Many companies that are developing an inbound marketing strategy or want to rely on inbound marketing in the future are faced with fundamental questions: What is important? What should be considered? Is there a rule of thumb for inbound marketing? We have put together some answers to these questions and useful terms for you and show you the conditions under which you can be successful with inbound marketing.
The inbound marketing method has fundamentally changed the way companies reach their potential customers.
In contrast to outbound marketing, which is often perceived as annoying and intrusive, the inbound method aims to let customers come to you.
The aim is to address the right or suitable people and to offer them relevant content so that they convert to leads at the right time and are ultimately taken over by sales.
1) Get to know your ideal customers
The core of every inbound marketing strategy is knowing the right target group.
So before you start writing blog articles, developing content offers and distributing them via your social media channels, you should first decide who your target group is or should be in the future.
Develop Buyer Personas : Find out what specific problems your personas are dealing with and why your product or service can help to solve exactly those problems.
Questions such as
- Does my persona save money, time, or other resources by using my product or service?
- Given tight budgets and limited resources, will my persona work more efficiently with my help?
- With my help, can my persona keep their boss happy while advancing their career?
Once you’ve developed your persona, you should align all future blog posts, content offers, emails, landing pages, and social media posts with that persona.
Read more: Checklist – give your persona a face with these 20 questions
2) Orientate yourself on the buyer’s journey
Every purchase decision is preceded by a process and a click on an e-mail does not make a lead. In other words, you need to understand where your lead is on the buyer’s (customer) journey.
Is he still trying to identify his problem? Does he research the internet on his own to solve his problem? In this case, a call from a sales representative would be the completely wrong decision. Inbound marketing is about offering helpful content that is tailored to the needs or challenges (pain points) of the persona.
These needs vary at each stage of the buyer’s journey. By packing the right information into your content, you ensure that your potential customer (prospect) gets exactly the information they need in the moment to become a lead . Over time, you can develop this lead further (nurturing): you provide it with further information that builds on one another until, ideally, it solves its problem with your help and it becomes one of your customers.
Read more: Align your sales process with your desired customer in 5 steps
3) Offer the appropriate added value
Once you’ve identified your persona’s needs and where they are on the buyer’s journey, you should consider how you can offer help.
Your inbound marketing strategy should never start with a sales pitch about your products and services. Rather, it is advisable to develop your lead further over a longer period of time with helpful advice, industry insights or similar.
Studies show that 80 percent of all decision-makers prefer to find out more about a company through different content than with the help of an advertisement. Your content should therefore be a mix of informative, educational blog articles, guides, white papers and case studies. With these, you offer your personas added value and at the same time guide them through the individual phases of the buyer’s journey.
Incidentally, this content mix is not only interesting for existing leads, but also for strangers who do not yet know your company and are looking for information on the Internet.
4) Promote your content
The best, most informative and most useful content is worthless if it doesn’t get noticed. But how do you get the attention you need?
Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer: he or she searches the internet for causes and solutions to his or her problems or challenges. To do this, he or she uses search engines, reads in various blogs, on websites and communicates in social networks.
In order to attract the attention of your desired customer, you should use those keywords or phrases during content development that your desired customer is also looking for (always think of the pain points). Promote your content the right way on landing pages, webinars, videos and social media – you’ll see that this will generate new leads relatively quickly.
5) Trust pays off
If you can truly understand your audience, offer useful content for each stage of the buyer’s journey, and deliver that content at the right time, you’ll get to know your leads better and gain their trust over time.
When the time comes to compare solutions or make a purchasing decision, leads who are already confident and confident in your company, product or service become qualified leads for your sales team.
And ideally to new customers.
Read more: Is your content generating too few leads? That could be the reason
Conclusion
This is what matters in inbound marketing: Get to know your ideal customers and their challenges, orient your content to the customer journey of these ideal customers, offer added value at the right time, make impressive advertising and create real trust. This approach is particularly worthwhile for products and services that require explanation and intensive business relationships. Promised.