Inbound Marketing strategy consists of combining non-intrusive marketing and advertising techniques in order to reach the user. This marketing strategy is based on attracting potential customers with relevant and valuable content through various channels, such as blogs or social networks, with the aim of achieving the lowest user acquisition cost possible and obtaining a clear value in the content.
The Inbound Marketing launches a strategy, in the medium-long term, that allows us to know the user better, give valuable content, help him better understand his needs and, therefore, turn it into a prescriber of our product/service.
The origin of the Inbound Marketing strategy
Bill Gates already realized the enormous potential that content had in times when the internet was just beginning to show itself as an instrument of mass use. He said it in 1996 in an article entitled ” Content is king “, considered a reference today. It talked about creative business opportunities for companies in the face of the growing number of users seeking useful information on the network.
However, it was Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, co-founders of HubSpot, in 2005, who created the term inbound marketing strategy, defined a methodology and conceived the philosophy that is used today.
From then on, if you want to attract new users and possible future customers to our digital environments, you will need to implement the so-called “sales funnel”:
- Attract the profile of users that interest us through the generation of a content of interest in the blog, social networks…
- Convert to the visits of our portals and contents in a potential client, generating interest in contacting the company and requesting more information about their products and services.
- Contact the leads generated with the intention of closing the sale.
- Loyalty to the customer through other content of interest or generating the need for contracting the product/service in case it has not done so.
This methodology has many advantages, since it increases visits to the website, improves the online reputation of the brand or company, improves the quality of the leads obtained, and increases the loyalty of users, among others.
Keys to Inbound Marketing
To develop an Inbound Marketing strategy, there are 4 keys in which to work to optimize your performance: Person, Purpose, Promotion and Period. We will analyze each of them and give some examples to consider:
Person
We must dedicate time to get to know the people we want to address and create our “Buyer Persona” that is defining the typology of our potential clients with their desired characteristics. From there, you have to create messages of value and content necessary to reach each of them.
In here, we recommend that the Buyer Persona cards include some points such as:
- Name of individual
- Position
- Sector to which it belongs
- Description
- Digital behavior
- Contents consulted
- Products/services of your interest
- Recurring questions
- How do you know the company
The objective of this inbound marketing strategy is to have a card similar to these with the information of each type of client that allows us to put ourselves in the client’s place and generate the most appropriate proposal for each one of them.
Purpose
We must anticipate the needs of potential customers and be where our Buyer Person will look for information. We will design a Customer Journey that will map the navigation that each type of client will make on our website.
With this, we will plan the most appropriate content to generate in each phase and taking into account the needs of our users. We will look for solutions to the possible problems of our clients.
Publication and promotion
Once we know “to whom” we direct our content and “why”, we have to plan our content to generate maximum impact through the company’s blog, social networks, etc. For this, we must analyze the type of clients and the type of content that we are going to promote to select the appropriate means in which to share it.
Period
Although we put a specific period to our campaigns, we can attract potential customers throughout the year.
In here we recommend working with a monthly calendar of contents that will allow us to organize the date in which the contents will be published and promoted. This type of calendars will allow us to have a global vision of the strategy. Its simplest form is a table that shows the month and the fundamental information that will have to be prepared.
Inbound Marketing Techniques
There are several actions that we can start in our company to start working on an Inbound Marketing strategy:
Content marketing
Through these contents is how a company communicates with users. Beyond simply creating content in a blog, it is important to analyze the needs of the users and according to that direction, write your content. Post your content according to their behavior and port the related keywords to there. The main objective is to cover the need of the user to whom we are going. Giving it a proper use, it can be a good tool to get positioning and attract leads. These leads must be relevant and fit the characteristics of our Buyer Persona if we want them to end up being our new clients.
SEO positioning
In relation to the previous point, it is important that the content we create is optimized for SEO, so that Google identifies and indexes that content and attracts the indicated users. A natural link building is very important in an SEO strategy; how many more natural links the content has, the better it will be positioned in the search engines. This is a long-term process since Google can penalize you if you get links quickly in a non-organic way.
A good way to demonstrate to Google that the content you want to link is relevant, is to get a good amount of backlinks, or external links, on other sites (sites relevant to Google). For this, it is good to analyze the backlinks of the competition through tools such as SEMRush or Ahrefs.
Inbound marketing strategy in Social networks
Social networks are the perfect showcase to share your content and attract new visitors. The visual elements are key to achieve maximum audience in your publication. It is important to consider the profiles in which it is appropriate to share the content, since not any social network will be the right one; not to publish it in all you will get more visibility. It is also necessary to generate additional content adapted to these networks that serve as a complement to the main linked content and shows, briefly and visually, what is wanted to be highlighted, but without counting too much; so the user will enter to see the rest.
Knowing our target audience is an increasingly simple addition with analytical tools, to be able to adapt the contents as best as possible.
Use Newsletter as an inbound marketing strategy
Another way to present your content in a visual and personalized way is through the newsletters. In a Newsletter, you have the opportunity to present more than one content to the users who may be really interested. For this, it is important to establish a periodicity (weekly, monthly …), offer varied and interesting content (in the line that corresponds) and not recharge it. It must be very visual, briefly tell what the content you share is, but without using it as a means of intrusive advertising, and with a clear and simple design.
In addition, if you have made the buyer persona and defined the customer journey, you can figure out what is the best time for the user to receive this newsletter. The quality type of content will be most appropriate at each moment to generate trust in the product/service or fidelity towards the company.
PPC campaigns
By starting an inbound marketing strategy, PPC campaigns can help give that initial push that is needed to accelerate the first results. With these campaigns, you get faster to users, because they allow you to position yourself in the first results of Google and other search engines. With a totally variable investment, payment campaigns can offer very good results.
Inbound Marketing is a strategy that medium to long term is to take the place of your potential customers and generate the defendants contained in a timely fashion. Through social networks, content marketing, SEO, newsletters … companies are able to find them when they need a service or product and there are a series of consensual interactions (vs. interruptions) that also aim to close the sale.
