Inbound Marketing
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is a method that encompasses different marketing tactics such as content marketing, blogs, SEO, social media, PPC, and more to attract new customers to your business, generate brand awareness, and build a trust-based community over time.
This business philosophy puts the customer in the core, so everything revolves around it; therefore, if your business decides to take the Inbound path, you need to understand that your marketing efforts go beyond creating a nice website, in fact, that would be just the beginning. The foundation of Inbound Marketing is based on helping, empowering, and supporting your customers, before, during, and after you close a sale, letting your business grow with the backup of a loyal community that you have built across time.
Inbound Marketing strategies grow your business by attracting, engaging, and delighting customers with high-quality content and continuous support. The secret of success of inbound marketing falls in humanizing your brand to better serve and help your customers, building trust over time. It is simply a win-win situation in which what is good for your customer will be good for your business too, since all the marketing strategies placed for your business will be designed to address the issues, needs, wants, and desires of YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMERS, and not the masses.
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
The world is constantly evolving and so is marketing. Nowadays, marketers use digital strategies such as the ones encompassed in inbound marketing regularly to provide customers a better experience with a specific brand; however, a couple of years ago, the way to approach customers was completely different.
You might remember receiving cold calls, getting advertisements about seminar series, trade shows, or even receiving emails from businesses you’ve never heard about, well all that is mentioned before is part of the traditional method of marketing, Outbound Marketing. In this methodology, marketers put their clients’ messages out targeting the wide masses and hoping someone will be interested. Unfortunately, this highly-priced philosophy is becoming less effective over time mainly because of three reasons. First, is less expensive for businesses to utilize digital marketing strategies; second, since customers are already overexposed to ads that are specifically targeted for them, the chances of driving to an outbound sales funnel are fewer; finally, outbound marketing can be annoying for some customers, which had led them to find different ways to avoid being contacted by marketers such as spam filtering, caller ID, etc.
Inbound Marketing, on the other hand, focuses its efforts on creating valuable content that will allow your customers to get to know you, spread brand awareness, and buying your products or service. Inbound Marketing strategies are tailored to engage with an audience that is interested in what your business has to offer.
Inbound Marketing Strategy
Inbound Marketing success is based on three pillars: Attract, Engage, and Interact which also serve as the strategies to make your business achieve the desired goals. Let’s go in-depth into each one of them.
This is the first step of the process, marketing professionals, as the ones you will find at Sensation Enterprises, attract your possible customers to incorporate them into the sales funnel; to do so, we study the buyer persona of your business and create content that will be appealing to that ideal customer. These pieces of content will be created on different formats such as blog posts, social media graphics, and content promotions so it can be adapted to the channels selected for your business, therefore we will provide value to your possible customers by giving them information about your business, promotions, discounts, and solutions for their issues. Additionally, we will optimize that content with the proper keywords, tags, and phrases related to your products and services so it can be found organically in different search engines results page.
Now they are attracted to your business’ products or services, it’s time to make sure that the content your customers are receiving, and the way your company is treating them, results in a long term relationship, in other words, it’s time to make sure those customers are engaged with your brand. This part of the process must focus on providing value to your clients through customer service, make sure to train your customer service representative to sell a solution and not a product so you can build a win-win relationship with your clients in which you are providing them a product or service that is the perfect fit for them. You might be wondering, how do I keep my customers constantly happy, well you are in luck because we do it for you. At Sensation Enterprises we offer reputation management to all of our clients, therefore we take care of every message, comment or review that comes into your account and handle it accordingly so your clients are constantly engaged with your brand; also, we offer our clients engaging tools such as email marketing and lead management to create brand loyalty and target specific audiences.
The final step of the process is to delight those customers who are already attracted and engaged with your products and services. To delight your customers you need to make sure they are supported, happy, and satisfied after purchasing something from your business; try to incorporate into your marketing efforts surveys and chatbots to get to know your customers better, support them, and ask them for feedback. Additionally, at Sensation Enterprises we actively practice social media listening to manage the reputation of your business, and help you keep building your sales; since most of your customer will use this channel to ask questions and share their experience with your business’ products or service, we want to be there to answer all their questions, solve all their problems, and provide them the support they need to keep being loyal with your brand. Keep in mind that a loyal customer who is happy with your brand will become an extraordinary brand advocate that will promote through word of mouth the delightful experience it has had with your business; therefore deal with every interaction as it is the most important one of all, because truth is, it is.
Inbound Marketing Tactics
The Inbound Methodology encompasses different tactics to help you attract leads, engage with them, and delight them after they have completed the sales process, now that you know the strategies let’s go over some one of the tactics that we could use at Sensation Enterprises to make your business grow.
PPC stands for pay-per-click, a digital marketing model that helps marketers distribute ads on different platforms and pay the host a fee for every time the ad is clicked. Essentially, every time an online user clicks on an ad it will be redirected to a website or a landing page where it will be able to purchase the product or service offered, generating sales for the company and covering the fee that the company needed to pay when the online user clicked the ad, in other words, the online visit will worth more than what the company paid for it. At Sensation Enterprises we manage and design all phases of pay-per-click campaigns from research and use the appropriate keywords, to set up PPC landing pages that are fully optimized for conversions.
Email Marketing goes beyond sending emails, this strategy is about building an email list of targeted customers, optimizing your emails for the highest click-through rates and open rates, plus taking advantage of the platforms available to automate the process of nurturing your leads and turning them into customers.
Well crafted messages have a huge impact on customers decisions, a good email will connect your audience to your brand, they will know your products or service better and will learn about your story and the story of our business, as a consequence, your customers are going to be more loyal to your business which will increase your sales.
How businesses use Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing is a great option for any industry or business model since it attracts, engages, and delights clients that are specifically targeted for your business through valuable content spread on different channels. This Marketing Methodology will increase your leads and conversion rates while retaining your customers longer since it drives them through sales funnels that focus on awareness, interest, decision, and action.
At the beginning of the funnel, the awareness stage, the individual is not looking to make a purchase but is attracted by the content the business provides; once that attraction turns into interest, that individual will research to find more information about that product or service that triggered its attention by searching on the website and other digital channels the business is present in, it will consider also searching for similar options in other companies and after careful consideration (and some discounts, promotions, up-sales, etc presented by your business) it will make a decision; finally, your efforts will lead that individual to the final phase of your funnel, the action stage, where that individual will be ready to purchase the product or service your company is offering.
How Sensation Can Help
Let us grow your business with a marketing philosophy that puts customers at the core, at Sensation Enterprises, we can help you attract new customers to your business, generate brand awareness, and build a trust-based community over time utilizing all the tools that Inbound Marketing provide us. This methodology requires the effort of different teams of professionals working together working alongside our clients with one goal in mind, to attract, engage, and delight your customers; to do so we utilize tactics such as content marketing, blogs, SEO, social media, PPC, and more to provide valuable content to your leads and customers while driving them through a sales funnel based on awareness, interest, decision, and action that will create customers and turns them into promoters for your business.