Inbound Marketing: What it is and How to Use It

Inbound marketing is one of the best techniques for generating new leads for your business. Thanks to the internet, businesses can now use inbound techniques to attract clients instead of outbound marketing that many customers find annoying and disruptive. Read on for an overview of inbound marketing and how to implement it in your business. 

What is inbound marketing? 

The easiest way to understand inbound marketing is to contrast it with outbound marketing. Outbound marketing efforts, usually ads, are put directly in front of customers often when they’re doing another activity. You’re sending advertisements outward to customers. Examples include paid social media ads (disrupts scrolling to see your ad), billboards, physical mailers, television ads, or really most (if not all) forms of advertising. While great for brand awareness, it’s a fine line to avoid being too disruptive and annoying customers. 

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, pulls customers towards your business. This is done by creating marketing content and experiences that your customers actually want as opposed to ads that they don’t necessarily want to see. The most common form of inbound marketing is blogging or ranking for SEO because this allows your company to appear when customers are actively searching for a problem you solve. They come to you rather than you going to them. This is the power of inbound marketing--its ability to attract only those who are interested in your offerings, which results in a stronger ROI of marketing spend and a more engaged customer base. 

How can I implement inbound marketing in my business?

There are many inbound marketing techniques you can begin implementing today in your business. We’ve included a few of our favorites below.

SEO Improvement.

All of your pages on your website, especially the ones that cover your offerings, should target specific keywords that relate to what you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling rugged mountain bikes, you should have a page on your website optimized for “rugged mountain bikes”. You will need to do research to make sure you’re targeting a keyword without too much competition. 

Once you’ve updated your website, you’ll start ranking higher for your keywords, and customers who are searching for those keywords will discover your business. This means that a customer looking for “rugged mountain bikes” will land on your page ready to learn more and, hopefully, purchase a mountain bike. 

Blogs.

A continuation of SEO, blogging is an excellent way to drive customers to your business. Similar to your product pages, you’ll want to target keywords that customers are searching in order to rank highly. It’s important to keep in mind the intent behind the keyword as you write your blogs. If we look back at the previous example, someone searching “rugged mountain bikes” might just want to learn more about mountain bikes, which is great for a blog. A search for “where to buy rugged mountain bikes” shows an intent to buy. You can use your blog or backlinks to target this keyword (or search phrase) and inspire potential customers to buy from you. 

Social Media.

Social media isn’t just a fad for marketing. In fact, the average person spends  2 hours and 33 minutes on social media every day. This means you should make sure your company is on social media producing engaging content that they want to see during those 2 and a half hours. 

Social media is a great place to provide social proof to customers and motivate them to work with you. If you’re on Instagram, share videos and post to your stories with behind-the-scenes or examples of other customers using your product. Twitter is great for sharing quick insights from current events. You can grow a Facebook group around your services that allow customers to engage with each other and form a community through your brand. The most important thing to keep in mind is to focus on the platform where your ideal customer spends their time. For example, over half of Instagram’s customer base is aged between 18-34 years old, which means it’s not the best platform for you if your target customer is in their mid-50s. 

Email Marketing.

The above techniques focus mostly on the top of the funnel marketing, which encompasses the first interactions they have with your company. Inbound marketing doesn’t stop with just driving customers to your website or social account. Continuing to engage and build a relationship with potential customers is key to a successful inbound strategy. That’s where email comes in. 

You should be collecting emails on your website (if you aren’t, start now!), and ideally you’re sorting those leads into groups based on their interests. You can use these interests to send emails tailored to them specifically. Going back to mountain bikes, if you’re a bike shop and you sell road bikes, kid bikes, and mountain bikes, you’ll ideally segment your customers into groups based on what type of bike meets their needs and send them emails around that topic. If someone found you through a search for mountain bikes, they don’t want to subscribe and receive emails for kid’s bikes. They’ll want tips on how to mountain bike, the best places to go, when your bikes are on sale, etc. Use your email marketing to continue to engage with customers and grow your relationship.

How long will it take for inbound marketing to bring me customers?

According to impactbnd, it could take 6-9 months to see an ROI on your inbound marketing strategy. Before you write it off as taking too long, remember that inbound marketing drives customers to your business. This means that in 6-9 months, you’ll ideally have customers contacting you for your offering as a result of a search on Google. Contrast that with the high costs of paid advertising and the emotional pain of cold outreach. Which do you prefer? 

Tips for Getting Started with Inbound Marketing

Now that you know more about inbound marketing, it’s time to apply it to your business. Here are a few tips to ensure you receive the best results. 

Develop a long-term strategy. With a 6-9 month lead time, it’s critical that you have a planned approach to your inbound marketing. Create a content calendar, identify keywords, and develop an engagement approach with your email marketing. 

Determine your budget. If you’re not a writer, the best option is likely to hire a writer to create your content. Know how valuable inbound marketing is to you and find a writer within your budget.

Complement with Outbound Techniques. While you can rely exclusively on an inbound strategy, for some businesses, using outbound techniques allows them to have a comprehensive marketing strategy. You can use paid ads to raise brand awareness and generate leads that drive customers to your landing pages to collect emails, inform them on your brand, and more. 

Be patient. It’s easy to become discouraged when you’ve spent hours (or weeks) writing content only to see your traffic staying the same. In order to successfully implement an inbound approach, you have to stick with it and wait for the results. They won’t come overnight, but once they do, you’ll be glad you stuck with it. 

Have a favorite inbound technique that we missed? Let us know!