Growing your business’s inbound marketing is one of the best ways to open the door for the right customers who want to connect with your brand. Inbound marketing methodologies are rethinking how businesses market their products or services by giving customers everything they need through each step of the buyer’s journey.
Never before have businesses been able to connect and build a relationship with their customers like they can through inbound marketing. Implementing an inbound marketing strategy in your business is a great way to create long-term customer loyalty. This is your gateway to repeated business and building a supportive audience that genuinely believes in your brand.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that growing inbound marketing is as straightforward as it sounds. Growing Inbound marketing requires looking further into your business, developing company culture and branding, understanding your customer, and many other considerations.
This article will dive deep into inbound marketing and how you can quickly implement the right strategy for your business.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Simply put, Inbound marketing focuses on drawing a target audience to your business through various mediums and tactics. The overall point of inbound marketing is for customers to find and come to you through a pay-per-click ad, social media post, blog, search engine optimization, or local SEO
There is no one way to approach inbound marketing because the approach will be different for everyone. Each business has its unique target audience, service or product offering, and personality.
The best part about inbound marketing is you can tailor your strategy to work exactly for your specific target audience. When customers come to you versus you spending time reaching out to them, you’ll start to save loads of time and resources.
Additionally, you’ll be able to focus on growing your business instead of running through the traditional and often timely outbound sales process.
Does that mean that outbound marketing is ineffective? Of course not! Understanding the difference between inbound and outbound marketing will help you decide which is right for you.
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
One of the most common uses for blog content is highlighting specific solutions your business provides to your customer’s pain points. Customers are most likely to conduct business with you if they come across your blog and read about how you can solve their pain points. This is an inbound marketing methodology because the customer is seeking you out versus you directly reaching them.
Outbound marketing involves your company being the first to start a conversation with the customer. This form of marketing is more frequently associated with a direct approach to marketing like social media advertising, email marketing, television advertisements, or cold calling (sometimes referred to as “outbound calling”).
Benefits Of Growing Inbound Marketing
There are many benefits of growing inbound marketing to help generate more customer interest in your business. One of the most significant benefits companies enjoy about inbound marketing is how it allows your brand to connect and build long-term relationships with your customer base.
Many people forget about a brand if they purchase something unless the company means something to them. Inbound marketing tactics can create content showing your target audience how your mutual values align. This not only helps drive people to your business but people who are interested in buying from you.
Driving quality prospects to your business will help weed out those who aren’t right for your business so you can focus on the ones who matter. Depending on your business, you could create life-long customers who will bring in repeat business.
At the minimum, you’ll still enjoy the benefits of connecting with your audience when they talk highly to their peers and other people within their communities.
When you’re putting out content that your audience can relate to, you start to build your brand up as a point of authority on the matter. Industry leaders continue to get repeated business because their customers see the brands as trusted figures and subject matter experts.
Many people are already hesitant to trust advertisements and other outrageous claims unless they can trust the brand to be honest and educated. Building trust starts with bridging the gap between long-term customer loyalty and your business.
The best way to build trust starts with good company values and valuable content that displays your expertise.
Additionally, the cost to do inbound marketing is much more affordable, especially compared to how expensive outbound marketing can become. Unlike mass marketing, successful inbound marketing requires you to be thorough about who you connect with.
By researching and being more exact with targeting, you’ll significantly increase the return on spend per customer.
Are There Any Drawbacks To Inbound Marketing?
Like everything else in marketing, some drawbacks to inbound marketing often push businesses to try other methods. Inbound marketing takes up a lot of time because of how many layers there are to uncover before launching your inbound strategy.
Establishing a target audience, buyer personas, content strategy, finding out where your customer hangs out online, and many more takes up a lot of time. Busy companies don’t have much time to determine and solve all the different factors that go into a successful strategy for their brands.
Additionally, inbound marketing may not need to be the sole focus of a brand, depending on its service or product offering. The best types of businesses that are more successful with inbound marketing are those that offer something that requires their audience to research.
Finally, the cost of inbound marketing can be high in some competitive markets. Since Google Ads is based on an auction market, the price per click can increase exponentially (think real estate, insurance, car sales, etc.)
Elements of Inbound Marketing
Before getting started, you must uncover several elements of your inbound marketing strategy. These elements will help you connect the dots on what will be essential to utilize for your inbound marketing strategy.
There are many ways to do inbound marketing, but trying to keep up with everything all at once is unproductive and unsustainable. Inbound marketing tactics can take a while to get off the ground, so focusing on techniques you can consistently keep up with is essential.
A deeper understanding of what and who you must focus on will help determine your business’s suitable mediums and methods.
The Buyer Persona
If you’ve been in business for any time, you’ve probably heard of a buyer persona. Many business owners and marketing professionals cannot tell who their buyer persona is; by doing so, they’re missing out on massive opportunities.
The buyer persona is the ideal person you want to shop at your business. Typically this person is a fictional character made up to represent your target audience. By being specific with your targeting, you’re giving yourself a distinct advantage because you’ll know precisely who your message will reach.
Speaking directly to the right prospect for your business will automatically give you a competitive advantage. Customers who relate to your messaging will build the necessary trust on encouraging them further down the inbound sales funnel.
Defining Pain Points
When tailoring any marketing strategy, whether inbound or outbound, you must put yourself in your customer’s shoes to understand what they need. Understanding your customer’s pain points will help you create the right type of content for prospects to realize better how you can solve their problems.
People need to know that you fully understand their feelings and why your offering can solve that issue. To provide an authentic offering, you must address the specific pain points of your brand’s unique target audience.
Data Analysis
Inbound marketing strategies thrive today because of the different technological capabilities to measure performance. Operating in the modern marketing world comes with the unique benefit of measuring campaign performance and making necessary adjustments.
Now more than ever, marketers have been able to track their inbound marketing efforts to such precise data points. After developing your inbound marketing objectives, you should research the proper KPIs or Key Performance Indicators to show your content’s effectiveness.
Analyzing data is not an option but a necessity if you’re trying to see the fruits of your inbound marketing pay off in dividends.
Additionally, analyzing data has never been easier because of the available analysis software to help. Successful inbound marketing focuses on creating relevant content for your target audience.
How do you know if your content is hitting the mark if you never take the time to evaluate its performance? Consider mapping out your plan for analyzing data, which KPIs you need to monitor based on your objectives, and watch your inbound marketing efforts pay off.
Inbound Marketing Automation
The road to success with inbound marketing requires finding ways to save critical time and focus on areas of upkeep that matter. Determining the different areas of your inbound marketing strategy that can be automated will make consistency even easier.
Unfortunately, areas of focus like search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising can’t be fully automated.
Your organization can use several marketing automation tools to make several areas of your inbound marketing strategy seem effortless. Whether you are looking for a marketing automation software to schedule posts on social media or blog content, send specific email marketing materials in a drip campaign, or even automatic replies when you’re out of the office.
Several tools make marketing automation a helpful element of your marketing strategy to make processes run smoother and save time on menial tasks.
Competitor Analysis
It helps to know where your company is among your competitors. This doesn’t mean you should fixate your inbound marketing strategy around your competitors, but it does help to see what they’re doing.
Competitor analysis involves looking at your industry competitor’s inbound marketing efforts and seeing where you can get ahead. Take some time to look at their social media, email marketing efforts, search engine optimization, local SEO, pay-per-click advertising, and other inbound marketing.
You can understand how your brand fits into the landscape of your industry and how you can better position yourself.
Building a Content Strategy
Many steps go into developing a content strategy, much of which is based on your goals and target audience. Content strategies answer the questions about your inbound marketing content, what, where, when, and how.
Creating content is the lifeblood of inbound marketing because, without content, you have nothing to share and no way of bringing people to you.
There is a good chance your target audience is not hanging out everywhere online, but they are hanging out somewhere. Focus on reaching your audience through the areas in which they’re more likely to be active.
Trying to create content for every platform is near-impossible and ineffective if the majority of your reach isn’t the suitable candidates for your business anyway.
Don’t forget to narrow down the type of content you want to create by identifying your content strategy objectives. Every content marketing campaign needs a specific end goal to establish the right content.
The days of making boring, generic content are over because people are overwhelmed with saturated with so much content. To compete with the vast online space, you will need to create content with the specific intent of reaching and talking to your audience.
When developing your content strategy, you should consider which mediums you want to focus on and their intent. There will be different requirements to meet depending if you want to focus on search engine optimization, local SEO, pay-per-click advertising, social media, and email marketing.
To better understand which content you need to focus on for your audience, it’s best to map out your buyer’s journey.
Understanding Your Buyer’s Journey
Educating yourself on the buyer’s journey is crucial for creating an inbound marketing strategy. To find potential customers online, you need to know what interests them, where they’re more likely to hang out, and the process they go through when buying from you.
There are three distinct phases that many marketers base their inbound marketing efforts around to optimize their campaign performance. Understand the buyer’s journey your potential customers go through so you can provide the best experience from the beginning to the final purchase and beyond.
Awareness
The first phase of the buyer’s journey is the Awareness phase. Prospects in the Awareness phase may or may not be aware they have a problem that needs to be solved. The potential customer is typically going to start doing research into understanding their situation further.
Getting a potential customer into the Awareness phase is the most difficult for those who don’t realize they have a problem. Moving into the Consideration phase is easy for those aware they have a problem because they know they need to find a solution.
This is your chance to create relevant content, like a blog post, highlighting significant pain points your target audience may face.
Consideration
After they’ve clearly defined their problem, the potential customer will start researching to find the right solution for them. Depending on the person and how in-depth they are with their research or how badly they need a solution, this phase can take the longest.
The Consideration phase is where you will start building trust with your potential customer as you position yourself as a point of authority.
To grow inbound marketing overall, there needs to be a heavy investment in well-constructed research that proves your offering will solve the customer’s problem. This phase is where the valuable content you create will start to come into play and help ease the prospect’s worries about finding a solution.
Decision
Chances are the potential customer is looking at other resources to educate themselves on the solutions available outside your organization. The Decision phase can be the make-or-break moment, but with a clearly defined content strategy, this can also be the quickest phase.
Typically buyers in the phase will be digging into the weeds of your company’s offering and comparing it to others. This is your last and best chance to address any objections they may have, in addition to bolstering your unique selling points.
Something To Consider
You may know the general pain points your target audience experiences, but understand their priorities may shift through each phase. Address the joint pain points your buyer may have as they navigate each stage of the buyer’s journey to keep them hooked.
Taking this extra step and tailoring the journey to your buyer will position your company as a trusted figure. Buyers want to know that you’ll solve their problem and that their money won’t be wasted, especially if they’ve been let down in the past.
Growing Inbound Marketing Today
Now there are many different steps going into inbound marketing for your business. This can make getting started, and growing inbound marketing efforts feel near-impossible. If you’re unsure where to begin or how to optimize your business’s inbound marketing, then contact Wedgewood Marketing.
Our highly experienced marketers will walk you through each step of the inbound marketing process and put you on a path to success. Starting inbound marketing can be lengthy and time-consuming, but that’s well worth it once your campaigns are up and running.
Wedgewood Marketing can help anyone interested in growing inbound marketing but doesn’t have the time to start and maintain their marketing campaigns. Our services will cover all the areas you’ll need to succeed within inbound marketing, from pay-per-click advertising to social media, search engine optimization, local SEO, and more.
We offer free audits to help you better understand your inbound marketing potential and where you currently stand. Don’t let another day go by not growing inbound marketing for your business; get started by contacting Wedgewood Marketing today!
