What is Inbound Marketing?

Understanding Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Most people recognize Outbound Marketing, where companies interrupt audiences with unwanted content like TV commercials, radio ads, YouTube ads, and pop-ups.

Inbound Marketing, on the other hand, offers valuable content to solve audience problems and build connections. It earns attention rather than buying it.

The key is providing helpful solutions that positively impact both your audience and business. Attracting customers is just the beginning.

Businesses must also support and help customers grow after making the sale.

The three steps of Inbound Marketing

Attract

Bringing the right people to your website or business is the first step. Getting the right customers through the door, figuratively or literally, will help your business by focusing your attention on the right people. You can’t sell the unsellable, so save your energy and engage with the right prospects.

Attract potential customers by improving your search ranking, creating blog posts and/or videos, asking and answering questions on social media, offering free guides/ebooks, or anything else that will make your business useful and reliable. You don’t need to focus on the sale, focus on building a relationship and the sales will practically take care of themselves.

Engage

Follow up with the people who take action on your website. Get their email and send them more useful content. We’re still not pushing the sale on the customer, we’re building the relationship and understanding the customer better.

Delight

With a better understanding of each customer, you can provide individualized information that’s going to be the most value to them. Give them something memorable and shareable in the format they prefer. This is where it’s helpful to have smart content that is released to appropriate customers. You’ll want multiple pieces of content that get fairly specific and are useful to a smaller group of customers, then share the content with the customers that fit with that content.

HubSpot coined the term Inbound Marketing in 2006 and has more information and resources

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