Today, everybody knows the components of classic and digital marketing, but having this knowledge is not enough.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
The term digital inbound marketing describes an entire marketing and advertising methodology that uses blogs, social media, email campaigns, site promotions and more on the web.
With this approach, it is no longer possible to do a little bit of everything – a little bit on Facebook, a little bit on the website, a little bit of SEO in Google.
Everything has to have a reason and there must be connections between things.
It is a marketing puzzle that can exist only if all its parts are linked.
It is the new and right media in today’s dynamic marketing environment.
The method caters both to companies that are introducing new products or service into the market, and to organizations that are not looking for new customers but want to preserve what they have.
Inbound marketing breaks down digital marketing processes into four main elements:
- How to generate traffic to a website
- How to convert traffic into leads
- How to turn leads into customers
- How to measure and analyze what works and what doesn’t
- This education practice should convey the right message, to the right people, at the right time.
STAGES OF A SUCCESSFUL INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGY
Each stage in the process has its own content components.
To generate traffic, for example, you have to invest in creating a blog, articles, a website, in having a presence in social media and also in SEO.
There should be a connection between the different types of content, search words should appear in all, and there should be interaction between them so that they can interact with your visitors.
Just like a flow, quality traffic is measured based on traffic between channels. This is the only way you can bring traffic to a point where it can be converted into leads.
To convert visitors into leads, your content must have a call to action, something like “click to subscribe to our latest newsletter”, anything that causes visitors to provide their name and email, converting them from anonymous people into leads.
The third and significant stage is converting leads into customers.
Content here must already be sales focused, and you have to think of sale offers that suit the preferences of your visitors.
These offers should be integrated into CRM and telemarketing systems so that you can follow up and ensure that a visitor that got this far remains faithful to your brand.
The fourth stage of digital inbound marketing is what differentiates it substantially from classic marketing – its ability to measure.
This is the time to check which of all the elements worked best, with what segment of visitors, what kind of words dominated the searches, where visitors dropped, and more.
Inbound-marketing software provides a very detailed map of the marketing network and the exact locations where visitors converted. This is the time to focus and filter.
HOW DO YOU MAKE SENSE OF ALL THIS? WHERE SHOULD YOU START?
First, take some time and analyze where you are today and where you want to go. What pieces of the puzzle you already have and what you’re missing.
Where you want to generate the traffic, what calls to action you want to use so that they convert into leads, and what you will give to the leads so that they become customers.
Then you have to decide on an implementation method.
What type of content will you create? Where will you insert the content?
Then you have to start creating content adapted to each of the platforms you selected, make the right links (Twitter versus blog versus Facebook), and give your visitors a reason to connect to you and your brand, and to stay.
Last but not least – inbound marketing saves lots of money and brings significant results and profits.
This is called Return on Investment or ROI, and is undoubtedly the main reason for adopting inbound marketing in your organization.
