Nurture Your Customer Relationships With Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is how we draw customers to your product through a mix of content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimisation, and Google display ads, all while building and sculpting your brand, drawing customers into your conversion funnel.

Inbound marketing is a digital marketing strategy that guides consumers to your company when they are looking for solutions to a problem. This involves creating content and experiences to draw customers in rather than seeking them out directly. 

How does inbound marketing work? 

Unlike outbound or traditional, blunt marketing efforts – TV, radio, telemarketing, press releases, billboards, to generate sales leads – inbound marketing involves utilising our expertise and an array of tools to identify your customers, reach them, and lead them to your product. 

Ultimately what you’re doing with inbound marketing is growing your business by building lasting relationships with customers and pulling them to your brand.

“In a nutshell, the essential idea of inbound marketing is to provide value first and convert customers later. This can work better than outbound marketing, as customers tend to prefer companies that provide value throughout their interactions rather than only during the buying process.”

And here’s the key difference with inbound marketing: customers find you. By utilising search engines and social media, customers initiate their interaction with your company, the first step in creating a relationship that leads to a sale, and which, hopefully, forms the basis of an ongoing (carefully tended) relationship.

How to improve your inbound marketing strategy 

Leading your potential customers to you isn’t even necessarily the trickiest part. People are constantly looking for things. The challenge is getting your customers to stick around after they have found you. 

The most essential point of inbound marketing is to create reasons for customers to come to you. This is what we call pull power, and it is divided into four stages:

1. Attract 

The first goal of the inbound marketing methodology is to attract prospects. You want to make people aware of your business and the products and services you offer. Attract people to your business through Google keyword searches, blogs and social media campaigns and turn strangers into visitors. 

2. Convert

Once you have attracted qualified prospects, you want to convert them into leads. At this stage you want to collect visitors’ contact information through well-crafted landing pages, calls-to-action and forms that ask for an email address (and, frequently, give something away in exchange).

3. Close

The closing stage is where you take your leads and gradually turn them into paying customers. Make sure that you keep attending to your leads but don’t overwhelm them with too much information. With effective email campaigns and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, you want to nurture your leads and close the deal. 

4. Delight 

Delight is the final, and most ignore stage of inbound marketing. You want to delight the customers you have won over through retention techniques to keep them engaged. Stay in touch with your customers through social media monitoring, customer surveys and personalised product offers. Make your customers feel valued and appreciated so they will return to your business, and more importantly, recommend you to others. 

In the process of all of this what you are accomplishing is both psychological, as well as in the service of the commerce of your product or service. You start by introducing yourself to strangers, who become curious visitors, who then become leads, who become customers. 

And if you do it right, what you get are promoters who transform into product evangelists, both recommending your product to others and returning to purchase again and again. 

And through all of this, what you are doing the whole time is developing and burnishing your brand. 

Quick tips to maximise your inbound marketing journey

• Take the time and effort to produce high-quality content
• Write great headlines
• Make your content more visual utilising
• You don’t have to be dry and clinical – Tell a great story!
• We’ve said this before already, but in case you missed it: SEO, SEO, SEO
• Offer something free in exchange for an email address
• Establish great email campaigns and keep them going. Email still offers the best ROI of any marketing tactic, with $36 returned for every $1 spent.
• Court an influencer and run an influencer campaign
• Plan, Test, Learn, and do it again

Targeted inbound marketing strategies are not only effective, they are cost-effective. It is a holistic concept that considers the goal first, then looks at the available tools to determine how to effectively reach target customers. It attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them – it forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have. 

And, finally, one last point: people are individuals, not robots. They don’t always behave in predictable ways! The process, on an individual level, is frequently not linear. But if you have strong, flexible, reactive systems in place, you can get to where you want to be.

Need help with reaching your audience? Contact us today.