What Are Inbound Marketing Services?

Outbound and inbound marketing are drastically different, even though they share the goal of increasing conversions and sales. Inbound marketing occurs when you create relevant, valuable content designed to be discovered organically; outbound marketing is when you reach out to individuals directly.

Inbound marketing offers useful content like blogs, email, social media, and SEO to attract a prospects’ attention. This content is then spread by word of mouth, social media shares, and ads that don’t disrupt a user’s overall experience.

Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers. Godin encouraged marketers to respect the consumer’s choice and time. A buyer should initiate their journey, not the marketer or salesperson. This is the essence of inbound marketing.

If you want to capture the leads that are already out there and grow your business with sustainable, cost-effective methods – you need to be on top of digital marketing strategy. This is where the inbound marketing agency and inbound marketing methodology can increase your brand awareness and connect with prospective customers.

Why Inbound Marketing Works

One of the biggest problems with traditional outbound marketing is that it has to interrupt people in order to get their attention. In traditional outbound marketing, marketers have sought consumer attention by “disrupting.” A brand forcefully places itself in front of potential customers and hopes they’ll be interested in buying. Some examples of outbound marketing include TV advertisements, billboards, telemarketing, radio ads, and direct mail. 

Inbound marketing is based on delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. This willing engagement makes it far more likely that when a potential customer is ready to buy, they will make their purchase from the company that provided them valuable, relevant content. This is where outbound marketing fails and the inbound marketer can generate tremendous business growth. Through informative online content marketing, helpful videos, funny tweets, brand awareness, and many other outlets – inbound digital marketing strategy works because it draws the leads to you.

Attraction

Inbound marketing strategies use content and messaging that attract your target audience. People have different needs, and not all your prospects have the same interests, goals, and behaviors. Therefore, when evaluating your target market, it’s helpful to create several different buyer personas, so you can tailor your content to be more relevant, and valuable to each prospect.

To reach your prospective customers, start by creating and publishing relevant content – such as blog articles, content offers, and social media – that provide value. Examples include guides on how to use your products, information about how your solution can solve their challenges, customer testimonials, and details about promotions or discounts.

Engagement

When using inbound strategy to engage your audience, ensure you’re communicating and dealing with leads and customers in a way that makes them want to build long-term relationships with you. Additionally, be sure you’re always solution selling rather than product selling. This will ensure all deals end in mutually beneficial agreements for customers and your business – meaning, you provide value for your customers.

Satisfaction

Inbound Marketing strategies that delight prospects ensure engaged customers who are happy, satisfied, and supported long after they make a purchase. These strategies involve your team members becoming advisors and experts who assist customers at any point in time.

Lastly, the mark of an inbound strategy focused on delighting customers is one that assists and supports customers in any situation, whether or not your business gets any value out of it. Remember, a delighted customer becomes a brand advocate and promoter, so handle all interactions, both big and small, with care.

The Inbound Sales Funnel Explained

At its core, the inbound sales funnel isn’t much different from the buyer’s journey you’re familiar with. The Inbound marketing methodology‘s purpose is to keep prospective customers engaged with only your inbound marketing content so they choose your product over your competitor’s.

Leads are shown different types of content based on how far they’ve gotten in your sales funnel. First-time potential customers might find a blog post outlining how a product can solve a new problem they have. Perhaps they’ve realized that their shingles aren’t fit for severe weather and need to find a more enduring roofing material.

On the other hand, promoters who have interacted deeply with a business will get much more shareable and valuable content. They are already an entrenched part of your customer base and are a reliable source of social proof and general excitement over your brand.

What is an Automated Workflow?

Leads are much more likely to continue interacting with your business if you respond to their interest within the first 5-minutes. However, assigning someone to sit down and monitor all incoming interactions is a blatant waste of manpower. Especially when the process can be easily automated.

Automated workflows in inbound marketing or Marketing Automation refer to pre-made responses that are sent based on specific customer actions. Examples include sending a free gift for providing your email or emailing recommendations based on previous purchases.

A prepared response may sound like it’s going against the “customized experience” of inbound marketing, but that’s far from the truth. Since it is the customer‘s actions that prompt a workflow to initiate, they feel like they are being individually looked after. That’s why it’s important that the template message you craft doesn’t come off as overly robotic.

Additionally, although these messages follow a template, they have sections that differ according to the situation. Things like the recipient’s name, recommended products, and special offer types will vary widely for a more personal potential customer experience.

Nurturing Leads Throughout the Sales Funnel

When buyers are merely seeking out initial information, a hard sell pushes them away. Likewise, you do need to close when the time is right. Inbound marketing uses strategy and tactics that strike the right chord at the right time. A carefully crafted workflow lets you set up follow-up emails ensuring that you’re reaching them when their interest is peaking.

Generally, leads are separated into five stages that determine what type of content a potential customer is searching for.

1. Strangers: Completely new consumers who haven’t discovered your brand yet. These are people who have identified a problem and just started to search for a solution.
2. Visitors: Strangers who are interacting with your business on a surface level. I.E. Browsing your site or checking for social proof.
3. Leads: Visitors that have interacted with multiple forms of your digital marketing content. They are in the research phase and are considering making a purchase.
4. Customer: Leads who have taken the next step and gone through with a purchase from your business. This is where trust is cemented and where they can start providing social proof to your brand.
5. Promoters: Customers that make an effort to spread your brand within their circles. They are the best targets for involvement in social media marketing, content marketing, and other highly interactive and shareable mediums.

Inbound marketing campaigns can each begin and conclude with the right sales tactic – delivering hands-off information, offering a soft sell, or requiring a filled-out contact form to obtain more info. At each stage, inbound marketing strategy nurtures the lead with the right touch.

The Benefit of Inbound Marketing for Small Businesses

The resources available to large corporations give them the freedom to pursue high-budget advertising campaigns, but smaller-sized businesses don’t have that option. Inbound marketing services help bridge this gap and reach that potential customer.

Many inbound strategies don’t involve large productions or endorsements. They rely on using owned media sources to improve your online visibility and access. This includes mediums like email marketing, search engine optimization, blog posts, and social media marketing.

All of the presented options, when utilized correctly, can introduce large demographics to your brand with a low-cost content marketing strategy. It’s worth noting that the low cost also means that they are extremely forgiving as you can just continue perfecting them until you get it right.

Types of Inbound Marketing Methods

Any number of mediums can play a part in your inbound sales process. After all, online marketing is an inherently creative process and new ideas are popping up all the time. But to make a complete campaign, you’ll need to include a variety of these for your target audience to interact with as they go through their research. To make things easier, we’ve included some of the most popular inbound methods below.

Subscriber Lists and Email Marketing

Email marketing is still ranked as the most effective marketing channel, beating out social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing. Email marketing allows you to promote products and services, as well as incentivize customer loyalty. Email marketing is a form of marketing that can make the customers on your email list aware of new products, discounts, and other services. It can also educate your audience on the value of your brand or keep them engaged between purchases. Despite the rise of social media, people use email more than other platforms. Data shows that most people are on email-and the number increases every year.

While it can be seen as an older strategy, email marketing is highly recommended by most online experts. Not only is it affordable, but it brings back a dizzyingly high ROI of 3,800 percent! This is by far the highest recorded returns of any standard inbound marketing method.

Much of this success is owed to its innate customizability through gathered data. By sending out regular email circulars, you can track your target audience interactions with links, graphics, or deals you have going on. This lets your next attempt be better optimized for your subscriber list.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the practice of improving your web page’s ranking on sites like Google. Without proper SEO, potential shoppers are much less likely to find and interact with your content themselves. This is the least conspicuous form of inbound marketing, but it serves as the foundation of all your marketing content.

One of SEO’s most compatible attributes with inbound content marketing is keyword detection. When people are searching for a solution to their needs, the keywords they include in their query help Google bring up appropriate results. If the right words or phrases aren’t integrated, then your valuable content will end up buried somewhere on the 50th page of results. Search engine optimization tools like Google Analytics are used to make sure you rank at the top of search engine results pages.

Blog Posts

The key word here is consistent. There are countless blogs on nearly every subject, but most of them are content poor. They start out strong with updates coming once, sometimes twice, a week. However, as time goes on and view counts remain low, they are often put on the back burner.

This is a major loss to any inbound marketing campaign as many of the benefits of a consistent blog aren’t quantified by direct views. They factor into SEO rankings and make your site visible to a much wider range of search queries.

The more active your blog is, the more shopper questions your site addresses well. This gives your business and content marketing effort a higher level of credibility and makes it more likely that shoppers remain in your sales funnel.

Social Media

Social Media is one of the more intimidating aspects for small and medium-sized businesses to tackle. It’s a very direct method for conversing with your customer base and opens up dialogue for both fair and unfair critiques. However, most also recognize the necessity of some form of social media presence for business growth.

It helps you build the right brand image and provides an easy source of social proof in comment sections. These are invaluable assets to any inbound marketing strategy. Since most social media content is only given glancing consideration, you’re able to get out an extensive amount of content to potential customers while hitting a wide range of keywords and phrases.

There’s no need to create high-production skits or partnerships either. Depending on your goals, you can use template surveys or product highlights to get a discussion going and spark the engagement you need.

Content Designed for Your Customers

Inbound marketing provides content that specifically appeals to your potential customers. Better than casting an open net, better than targeting a general demographic – inbound content has direct relevance to the information sought by the consumer.

This means you’re not wasting resources attempting to connect with uninterested parties. So, while inbound marketing gets in front of fewer leads than traditional advertising, it only brings in the hottest leads.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

However, to do this effectively, you need to have a clear image of the type of shopper you’re trying to target. This is your “buyer persona.”

Initially, you can get the needed information from consumer research, surveys, subscriber information, or just by consulting your sales team. You’re looking for trends about which people consume your content and how they find it in the first place. Figuring out data like age, gender, income, and preferred media will allow you to create targeted messaging for a marketing campaign that is several times more efficient than general advertising.

Data to Analyze and Improve

Creating your buyer persona isn’t the end. You’re just a few steps from the starting line. The results of inbound marketing can be tracked on a daily basis and offer immediate feedback to inform changes to your campaign.

However, this also means that the specifics of your buyer persona evolve as you gather more data. It might reveal new treads or force you to pivot strategies with a newly released product. The beauty of inbound marketing is that you always know where your leads are coming from, how often they convert, and what engagement is causing it.

This reveals another major weakness in traditional marketing. Because it hits a broad audience, there’s no way to test the effects that small tweaks have. It’s lack of focus means that businesses can’t be sure that better results are due to a new tactic or occur because that tactic is reaching an entirely new person.

Choosing an Inbound Marketing Agency

It’s a brand new world and you don’t want to get lost in it. The vital role of inbound marketing in cultivating a brand means that your messaging needs to have a consistent voice on top of everything else. Rather than hiring full-time specialists to take over this role, it’s more effective to bring on a third-party agency.

Inbound marketers manage your resources so that everything is optimized for your ever-changing target audience and buyer personas. This means purposeful blog posts that draw in new searchers rather than pumping out irrelevant topics. It means an optimized website experience that organically prompts visitors to share their information. Most importantly, it means keeping customers with YOU the entire time.

It’s difficult to judge an inbound marketing agency on the small things, since you’re not an expert yourself. However, it speaks volumes toward their credibility when they’re open about their previous body of work. Their website should include case studies and testimonials detailing the exact results they brought to each of their clients. If you need further confirmation, you can always contact these clients and ask for their first-hand experience.

It’s also worth considering how an agency handles their own digital marketing strategy. If an agency can’t do right for themselves, how can you expect any better for your business?

Turn to BroadVision Marketing for Help with Inbound Marketing

As we’ve been saying, success with inbound marketing requires a sound strategy, purposeful content creation, and plenty more. At BroadVision Marketing, we keep our client’s names right on our homepage as badges of pride.

We get multiple content marketing sources set up for you right away so you can start seeing results as soon as possible. We also perform a holistic overview of your current website to find pain points that are hindering your ability to generate leads and convert prospective customers.

Then we get to the real work.

You’ll see remarkable changes in your online visibility and prospective customer interaction. We’ll spread targeted digital content through several online and social media channels and bring fast and improving results to your brand awareness.

If you’re ready to hire an inbound marketing agency or need more info about the process, contact BroadVision Marketing today. We’ll lead the way!

The Seven Principles for Attracting More Clients

This free white paper will help you build a solid foundation for all of your online marketing efforts:

Download Now!

Inbound Marketing Success Stories