What is Inbound Marketing

Do you know what Inbound Marketing is? If you have come this far, it is because you have heard of content and attraction marketing within digital marketing and you want to learn how to get customers to come to you instead of looking for them. For this reason, we explain step by step what Inbound Marketing or Attraction Marketing is and how to prepare a strategy that works.

What is Inbound Marketing and how is it defined

Inbound Marketing is translated as internal marketing and is best known as attraction marketing. It constitutes a set of techniques that allow us to reach our clients, defined in this methodology as a buyer persona, in a non-intrusive way. It is a strategy that attracts the customer with useful, relevant, and valuable content. In this way, potential customers find your company through different channels such as social networks, blogs, or SEO, among others. Undoubtedly, this non-intrusion is the key to the definition of inbound marketing and what provides the differential factor compared to traditional advertising ( outbound ).

Example of how to design an Inbound Marketing strategy in 8 easy steps

1. Define your Smart goals well
2. Create a buyer persona
3. Draw the Buyer Journey or Customer Journey Map
4. Get Attracting Qualified Traffic
5. Convert your traffic into Potential Customers
6. Convert your potential into Customers or Sales
7. Measure results at every stage of the funnel
8. Build loyalty and delight your client

Stages in Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is mainly based on three stages.

1. Attract

First, we need to generate traffic, for this, we need resources such as content marketing, SEO techniques, and social networks, among others. It is very important to create strategic planning to achieve good results. The idea is to increase the number of visitors. 

2. Convert

Once we have managed to attract visitors, we need them to become leads, that is, contacts with whom we can maintain a long-term relationship. For this, it is important to respond to messages and offer relevant content, among others. 

3. Build loyalty

With the database created, you must manage the records. You must automate your inbound marketing so that each lead receives specific information and ends up becoming a customer. In this phase, you have to keep the customer satisfied. 

Attraction marketing funnel: TOFU, MOFU, AND BOFU

Inbound marketing uses a methodology based on generating strategies defined for each stage of the funnel.

Top of the funnel – TOFU

This is the high stage of any top recruitment strategy focused on bringing users to your website or app for the first time. It is also called prospecting in digital marketing. For this, we use SEO, content, blog, and paid media.

middle of the funnel– MOFU

It’s about getting customers back to your website. For this, we mainly use email marketing and remarketing as well as conversational marketing or WhatsApp marketing.

Bottom of the funnel – BOFU

It is the final stage where we risk everything for everything. It is about converting visitors into customers and therefore we will use the offer and sales promotion through paid media -remarketing- and email marketing. We also cannot forget tools such as the chatbot or push messages for this type of sale-closing action.

How to Design an Attraction Marketing Strategy

Now that we know what Inbound Marketing is, we are going to see the steps to follow to create and execute an effective and working Inbound Marketing strategy.

8 Steps to Design an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Define your goals well

First, you have to establish what your goals are. What do you want to get? Who do you want to reach? How are you going to do it? What would the ideal visit be like? And very important: clearly define who your user is and the funnel they must follow to become a customer.

Create a personal buyer and a buyer journey

The best way to develop a buyer persona is by following the steps indicated in this one:

1. Define your ideal client
2. Collect information about your customer
3. Analyze the information and group the different buyer persona
4. Give life to your clients-people
5. Share information with the entire company

Previous questions:

1. Personal situation
2. Needs and Goals
3. Behaviors
4. Relevant Skills for our Business
5. Main Pain Points
6. Personal goals (goals where it can help you) and practical goals (related to us)
7. Buyer Journey

Get to attract qualified traffic

What do we understand as qualified traffic? We can define it as those users who have the best chance of becoming potential customers and, ultimately, customers. For this we cannot settle for an only acceptable website, we must pursue excellence and to achieve the attraction of our users we must take care of the following aspects.

First, you have to create optimized landing pages (or landing pages ). A landing page is a page that we arrive at when we click on a link. The ideal strategy? Have an optimized page for each theme. 

Now that we have our thematically segmented pages, the next step in Inbound Marketing is to attract qualified traffic to these pages. First of all, we will have to position our content in search engines either through natural SEO positioning or SEM-paid positioning. For this, the key is to create quality, attractive content that adds value to our users. And finally… Promote this content on social media!

Convert your traffic into leads

Now that we have already achieved a large volume of visits prone to becoming potential customers, we have to encourage this conversion. Traffic by itself is of little use, remember that our ultimate goal is to make a profit. In this phase we have to convert as many visits as possible into potential customers, that is, get leads. To do this, we must obtain the contact details of our clients by filling in a form. 

Convert your leads into customers or sales

We have reached the part that interested us: we have gotten traffic and we have managed to convert them into potential clients. The next step of Inbound Marketing is to get the sale. How can we encourage it? For this, we will launch an e-mail marketing campaign. Also in every sale, the buy button should be highlighted, create attractive shopping carts and make the web usable. We must also highlight our star product, include testimonials, offer security, and convey a sense of urgency, that is, that the product is about to run out. And, above all, you have to simplify the purchase as much as possible. 

Measure the result of the entire inbound marketing campaign

We have made a huge effort in all the previous stages. However, we must identify which actions are working and which are not. Only then can we prepare improvements to optimize the overall process? What indicators may interest us?

Regarding traffic, we have to look at key metrics such as:

• The global volume of visits.
• A total number of unique visits.
• Bounce percentage (that is, users who have left as soon as they enter our content). This percentage will help us to determine the quality of the content.
• Average visit time will also serve as a quality indicator.

Regarding our SEO actions, we would be interested in measuring the following in inbound Marketing:

• The number of organic traffic achieved.
• The number of strategic keywords positioned and their position in SEO search rankings.
• Rest of the keywords that we have positioned and their position.
• Inbound links that we have achieved.

Regarding our SEM positioning campaigns we will have to obtain the following indicators:

• CTR or Click Through Rate is the percentage of clicks on the number of impressions.
• The total volume of traffic achieved
• Average positions achieved.
• Cost per click.
• Total cost.

Regarding our actions in social networks, we will be interested in measuring:

• Increase in the number of followers.
• The number of user interactions with our content (likes, number of shares, comments, etc.) is an indicator of quality.
• The volume of traffic was achieved thanks to social networks.

And, finally, regarding our email marketing campaigns, we will be interested to know:

• The number of registered users.
• The opening percentage of the email.
• The percentage of conversions achieved.
• The number of users who have unsubscribed from the newsletter (as a quality indicator).

And finally … Loyalty and delight to your client!

Despite having reached the sale we cannot settle for it. We must be able to establish stable and lasting relationships with our clients and show them that we remember them. It can be achieved with details such as Christmas greetings, sending free samples, and interacting on social networks, among others.

Now that you know the steps, you cannot forget to apply the most advanced automation tools to be able to work more quickly and effectively. For this, we recommend the article on Inbound Marketing tools, such as Hubspot, where you will discover how easy it can be to generate leads thanks to the automation of your work.

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