To enter the world of digital marketing and grow your business, you need inbound marketing strategies to start your startup today. Do you know what the meaning of inbound marketing is? Have you ever heard of inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing strategies focus on attracting and engaging customers through valuable and relevant content. Rather than interrupting potential customers with ads, inbound marketing aims to pull them in through informative blogs, videos, social media posts, and other content that addresses their interests and challenges. By optimizing for search engines, using social media to promote content, and implementing lead capture forms, businesses can attract qualified leads and nurture them through the sales funnel. Inbound marketing builds trust and credibility, creating lasting relationships with customers who appreciate the helpful information provided, resulting in long-term growth and success for the business.
If you don’t know what inbound marketing is, the most effective inbound marketing strategies, and how to use them to grow and develop your business or startup, let’s talk about them. So stay with us.
What is the necessity of marketing strategies in the world of digital marketing?
The third world war is over the growth and survival of digital businesses! Don’t believe it?
Maybe this sentence seems a bit exaggerated; But with the fierce competition between businesses and start-ups in the digital age these days and it is increasing day by day, such a battle is not impossibly far-fetched.
Victory in this battlefield is the contribution of someone who has accurate war tactics and strategies to grow & reach the target audience and attract their attention, i.e., measures that in the business world are called a marketing strategy.
All small and large businesses in the world, from small shops to large companies and organizations, need a strong strategy.
A strategy that can raise brand awareness, get in touch with target audiences, lead them to buy their products and services, and achieve other marketing goals by evaluating their own and competitors’ positions.
Which one of the dozens of different strategies will really work for your business is what we are going to walk through.
In this article, we will first answer the question “What is inbound marketing?” and then we will fully introduce you to the most effective types of marketing (categories of marketing) strategies.
Finally, we will teach you several hot tips so that you can make a successful strategy for your business. If you agree, let’s start!
What is meant by inbound marketing?
To answer this question, first, we need to introduce you to the concept of “marketing”. Marketing is a concept beyond advertising and sales.
In simple words, the entire cycle of identifying and communicating with potential customers, as well as understanding their needs so that they can easily persuade prospects to buy products is called marketing.
With this definition, the meaning of inbound marketing is probably somewhat clear to you.
Inbound marketing is an effective and excellent way to expand your business by creating sustainable communication channels with potential customers and consumers by attracting and drawing them to your brand.
Perhaps it can be said that the most significant reason for the effectiveness of inbound marketing strategies is revealing and finding qualified leads in the first step, then the power of attracting prospects, turning them into real customers, and in the end, increasing the sales funnel.
In other words, inbound marketing is the best method to attract more new and ideal prospects to your website, increase & retain visits, and interact very well with them.
In order for you to get to know the concept of inbound marketing more concretely, we will give you an example:
If, as a marketer, you own a company page on LinkedIn and want to attract more connections (how to get more linkedin connections) or customers, you should focus on creating relevant and valuable content with them so that in addition to trending your posts on LinkedIn, you can drive more traffic to your business page and get more views for your content.
These content marketing strategies can include posting multiple images and videos, publishing high-quality articles, etc.
Do you know the difference between post and articles on LinkedIn?
The bottom line of inbound marketing is that it first creates more brand awareness and long-term trust & credibility with your customers, and then converts qualified leads into prospects.
As a whole, you can do inbound marketing by publishing quality and useful content on professional social media such as LinkedIn so that make your posts get noticed and stand out on LinkedIn, personalizing your social media pages, and trying other techniques that we will discuss in the rest of the article.
What is the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing?
Unlike traditional outbound marketing, inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses more on driving customers to your website instead of outwardly advertising your products & services.
By bringing potential customers to your website, as well as by creating high-quality content, inbound marketing familiarizes them with your brand & offerings and prepares them to buy.
While outbound marketing, through traditional paid media such as TV ads, billboards, and posters, go directly to advertising your products and services.
Another important difference between inbound and outbound marketing is that inbound marketing not only takes less time to build long-term relationships with prospects but also saves on marketing costs.
However, outbound marketing requires a great deal of money and time for sales campaigns.
What are the types of inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing can be divided into the following 3 types:
1. SEO: A search engine optimization strategy that involves improving a website or social media post to appear higher in search results, which can lead to more traffic.
2. PPC: Pay-per-click advertising is another inbound marketing strategy that relies on utilizing keywords.
3. Content: Another inbound marketing is producing useful and informative content. By publishing high-quality and valuable content, you can grow your audience and turn them into customers.
Best inbound marketing strategies
According to published statistics, businesses that have used an effective and documented strategy are over 300% more likely to report their success.
You will be surprised by this statistic, this number tells us that without a strategy, your business is doomed to failure, as well as all the money and effort you spend on marketing will not yield results. Do you know why?
That’s why without having an effective marketing strategy, you can neither recognize your customers completely nor know what’s going on with your competitors.
Having said that, the marketing strategy is like a map and guide that shows everything clearly: from the target audience to the type of advertising, and communication channels, and how to achieve the long-term and short-term objectives of the organization.
According to what was said, the marketing strategy is a long or short-term plan that every company chooses to introduce products to potential customers, to encourage them to buy, and to reach their target marketing goals.
Now that you know the definition of marketing strategy and inbound marketing as well, let’s see what the best inbound marketing strategies are.
There are many different types (perhaps more than fifty types) of inbound marketing strategies that depending on your goals and business needs, you can choose them.
However, we do not introduce all of them in this section, rather, we go to strategies that have already become successful and form the basis of most businesses marketing activities.
Here are just the top and most effective inbound marketing strategies for driving business growth:
1. Use strong and professional social media: LinkedIn
To create a target persona and understand your target prospects, it is recommended that you need to use social media.
Do you need LinkedIn? Yes, of course, LinkedIn is the best and largest specialized social network in the world with more than 875 million professional users worldwide.
You can make the most of LinkedIn to identify and understand your target customers. Keep in mind that you must have a deep knowledge of your target market.
By providing invaluable marketing and advertising solutions, quality lead generation, effective connection with recruiters and clients, sales and talent solutions, etc. LinkedIn is the best place to do & improve your sales and marketing, as well as create a target persona.
With the ability to have multiple company pages on LinkedIn, you can get more useful information about your target audience’s insights by analyzing the content published and activity on your LinkedIn pages.
By checking LinkedIn demographic information, you can get to know your target audience well and also easily understand what demographic information applies to your business on LinkedIn.
Your LinkedIn activity analytics page gives you useful information about your audiences such as location, job title, industry, company, and company size.
Based on this, you will know what content to publish on your LinkedIn company page that will be more interesting to them.
2. Use visual content: video posts as well as images
Visual content has many fans. As such these visual posts attract more readers.
Maybe you have heard of video marketing?
Video marketing is one of the inbound marketing strategies and a quick & effective method that uses video tools to deliver your message to your audience.
What kind of video do you use? From short and educational videos about your business and products to interesting motion graphics and first-hand business news and longer documentaries regarding your career and industry, they can all be the subject of your video posts.
According to a report published by Hubspot, companies in 2022 that utilize video as part of their marketing strategy will have a 43% increase in revenue compared to their competitors.
On top of the video, you can take advantage of images on posts. Nearly 90% of content writers use images to make their content stronger.
The more images, charts, videos, etc. your content contains, the more engaging your content will be and the better your inbound marketing efforts will be as well.
3. Produce deep data-driven content
Rather than sharing short posts, try to write articles that are the result of in-depth and extensive research. Because they have a greater effect on the audience.
Did you know that the longer your content, the more page views, lead generation, social media shares, and better inbound marketing and SEO rankings you will get?
No doubt, you will be amazed by these published statistics on social media!
According to these statistics, compared to short posts, long articles have 8 times more views, 9 times more lead generation, and 3 times more shares.
4. Use an event marketing strategy
Event marketing is one of the most appropriate ways to increase sales in B2B and B2C businesses.
Event marketing refers to hosting, sponsoring, or participating in an event, conference, exhibition, Webinar, etc., which is done with the aim of introducing new brands or services & products and generating prospects.
With this method of marketing, you can not only develop relationships with clients and other colleagues, but you will also attract a lot of customers who are interested in your career area.
It is worth noting that you can promote events and webinars on your LinkedIn pages.
Content inbound marketing
Content marketing is one of the most powerful marketing strategies to increase traffic and conversions. What content marketing does is utilize high-quality and useful content to attract and convert leads into potential customers.
In fact, to understand the concept of content inbound marketing, you should know that this type of marketing focuses on the needs and concerns of users and provides educational and useful content instead of selling products or services.
Content inbound marketing has a tremendous impact on the buying behavior of users, and as it was said before, turns leads (potential customers) and users who are in the stages of the purchase journey and have the greatest desire and affinity for your company’s products and services into permanent clients.
In other words, instead of forcing people to buy, in a content inbound marketing strategy, you guide your audience along their journey by producing useful, engaging, and entertaining content.
This makes you a reliable source and reference in your field of work so that your contacts can follow your content eagerly and in the long run, they will be encouraged to buy your products and services.
It’s important to remember that content inbound marketing isn’t just limited to blog posts or social media posts like LinkedIn. Podcasts, ebooks, infographics, videos, webinars, etc., are other forms of content that will come in handy.
Accordingly, 5 types of forms are defined for content inbound marketing, as follows:
- Social media content marketing
- Blog content marketing
- Video content marketing
- Podcast content marketing
- Infographic content marketing
In a nutshell, content inbound marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for 2 main reasons:
- It drives prospects into your sales funnel and converts qualified leads into customers.
- It increases your brand awareness and credibility.
In this article, we talked about inbound marketing and how inbound marketing strategies can attract more customers, generate more leads, and consequently boost your ROI.
However, what exactly inbound marketing methodology is less discussed.
If you are new to inbound marketing, you probably haven’t heard about the basics of the inbound marketing funnel. We will shed light on what the inbound marketing funnel is in the rest of the article.
So what is an inbound marketing funnel?
The inbound marketing funnel is known as the inbound marketing methodology and in some cases, it is also referred to as an inbound flow chart.
To do the method of inbound marketing and to get the best results from it, you have to go through some steps.
The steps of doing inbound marketing are called the inbound marketing funnel, which includes 4 key steps, which if done properly, will have a major impact on your site’s SEO.
Simply put, the inbound marketing funnel labels clients based on how interested they are in your products and services, and accordingly, you straightforwardly know what kind of content is good, as well as when is the right time to send it to them.
Inbound marketing is done by following the model of “Attract, Delight, and Engage” which leverages SEO, social media strategies (social media strategy), content marketing, marketing automation, video marketing, and more to nurture consumers.
What are the steps of inbound marketing (inbound marketing funnel)?
Step 1: Attracting the audience (Attract):
To start this type of marketing, the first step is to attract the attention of the audience, in other words, to attract users to the website. At this point, you have to put in a lot of effort to drive the audience to your site.
Of course, bear in mind that audience attraction must be done in a purposeful and entirely principled way.
To attract the audience, you need to go through three steps, which we describe below:
Step 2: knowing the target audience (Engage):
The knowledge of the target audience, in general terms, is to know the needs of the audience in order to produce appropriate and user-friendly content.
At this step, you need to generate interest in your audience so that they are encouraged to stay on your website. For this purpose, you can make tempting offers that are related to your business and make them interested and enthusiastic.
Step 3: producing unique and high-quality content:
In such a way that it can attract the user. In this step, after you are able to arouse interest among your users, you should be able to convert interested audiences into customers by producing valuable content.
To produce the best content, you can use images and videos. In addition, the topic of your posts should be interesting and trending.
Remember that you can make the most of emojis, hashtags, tags, and mentions to increase click-through rates on your posts, for example on LinkedIn (what is a good click through rate on linkedin?).
Step 4: delivering the content to the audience (Delight):
To do this, you must interact with users. However, communicating with users can be very effective in gaining their satisfaction and trust.
On top of that, you can get help from different social media like LinkedIn or search engines.
As a matter of fact, the goal of producing good content is to improve SEO and optimize your website, which should be taken into account.
To put it more simply, the 4 steps of the above inbound marketing funnel can be summarized in the following relatively easy steps:
- Strangers
- Visitors or Prospects
- Customers
- Promoters
Inbound marketing planning
People who struggle with inbound marketing are definitely familiar with the complexities involved in planning and formulating an inbound marketing strategy.
Following a proper inbound marketing plan, which we will mention below, will help you to consider the right inbound marketing strategies for your company and organization, and then prioritize and focus to get the best results.
Now the question that may arise for you is, how can you create a comprehensive plan for inbound marketing?
To do this, it is necessary to remember the following important tips first and then follow:
1. Determine the budget:
Determining the marketing budget is the first step for planning inbound marketing. A lack of budget and financial resources can immediately derail your strategy.
You should first estimate your budget and all your expenses very carefully and make sure that you don’t end up in debt with the amount of money you have for marketing.
2. Identify your buyer personas:
If you don’t know who your audience is, what they’re looking for, and what their needs are, or you don’t even know who you’re talking to, how are you going to influence them and get their attention?
So, the second principle for formulating a marketing strategy is knowing the audience and designing a persona.
Knowing the customer’s concerns, needs, interests, behavior, and goals, helps you to create an effective strategy. By researching keywords, conducting surveys, checking social network statistics, and Google Analytics, you can design a credible buyer persona.
3. Identify the target market
Now it’s time to target! In the third step, you need to determine which segment of your target market you want to target.
It is at this stage that you determine in which way and channel to target the audience in order to reach the target market and audience.
A little trick: you can target a market where there is little competition and room for growth.
4. Determine weaknesses, strengths, threats, and opportunities
In the fourth step, you need to scrutinize all the strengths & weaknesses, opportunities, and threats ahead.
The SWOT matrix, which is a combination of the 4 words Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, is a good technique to get a comprehensive view of obstacles and opportunities in business.
Analyzing these 4 factors in the strategy development phase is necessary for the growth of any business.
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Inbound marketing strategies are customer-centric approaches that focus on attracting and engaging potential clients through valuable and relevant content. Unlike traditional outbound marketing, which involves direct and interruptive advertising, inbound marketing aims to pull customers in by creating meaningful interactions at every stage of the buyer’s journey. A well-structured inbound marketing funnel begins with attracting prospects through various channels, such as social media, blogs, and search engine optimization (SEO). Valuable content, such as e-books, videos, and webinars, is shared to nurture and guide leads through the funnel, converting them into customers. A template-driven approach can be employed to streamline content creation and ensure consistent messaging. The company’s website plays a crucial role in inbound marketing, acting as the central hub to provide relevant information and encourage engagement. By utilizing inbound marketing strategies, B2B businesses can build lasting relationships with their target audience, generate quality leads, and establish authority and trust in the digital marketing landscape.
Conclusion
With the development of technology and the change in the way people interact with each other, their expectations of a business and the way of selling have also changed.
At this point in time, inbound marketing helps businesses to keep up with the changes and in addition to increasing sales, they create a good business experience for customers.
For this purpose, it is necessary to implement inbound marketing strategies in all dimensions of your company and consider its different stages.
FAQs
What does inbound marketing mean? Inbound marketing is a method that helps you attract, engage, and ultimately make your business’s audience and customers happy and satisfied.
What are examples of inbound marketing? The most important examples of inbound marketing include:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts like LinkedIn posts
- Ebooks
- Viral videos
- Webinars
What are the 3 types of inbound marketing? 3 Types of inbound marketing include SEO, PPC, and content creation.
What do you do inbound marketing? With the help of inbound marketing, you can find your prospects and convert them into customers ready to buy, which ultimately leads to increased sales and prosperity of your business.