-Inbound Marketing

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Hypha partner and leading inbound marketing, sales, and customer service platform HubSpot—which actually coined the term ‘inbound marketing’—defines this methodology as “an approach focused on attracting customers through content and interactions that are relevant and helpful—not interruptive.”

This might be difficult to hear if you’re in marketing.

People generally don’t like commercials, or any ad that interrupts and tries really hard to sell them a product. That type of selling—known as outbound marketing—often makes potential customers feel coerced, intruded upon, and disrupted.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, focuses on building awareness, developing relationships, and generating leads. It’s a method that attracts and informs people, engaging them in a way that helps them find your company before they have any intention of becoming a customer. Far removed from flashy ad campaigns, inbound marketing provides content that is educational, entertaining, and welcomed by potential customers.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

Inbound marketing efforts start simply enough with the creation of content. This can take the form of well-researched blog articles, dynamic content offers, and engaging social media posts. The key differentiating factor between a strategy that works and one that stalls is the value it does or doesn’t provide. Guides about how to use a product or service, an extensive blog delving into the specifics of how you solve a customer’s specific problem, positive testimonials from previous customers, promotional offerings and discounts—this is all content that provides value, and attracts customers.

Writing and publishing blogs alone won’t necessarily reach your target audience.

But here’s one of the most important rules of attraction: Writing and publishing blogs alone won’t necessarily reach your target audience. For that, you must optimize your content with an SEO strategy. Here, you target specific keywords and phrases that represent your efforts to serve customers and are related to your products or services. The more keywords you target on a consistent basis, the more your content will organically appear on the search engine results page (SERP) of a customer actively searching for something related to your business.

Following the production of content, continue your flywheel’s momentum by keeping the lines of communication open. Engage with leads and customers, to build beneficial (and profitable) long-term relationships, by focusing on customer service. Here, you’ll need to handle and manage inbound sales calls, and always be ‘solution selling’ rather than ‘product selling.’ Remember that the customers will be searching for you and calling you—this means they are already so-called ‘right-fit’ customers, and you only need to ensure you close the deal!

So you’ve attracted customers, engaged with them, and (hopefully) seen the relationship through to the buying portion of the customer journey. After the purchase is finalized, delight customers with strategies that establish your team as advisors and experts who can step in to assist any customer, at any time. Chatbots and surveys can net customer feedback and glean invaluable insights to help you improve processes. And even if your business doesn’t receive any tangible benefits, your delighted customer, handled properly, can become a brand advocate and unofficial promoter.

What’s HubSpot?

Throughout this article, you’ve seen links sending you to a place called HubSpot. What’s a HubSpot? Credited with coining the term ‘Inbound Marketing’ back in 2006, HubSpot is Inbound Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service Software that helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close deals. Leveraging HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Methodology and powerful CRM platform will grow your business, improve efficiencies, and achieve your goals.