What is the Inbound Marketing method?
The term Inbound Marketing was created in 2004 by HubSpot, a company that develops and sells marketing-sales software based in the US. Accordingly, Inbound Marketing is a way to attract customers to you by sharing relevant information, creating useful content, and satisfying readers’ needs.
What are the advantages of the Inbound Marketing method? No need for expensive advertising, Inbound Marketing will guide potential customers to actively search for businesses through Google, blogs or social networks. By publishing the right content, in the right place and at the right time, Inbound Marketing creates real value for customers.
They will trust and love the business more because they receive valuable information. That’s also why HubSpot calls Inbound Marketing a marketing method based on humanity.
What is Inbound Marketing?
What is the difference between Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing?
The opposite of Inbound Marketing is Outbound Marketing – a traditional marketing method. Surely all of us have sometimes been annoyed by solicitation calls from sales staff, personal inboxes filled with spam, or ads that interrupt the movie or program you are watching… Ways to approach This marketing is both costly and ineffective and even causes the brand to lose points in the eyes of consumers.
To better understand the difference between Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing, there is a simile saying: “Inbound marketing attracts customers like magnets, not hitting them on the head with a sledgehammer”.
What is the difference between Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing?
What is the difference between Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing?
The market goes through many stages of “change”. People’s way of living and shopping have also changed significantly. That’s why marketers should not cling to marketing methods from the 1990s to please customers.
Nowadays, people mainly shop and search for information via the internet and there is always a way to block your “bothering” tactics. Although it takes more time than Outbound Marketing, once successful, Inbound Marketing will attract customers at a cost 7 times lower. That’s why Inbound Marketing has “overtaken” Outbound Marketing and become the leading trend in the marketing market.
Inbound Marketing Story: “Encyclopedia” Wikipedia succeeds thanks to collaboration
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia operates on the principle of collaboration – everyone can contribute and build a flexible encyclopedia. Instead of being limited by a group of editors, Wikipedia has access to expertise on many topics and the information is always updated. The collaborative and 100% voluntary approach from the community has helped Wikipedia have more than 6 million inbound links from other websites.
Learn the 5 stages of Inbound Marketing
In order not to “deify” the benefits of this method, let’s find out what are the 5 stages of attracting online customers of Inbound Marketing?
1. Attract visitors to the website
Most users will search for products and services themselves through the following three channels: Google , blogs and social networks . To attract them to your website, you have to rely on many different techniques. Specifically:
Google: When users search for information on Google, there are two types of results returned: organic (natural) or paid (usually advertising). However, the number of visitors to these two results is not proportional to the business’s wallet openness. This means that even though you don’t spend any money, natural results still attract 3 times more traffic than paid results. Why is that?
That is the effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO). Your chances of appearing on Google are higher when your content contains keywords related to user needs.
Ways to improve website rankings on Google:
– Choose the perfect keyword: from the perspective of potential customers, choose keywords related to your business, and estimate the number of searches and the level of competition of those keywords.
– Optimize title tag: use the most important keyword in the title (better yet, put it in the first position). You should also consider putting your company name at the end of the title.
– Website content: includes important keywords in the title, inserting illustrations.
Blogs: Instead of passively receiving information from businesses, smart consumers will refer to blogs themselves. You can choose the most popular blogging platform today, WordPress.com, to chat with potential customers, thereby leading inbound links to your website.
Social networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube…): By creating a professional profile and conveying your message anytime, anywhere on social media, you can easily attract followers. and link back to your main website.
Inbound Marketing Story: Nike and Casey Neistat’s world tour
Adapting to market changes, Nike has applied the Inbound Marketing method to reach consumers. Besides blogging, Influencer Marketing and publishing content on social media, in 2019, the brand also collaborated with famous vlogger Casey Neistat on the “Make It Count” campaign. This is an example of how Nike reaches its target audience through non-traditional channels.
To convey the message “Life is a sport. Let’s make it meaningful,” Neistat went on a 10-day round-the-world trip. Neistat’s real-life experiences have attracted more than 30 million views on YouTube. This gets Nike more attention than any other advertisement.
2. Customer conversion – Transformation
However, just attracting visitors to your website is not enough. Motivate people to take action with CTAs (call-to-action) such as: signing up for a newsletter, filling out a registration form or offering to use a trial version… to get them to interact with your business more. From there, you can increase your chances of converting visitors into leads, and ultimately, real customers.
- Read more: What are the 5 factors to increase conversion rates for Facebook posts?
3. Marketing automation
The purpose of this stage is to rely on an automated system to communicate with potential customers until they become real customers. Some marketing automation techniques you can use are:
– Leadscoring: is the process of assigning value to each potential customer so that the sales team can quickly reach the customers who need to be interacted with first, along with eliminating customers with the lowest scores to avoid wasting time on a group of potential customers.
– Nurturing: based on the score achieved and the characteristics of the lead, you will design a series of automated flows to send information related to their needs.
4. Brand loyalty
The process isn’t over when you convert leads into customers. The next step is to get this customer to stay with you as long as possible through customer loyalty-building strategies. Such as newsletters on the website (newsletters), incentives, and after-sales services… This is very beneficial for the company because maintaining a customer is much less expensive than finding a new customer from the head.
5. Check progress and measure results
No Inbound Marketing strategy is complete if the business lacks a plan to measure and analyze results.
For each stage, track your progress. Measure expected customers, potential customers, and actual customers on each channel over time, as well as conversion rates… So you can determine which programs are effective to continue, and which programs are needed. Eliminated to save time and costs.
Conclusion
The above article helps you better understand the concept of Inbound Marketing and the stages to attract customers online. It can be said that Inbound Marketing is a long-term investment, requiring attracting, establishing, and nurturing potential customers instead of chasing immediate profits. That’s why many Vietnamese businesses are still hesitant to leave their comfort zone to join the Inbound Marketing trend.
Stop annoying your customers and start producing valuable content for everyone. With Inbound Marketing, the saying “Giving is receiving” is completely true. Your business will also promise many prospects when applying this marketing method.
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