What is Inbound Marketing? Methodology and Tools

The traditional marketing or outbound marketing focuses on finding and targeting customers usually through different medium such as TV, radio, direct mail, newspaper or billboards. Whereas, the new marketing strategy is the inbound marketing methodology. This concept focused on creating quality content that attracts new customers and creates brand awareness.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that focuses on attracting customers. And help potential customers to find you through different channels such as blogs, search engines, and social media. This can be done through having an attractive content style and by focusing on each stage of buyers’ journey. Thus, you attract qualified prospects and build trust for your business.

The Inbound Marketing Methodology

Inbound marketing focuses on attracting as many leads as possible and maintaining customers. It has four main stages:

1. Attract stage

This stage focuses on attracting interested people and visitors who are most likely to become leads. Inbound Marketing strategy does not focus on the number of visits as much as it cares about the visits’ type and quality. Thus, you attract more of the right customers with relevant content at the right time.

Some of the most important tools used in this stage are:

• Blogging: Basically, inbound marketing starts with content. The best way of attracting prospective customers by creating educational content for your leads that speaks to them and answers their questions.
• Social Media Platforms: These platforms allow you to share that valuable information, engage and deliver content with your prospects. In addition, they facilitate communication with current customers and put a human face on your brand company’s trademark.  It is very important to follow up with your customers and identify the most suitable platform for your potential customers to interact with them.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Simply it means your online website visibility in the search results list. This happens through a number of methods and techniques to your website appearance at the top of search engine results (without having paid ads). There are several factors that affect how fast the results appear. For example, website content size, quality of the content and visitors’ level of interaction. learn more about SEO 

2. Convert stage

After attracting the right visitors to your website, it is time to convert those visitors into leads (truly interested people and ready to share with you their basic information). By having their contact information; Email address which is the most valuable and useful one. You do this through several techniques and tools such as:

• Call to Action (CTA): It is a picture or a text that encourages visitors or potential customers to take a specific action. For example, download a book, share a newsletter, etc. CTA can be found in email or at the end of a blog or anywhere else on the website.
• Landing Pages: They are web pages that enable you to get visitors’ information through filling a specific form. The main goal is to get visitors’ information and convert visitors from prospects to leads.

3. Close stage

When you reach this stage, that means you are on the right track. It means you succeed in attracting the right visitors and convert them into leads. Then you need to transfer those leads into customers. Some of the most used techniques in this stage is marketing through email. The potential buyers are going to be targeted by several emails that include attractive content and end up with actual buyers.

4. Delight stage

It is considered a very important stage to maintain current customers and try to get new ones. Taking care of the customers after the purchasing stage happens through keeping in touch with them by sending emails with useful content regularly and sending some free items. By doing so, you make them feel special and encourage them to get back to you and advice people around them to use your products.

Briefly,

The inbound marketing strategy is built upon customers’ care it’s about earning visitor’s attention, rather than buying it which makes your company easy to be found. It is simply, attracts visitors then converts them to customers, close and delight them over time.

Learn more about Inbound Marketing at HubSpot.