Inbound marketing generates up to 3x more leads per $1 spent compared to the traditional marketing strategies.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a methodology that uses content creation strategies to get people’s attention and win more customers.

Inbound marketing uses valuable content and non-intrusive marketing strategies that manage to establish a relationship between your business and your customers. With the help of inbound marketing, your business takes your customers throughout the customer journey: From the moment they hear about your products and/or services for the first time until they buy from you and recommend you with other people.

Inbound marketing allows people to get interested in your business, establish a business relationship and become loyal customers.

Want to know more about the customer value journey and how it can help your business? Read our blog post "The Customer Value Journey: Turn Strangers into Super-fans"

Differences between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing is a methodology that uses direct marketing strategies to get more sales. Outbound marketing uses more traditional methods of marketing and advertising, with the intention of reaching out to people in a more massive way at any time.

On the other hand, inbound marketing uses strategies to get people to find your business at the right time: when they need to solve a problem and your business can help them.

Outbound marketing uses methods that get people's attention and immediately ask for the sale by showing the characteristics of their products and/or services. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, sparks the interest of your business buyer persona by using valuable content that helps them solve their problems. This allows your potential customers to voluntarily approach your business when they need you.

Advantages of using Inbound Marketing in your business

Inbound marketing not only helps you get more customers, it helps you increase your customer value. This methodology creates and nurtures a valuable relationship with people who have already done business with you, and motivates them to become loyal customers.

There are a lot of benefits of using inbound marketing for your business. Inbound marketing can help you to:

1. Reduce expenses

By focusing your efforts on more targeted marketing strategies, your business can save money and experience a higher Return on Investment (ROI) over time.

It's important to keep in mind that inbound marketing is a long-term investment for your business, and that it has great benefits that help you get better results.

According to a recent study, customers gained through inbound marketing strategies cost an average of 61% less than any other type of marketing strategy.

2. Create trust

About 85% of people research a business before making a purchase. When people find your business on search engines (like Google), you build trust and credibility.

By creating interesting, useful and relevant content for your target audience, you will stand out from the competition and will be perceived as an industry expert.

Offering this content for free will make people trust your business to buy your products and/or services in the future.

Just like your products and/or services, the content you create should help your customers solve their problems. That way, the next time they have a problem, they will look for your help.

3. Generate quality traffic and leads

The main goal of the inbound marketing is to get more and better leads and traffic for your business. With more targeted marketing strategies, you can get customers who are more interested in the solutions your business provides.

Inbound marketing helps you increase your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) by 7.3% in the first year. This means that your business will generate more lead contacts who are truly interested in your products and/or services.

In addition, implementing these strategies helps you increase your business website traffic by 4.7% in the first year, and up to 24.3% in two years.

Inbound Marketing Stages

Inbound marketing is a combination of strategies that gets new customers and retains existing customers through valuable content.

This process is divided in four stages that form a conversion funnel. Each of these stages has specific techniques that help your business get better results.

Below we present each the inbound marketing stages and some tactics you could use to grow your business:

1. Attract

The first stage has the goal to attract and engage potential customers to your business so that they learn more about your products and/or services. This is achieved by creating content that provides value to your customers and ensuring that it reaches the right people.

For this, it's important to use content marketing strategies, such as:

• Creating a business blog: Creating a blog for your business will be the key to get more customers. A blog helps your website rank better in Google. In addition, it's the ideal space to create content that focuses on topics that highlight how your products and/or services help your customers with the problem they face.
• Posting on social media: People spend a lot of time on social media. Take advantage of these tools and create a content strategy on these networks. Create posts with attractive designs and valuable content to engage with users. It's important that you identify very well which are the social networks that your ideal client uses and focus only on those.
  

2. Subscribe

This stage turns people who came to your website and are interested in your content, into a lead for your business. There are some key elements that you can use to get people to take the next step and provide you with their contact information:

• Lead Magnets: A lead magnet is valuable content that you can offer your potential customers for free, in exchange for their contact information. This content is more complete than what you offer in your business blog or social media posts and has a more attractive format (an eBook or PDF).

Want to know more about lead magnets and how they can help your business? Read our blog post "What is a Lead Magnet and why your business needs one?"

• Call-to-Action Buttons: A call-to-action (CTA) button is an engaging visual element that encourages people to click and tells them what the next logical step is. A call-to-action button asks the visitor to do something: spend more time with you, provide their contact details, or make a purchase. Therefore, it's important to clearly explain what are the benefits that the client gets when they click.

3. Convert

Once you have your leads contact information, it's time to start nurturing a relationship with them. The goal of this stage is to ask for the sale in a non-intrusive way and to achieve this you can use the following techniques:

• Email marketing: This strategy consists of sending emails automatically with a specialized software. With the help of this software, you will know exactly who to send an email to, what to send and the best time to do it without having to worry about doing this manually. These emails are personalized and sent based on the actions of each of your contacts.
• Retargeting campaigns: The objective of these campaigns is to remind people why they were interested in your products and/or services. If your business has an online store, you can use ads that show up to people who didn't finish their purchase and continue browsing other websites. This ad will follow the person through these sites and show them the product they were willing to buy in an attractive way.

By using these techniques, you will be on top of mind of people and you will get them to buy your products and/or services just at the moment they actually need it.

4. Delight

The ultimate goal of inbound marketing is not just about getting customers. The last stage of this methodology is about getting your new customers to trust your business so that they recommend you to more people and buy from you again.

Keep new customers satisfied even after their purchase by giving them a memorable experience. You can achieve this by:

• Offering a user guide for the product they just bought.
• Communicating the expectations of the service they purchased.
• Providing additional features that surprise them.
• Sharing additional information that your new customers will enjoy.
• Providing excellent customer service.

Satisfied customers love to share their experience, but sometimes they need a little encouragement to do so. The good thing is that once they do, they become promoters for your business. Use surveys through different channels (email, Google, online store) and ask for their opinion through your social networks.

In addition to becoming promoters of your business, this inbound marketing stage also focuses on getting your current customers to become loyal to your business. To achieve this, you can use the following additional sales strategies:

• Cross-Selling: Consists of offering your customers a product or service that is complementary to the one they have already bought. For example, a hamburger restaurant may offer fries at a cheaper price when purchasing one of its hamburgers.
• Up-Selling: Consists of offering your customers a product or service similar to the one they intend to buy, but with a higher price. For example, the hamburger restaurant may offer to upgrade to a bigger burger for a cheap price.

Start using Inbound Marketing in your business

Inbound marketing focuses on building relationships between your business and your customers. Inbound marketing has the ability to connect your business with people who are truly interested in your products and/or services and increase your sales exponentially.

At Capitaltec, we help you define and optimize your inbound marketing strategy. Schedule a call to learn more about your business and help you create an effective marketing strategy that allows you to grow your business in a predictable and profitable way.

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