stage, people aren’t ready to buy, but they will be interested in the content you provide, given that it’s valuable to them. To figure out what kind of content that should be, creating customer personas is a great way to start to give you a better idea of what the buyer's journey and progression look like. From there, you can create content that will best align with them as people, which will lead to more overall awareness and engagement.

2. Engage

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With the knowledge learned about potential customers in the first stage, you can use that to your advantage now. From the customer journey and personas, determine what their pain points and goals are. With that, the content you create will be much more valuable to them, especially if you address the problems they initially had. Plus, it’ll keep your business at the top of mind when they are ready to purchase later on.

3. Delight

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In the last stage of the inbound marketing process, your business should not only understand what problems your potential customers are having, but also how to solve them. While inbound marketing can include advertising tactics like pay-per-click (PPC) and social media ads, they shouldn’t be interruptive. Instead, they should be relevant, helpful, and targeted, with specific keywords and phrases your buyer uses.

Inbound marketing isn’t a short overall process, but it’s well worth it for businesses in the end. While it can be time-consuming, customers appreciate content like this because it’s educational, entertaining, and most importantly, it doesn’t feel like they’re being sold to. Especially since it’s done in a nonintrusive way that invites customers to engage if they want to, unlike outbound marketing strategies. While it won’t result in a quick sale, it will, however, have a stronger influence on potential customers and result in more qualitative rather than quantitative leads. And in the long run, those customers are more likely to become loyal customers.

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