Introduction to

INBOUND
MARKETING.
What is
Inbound Marketing.
Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential
customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight
for their attention. Sharing is caring and inbound marketing is
about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating
content specifically designed to appeal to your dream custom-
ers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and
keeps them coming back for more.

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What is inbound marketing?
Are you finding that your marketing efforts aren’t as effective as they once
were? Or do you just need another channel to find new business?

Inbound marketing is about attracting potential clients who have self-select-

ed themselves. Let me explain…

If you’re running a direct marketing campaign, you’re likely targeting a group

that you believe is interested in your products or services. Inbound is even
more targeted because you are attracting prospects who are necessarily
looking for solutions somewhere along your sales cycle or, as Hubspot ex-
plains it, the buyer’s journey.

A w a r e ne ss Consideration Decision
Stage Stage St age

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If someone searches for your product or service on Google, which they are
no matter whether you are manufacturing products for the aerospace in-
dustry or managed care services for seniors, you want to show up front and
center and have content that compels the prospect to learn more about
you.

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The inbound methodology.
The inbound methodology can be best described as the process of turn-
ing strangers into leads, leads into customers, and customers into brand
promoters. There are four stages in this process, each requiring a different
approach.

• Attract
• Convert
• Close
• Delight

Stage 1: Attract.

This is where the difference between inbound and outbound marketing

shows the most. In outbound marketing, even the most precise market-
ing efforts have some element of “spray and pray.” In inbound marketing,
the focus is on the quality, not quantity - by defining an audience of people
who are interested in your products or services and that you serve best. To
define that audience and tailor the content to their liking, we create buyer
personas.

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What is a buyer persona?
You need to know exactly who you’re trying to attract to get the best results
in the Attract stage. A buyer persona is an imaginary person who best de-
scribes your ideal target: their sex, age, occupation, marital status, etc. In
addition to demographic information, the most effective buyer personas
include a psychographic profile including what their typical day at work and
at home looks like.

Here’s an example buyer persona for a purchasing agent:

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Once you’ve created buyer personas, you have the information that you
need to craft content and other marketing assets appealing to them.

• What are their goals in life and at work?

• What are the problems they are facing and how could your product or
service help them save time or money?
• What questions might they have about the product?

Now that you’ve got that covered, it’s time to get on with the Attract stage.

One of the most successful ways to attract potential customers at this stage
is blogging. If you don’t already have a blog on your company’s website, it’s
time to make one. Here you’ll post information that’s relevant to your buyer
persona. Not convinced? Consider these statistics:

• B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that
do not.
• Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy
positive ROI.
• By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships without
talking to a human.
• Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website.
• Blogs have been rated as the 5th most trusted source for accurate
online information.

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/business-blogging-in-2015

At this stage, you aren’t advertising your products or services just yet but
building awareness for the problems that you solve or even more general
issues that your buyer personas face.

Content may be King, but promotion is Queen! To get your content in front
of your buyer persona, you’ll need to drive targeted traffic to it using search
engine optimization, social media marketing, and email marketing among
other strategies to promote your content.

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Stage 2: Convert.

Now that you’ve attracted people with your content, it’s time to convert vis-
itors into leads. A lead is a potential sales contact that you have their email,
phone number, or some other means of communicating with them.

How often and at what places do you give strangers opportunities to be-
come leads? Chances are you should have more opportunities than you do!

One of our first steps with any website is to audit the existing content on a
website, determine whether someone is in the awareness stage, decision
stage, or ready to make a purchase if they were viewing that information,
and make sure that there is an appropriate offer. “Get a quote” is a great call
to action on your services page but not so much on your careers page.

Stage 3: Close.

A lead on its own doesn’t have much value unless you nurture it right. In the
Close stage, your goal is to turn leads into customers. At this point, you’re
nurturing your lead to the point of purchase. This is the process of winning
over leads that aren’t ready to close the deal yet and hopefully turning them
into customers.

Using CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software can make this

stage easier by keeping track of your leads, analyzing their behavior, and
assessing the right time to close. We use the free Hubspot CRM,
http://hubs.ly/H03nYzm0, and recommend it to our clients.

Stage 4: Delight.

Finally, the Delight stage turns your customers into promoters. Your custom-
ers are your best sales agents. Treat them right, keep your company top of
mind, ask for referrals and you’ll get the best conversion rates of any chan-
nel hands down.

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With inbound marketing, the sales cycle doesn’t stop when someone be-
comes a customer. The final goal is to delight your customers to the point
where they’ll share your content on social networks, forward your website to
a vendor, or help promote your company in another ways. At this stage you
should send occasional emails tailored to your customers interests, engage
with them on social media, promote products they might be interested in
based on their previous purchases, and so on.

Cold-hearted cold-calling needs to stop.

There is a reason why there are hundreds of memes about how much tele-
marketers suck. People don’t like being hassled, and they don’t like wasting
time on things that are of zero interest to them. Instead of making them
resent your company, thrill them with great content they’ll happily hit the
share button for.

Why should my company switch to inbound?

A picture is worth a 1000 words, an infographic is worth at least 3500. Here

are the differences between inbound and outbound marketing in a nutshell:

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You caught my attention, what’s the next step?

Let’s learn more about your strengths and weaknesses online. Register for a
no obligation site audit today.

CLICK TO GET STARTED

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