Inbound marketing means enticing buyers to come to you. It’s a way of meeting them where they are and engaging with them on their terms.
This strategy aims to increase the volume and quality of your leads by attracting like-minded potential buyers. It’s a method of aligning your marketing content to offer value to buyers without overtly selling a product or service.
Inbound marketing has gained popularity in recent years as buyers have taken more control over the sales process. The fuel for this strategy is helpful, creative, engaging content that nixes the sales pitch in favor of brand awareness, conversation, and shareability. Good inbound marketing should educate, inform and entertain, providing true value to the readers. When used properly, inbound marketing can be a key component of a successful marketing campaign that drives leads and sales.
Who Should Use Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing can work for most B2B marketers as a part of your well-balanced strategy. While you may not call it by the same name, inbound marketing is likely a tactic you already use. Many marketers today utilize a mixture of different types of content, across multiple platforms to connect with their buyers at each stage in the buying cycle.
So how does that relate to inbound? The idea is that creating content like whitepapers, infographics and eBooks, and blog posts and social media profiles will orient customers to your brand, bringing them *in* with targeted, subtle marketing efforts aligned to their general needs and pain points, instead of more traditional methods of ‘outbound’ marketing such as ads or email blasts that go *to* your buyers.
Marketers who create search-friendly content, and then promote that content through social media, opt-in email campaigns, and other methods are practicing inbound marketing.
How Does Inbound Marketing Work?
Inbound Marketing uses thought leadership and education and resources to help your buyers develop a relationship with your brand. The focus is on providing helpful information, offering fun or useful tips, and generally providing content that demonstrates how much you care about your prospect’s success. It offers tricks and tips, best practices, and industry guides, and it’s job is to draw prospects who may or may not be looking for your company at that point in their buying cycle by appealing to them on an informative level.
These aren’t the only types of content that work for inbound, but what they have in common is that they work well at a high level to educate a prospect about the potential for a product, rather than a product or service itself. This is why you need to combine your inbound marketing methods above with the hard-sell, or ‘outbound’ marketing methods that will move prospects through the sales funnel.
Source: Pardot
