What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is the method of promoting a business through prominent contents on the internet like social media marketing, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), eBooks, blogs and other similar methods the company has in its disposal. In the process, these contents will drive the prospective customers to go and check their product willingly, and not forcibly. This also makes the business easier to find, by means of making their customers drawn to the company when they saw the highly informative content of their website.
Getting the right customers by using this method can be difficult if you are not familiar with the concepts that you must employ before you engage in Inbound Marketing. Below are the key points that you must consider in strategizing your business plans revolving around this method:
- Multiple Areas to Cover – You need to lure in different type of individuals, and they will have multiple types of preference in terms of how are you going to approach them. Your goal is to establish rapport to these people, which requires them to do minimal effort, and to approach them wherever they are.
- Creating Useful Contents – They want to see a site with the contents they need, one that they can use to the fullest extent, and will answer the question that they usually cannot answer on their own. Not only that, you need to make them feel that they can share those information for everyone to know.
- Personalized Approach – There will the time when you can already see what your customer wants to be given to them. Use this to your advantage and plan on working over to suit their demands. Arrange the information you are sharing through your site in a way that they can feel that you personally approaching them.
- Synthesized Information – All the data that you have shared must have a perfect synergy to everything that you will place in your site. Complementing each other with the right combination of things that you want them to know, and the things they must know.
- Evolving Interaction – As you get to know your customers know, and they go through the changes in having a transaction with your company, you must be able to adapt and have other fresh ideas to use presenting ideas to them.
Those can be done by doing a series of step by step procedures on making customers or prospective buyers the feel that they are going to be taken care of. You can employ them by reading on what these actions are all about.
1.) Attracting your Target Customers
You want to maximize the traffic your site will get, and in aiming so, you must distinguish the passerby and the people who will be your target customers. To know who they are, you need to ask yourself, “Who could be the people who we want to be our customers?” Those people should be the ones that like exactly what you can offer. Customers that will welcome with open arms your products and are looking for the offers that your company can give and these types of customers will be the stepping stone for your business to become a success.
Some of the tools you can use to gain the customers that you want your site to have are:
- Blogs – The starting point of your Inbound Marketing, it is considered the simplest, yet most effective way to attract people to visit your site. To be found by your target customers on the internet, you must produce a blog that is highly informative, well structured, and contains the answers that they are looking for.
- Keywords – This is where your customer begins. By picking up good keywords for the items you are offering to your prospective buyers online, they will find you easily when they search for the things they need in the internet using a search engine.
- Web Pages – A creatively made web page that hosts your business online can magnify the number of prospective buyers that goes in and out of your website.
- Social Media Sites – Make impression to prospective customers by setting up a social media account. If your blogs represents the information about your product, the Social Media sites act as your human face to your prospective clients.
2.) Transforming Visitors into Potential Customers
You now made yourself popular online and made thousands of visitors to stumble upon your website, now that is the perfect time for them to be persuaded to give something back at you. A basic thing that they can give back is their email address. However, they might not give in easily, so you must be ready to offer something more to them, like basic tips, free eBooks or anything that can increase their interest towards your products
Examples of these materials that you can use to transform visitors to become one of your future customers are;
- Information Sheets – For them to be able to give accurate information about them, you must prepare a finely created form that they can fill out and submit for you to know more about them. Just make sure that these forms are as brief and easy to fill out for them not to be confused and your contacts to them becomes successful.
- Calls-to-Action – A pop-out button, or a link, this encourage the visitors of your site to do something to get closer to the things that they want to happen.
- Landing Pages – After they acted upon your calls-to-action buttons spread out on your site, those should bring them to a page where the answers for their question awaits. Usually, these pages should lead them to your team of sales agent, ready to get their questions answered.
3.) Closing in on Potential Customers
You are almost there. Getting them to do and fill out the materials you have prepared for them has drastically increased your chances of making them one of your loyal customers. This feat can be done by optimizing some of the best tools you have at your disposal.
Those recommended tools are as follows;
- Email – Your customers are not allowed to wait for long to get the information they want to get, especially if they are still unsure if they want to buy products from you. These emails must have some useful and accurate information that can hasten their intention to do business with you.
- Numerical Leads – A raw data can give you a hint on how many of the visitors that entered your site is willing to have a business relation to you and will take out random guesses out of the equation.
Expert Analysis – This will answer some of the bugging question like “Are we convincing enough for our customers?” “How can we bring our ideas closer to our target customers?”
Automated Marketing – Manual work can be very tedious, especially if you are short-handed on manual labour. This is also very effective in adapting on your customer’s ways on sending feedbacks from you and for them to reach you easily.
4.) Asserting a Delightful Experience
Inbound Marketing primarily focuses on guiding people to your business and letting them stay there because of your superb services and products. You are still not done, even though your customer has already made their payment to you. It is highly recommended that we never let them feel neglected after their transaction to us.
Ideal forms of showing our delight in having business with them are;
- Emails and Automatic Marketing – These two combined will show our clients that you are still at the top of things even though they are done doing business with you. Keeping them updated with newsletters and virtual pamphlets through email marketing will help them become interested again to transact with you
- Smart Calls-to-Action – It will be your tool to let them know changes that happened to your business after they made a transaction with you.
- Social Media Sites – This can show them your intention to serve them by giving out updates from your products by optimizing the functionality of social media sites to reach out to your previous customers easily.
The methods of Inbound Marketing shown here can guide a business oriented person into making the right decision by exerting their efforts to be more willing to help, more sincere in your intentions to give quality service to you and will also serve as your good reputation in the corporate world as a reliable individual in the long run.