INBOUND MARKETING

1. What exactly is inbound marketing?

WHAT IS INBOUND MARKETING?

Inbound marketing is a marketing concept that follows the so-called pull strategy. Products or companies are found by potential customers and not the other way around, as is the case with outbound marketing. The means of inbound marketing consist of a combination of search engine optimization, social media marketing and content marketing.

The heart of inbound marketing is high-quality content that attracts potential customers. Through this content, the company builds a relationship of trust with the prospective customer, which positively influences the purchasing decision in favor of the company.

2. What is different about inbound marketing?

HOW DOES INBOUND MARKETING WORK?

In addition to generating potential customers through target group-based content, another goal of inbound marketing is to build long-term and valuable relationships with customers by reaching them at every stage of the buyer's journey. For this reason, inbound marketing focuses on the customer. But how do interested parties find the content provided by your company? This is where search engine optimization comes into play, which ensures that blog posts, for example, are found by the right people. Since the content is not promotional in nature, but helps interested parties solve their problems or do research, you build trust and strengthen your position as an expert in the respective field. Premium content also offers particularly interested visitors to your website the opportunity to delve deeper into a topic. In exchange for this type of content, interested parties leave their contact details (e.g. email address). In this way, an anonymous visitor becomes a lead. In inbound marketing, there are two models that describe the development of a visitor into a customer:

THE SALES FUNNEL

The sales funnel model is structured like a funnel and divided into five sections. Each of these sections represents a further development stage of the visitors. At the very top of the funnel are the visitor numbers, while at the very bottom in the narrowest part are the customers. The sales funnel helps to estimate how many visitors to your website actually become customers and at which development stage problems may arise. The five sections of the sales funnel are:

  • Visits: Number of visitors who came to your website, for example via Google.
  • Leads: These are visitors to your website who leave their contact details in exchange for further content (e.g. white papers or eBooks).
  • Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): These leads match your customer profile and are therefore qualified to be approached by your marketing department. An MQL can, for example, be a person from a specific region or an employee of a specific company.
  • Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): Sales qualified leads are people who already have the intention to buy and who meet all the necessary criteria. These requirements include having the necessary budget.

The narrower the funnel becomes towards the bottom, the fewer visitors or leads there are in the respective section. This reflects the fact that not every visitor becomes a customer. In summary, this means: many visitors enter the sales funnel at the top and comparatively few customers come out at the bottom.

THE FLYWHEEL

The flywheel is a business model that describes the phases of inbound marketing. It can be described as an updated version of the sales funnel. The customer is at the center of the wheel. The three phases of inbound marketing are arranged around them: attract, interact and inspire.

In the attraction phase, people in a predefined target group are addressed with high-quality content. Ideally, the content matches exactly the solutions and information that people are looking for. Trust is created and even greater interest is aroused, which encourages the previously anonymous prospects to interact with your company. This happens when the prospects leave their contact details, for example in exchange for premium content. This creates leads that you can convert into buyers using the next steps. Now that you have the leads' contact details and know which subject areas they are particularly interested in, you can continue to provide the leads with helpful content. This keeps your company in people's minds as a trustworthy contact.

Once the leads have become buyers or customers, the enthusiasm phase begins. This phase ensures that customers are satisfied. The more satisfied a customer is, the more likely they are to recommend your company to other potential customers. The advantage of the flywheel over the funnel model is that it does not end once the conversion to a customer is complete. It still involves "old" customers as advocates, thus closing the loop.

By investing in strategies that help you acquire and retain customers, you can increase the speed at which the flywheel turns and thus the effectiveness of your measures. On the other hand, there are also factors that slow down or even block the wheel. These criteria include, among others, faulty communication between marketing, sales and customer service. For inbound marketing, it is therefore essential that the teams' working methods are coordinated.

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3. What makes inbound marketing special?

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF INBOUND MARKETING?

Not only your company benefits from a successful inbound marketing strategy, but also the customer. In this way, inbound marketing manages to build long-term and valuable customer relationships. By increasing visibility, it also increases traffic and thus the number of leads generated. In concrete terms, inbound marketing provides answers to the following questions:

How do I increase the awareness of my brand? Inbound marketing creates more visibility for your company overall. One of the most important tools for this is search engine optimization. High-quality and helpful content also ensures that your content is shared more often among interested parties.

How do I build a relationship of trust between my company and potential customers? Here, too, high-quality content is key. By informing, entertaining and interacting with potential customers, you build trust. If a purchase decision is then made, the person will have positive memories of the support you offered them and will be very likely to choose your offer.

How can I generate more quality leads? Inbound marketing addresses precisely those people who are actually interested in your offers. For example, interested parties land on your website via a social media post and are given the opportunity to delve deeper into the topic. Targeted inbound measures transform your website into a lead generation machine that, once started, keeps running.

Another advantage of inbound marketing is that success is measurable. Using defined metrics, you can see how well or how poorly the content is performing. This means you retain complete control over costs and always have an eye on the ROI (return on investment). Inbound marketing also generally has lower start-up costs than other marketing measures.

4. What about classic marketing measures?

INBOUND MARKETING VS. OUTBOUND MARKETING

The overarching goal of inbound marketing is to draw interested parties' attention to your company or brand through relevant content and ultimately convert them into customers. Inbound measures address those who are actively looking for information on a specific topic. A successful inbound marketing strategy manages to attract the right people at exactly the right time, namely when there is already a need for information or a solution.

Outbound marketing follows the so-called push strategy and is therefore contrary to the methods of inbound marketing. The company tries to actively find customers with the help of advertising tailored to the target group, for example in the form of online or print ads. The advertising messages also reach people who are not at all interested in the product on offer, which results in high wastage.

Another problem with outbound marketing is that traditional advertising messages are receiving less and less attention in a media-saturated society. Ad blockers ensure that advertisements do not appear on websites in the first place, advertising emails are deleted immediately and ad-free streaming services are preferred over traditional television. While outbound marketing is becoming increasingly less effective for this reason, marketing experts see inbound marketing as an effective and measurable method of reaching potential customers.

5. How can inbound marketing be used?

INBOUND MARKETING STRATEGIES

Each phase of inbound marketing requires a different strategy that best implements the methodology. Below we will take a closer look at the typical approaches in each phase:

ATTRACTING CUSTOMERS

Before you can generate leads, you first have to attract the right people. This is done by providing valuable content on your website. Such content can be blog articles, social media posts or downloadable white papers, for example. Videos in which you explain solutions to a specific problem are also suitable. The focus is always on the question of how you can best help your target group. Since even the best content has no effect if it cannot be found, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important strategies in the first phase. By integrating certain search terms and keywords related to your offer into your texts, your content appears organically on the search engine results pages.

INTERACTING WITH CUSTOMERS

Inbound marketing is designed to build long-term relationships with customers. Communication and dealing with potential and existing customers is structured accordingly. Communicate how a customer will benefit from your offer and what value it offers.

Customer service is particularly important in this phase, as it is the one that comes into direct contact with customers. Here, guidelines can help ensure that employees handle calls from interested parties and potential customers using the inbound method. The offer is not simply advertised. Instead, the concrete benefit that the product or service has for the potential customer is highlighted. In this way, your customers receive real added value and will continue to come back to your company.

ENTHUSIASM CUSTOMERS

Inbound marketing measures do not end when a deal is closed. The members of your team continue to provide customers with expert advice. Chatbots and surveys help to collect feedback and support customers with problems. Since these measures are intended to enrich your customers and not be perceived as a nuisance, the right timing is crucial. For example, a satisfaction survey only makes sense when the customer has had enough time to test the product.

Another important strategy in this phase is social listening. Some customers contact you via social media and use your profile to send feedback or explain their concerns. This form of interaction gives you another chance to provide your customers with valuable information and strengthen their trust in your company.

Finally, the third phase is about helping customers in every situation and getting them excited about your brand. Satisfied customers then become advocates who recommend your company to others and in turn attract new customers. Therefore, every interaction with the customer, no matter how short, is of great importance.

6. How can I get started with inbound marketing?

INBOUND MARKETING IN PRACTICE

The more time and effort you invest in your inbound marketing strategy, the more your sales will increase. One way to show whether your strategy is successful is by how many leads you generate and how many of them become customers. But what does inbound marketing look like in practice?

1. DEFINING THE TARGET GROUP

Who is your content intended for? What problems and concerns do your target group have? Get to know the people you want to address in detail. This is the only way you can create suitable content that will benefit your potential customers.

2. CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing includes the conception, planning, production and publication of content that serves as an attraction for potential customers. It is important that the content corresponds to the interests of the target group and provides real added value. It is also helpful to keep a content calendar that specifies exactly when and where content will be published.

3. PROVIDE THE RIGHT CONTENT FOR EACH PHASE

Depending on which phase a lead is in, they will be interested in different content. While a person who has just discovered your company will be happy to receive introductory information, someone who is about to make a purchase decision will not be able to do much with it. Make sure that interest in your company remains by having the right content ready for each type of lead. This process is also known as lead nurturing.

4. BUILD THE WEBSITE SENSITIVELY

Your website should be designed so that visitors can navigate it intuitively and quickly find what interests them.

5. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Optimizing your website for search engines is essential to ensure that your content is found. Broken down to the essentials, search engine optimization depends primarily on these three factors:

  • Content: Search engines like Google recognize whether a user returns from a website to the search results page and searches for another page. Google uses this to draw conclusions about the usefulness of the content. The more useful your content is, the higher it will appear on the search results page and the easier it will be found.
  • Usability: Search engines use various technical parameters to measure the user-friendliness of your website. For example, long loading times have a negative impact on the ranking of your website.
  • Backlinks: This refers to links that point from an external website to your own. The more often other websites link to yours, the more relevant it is viewed by search engines.

7. What influence does marketing automation have on inbound marketing?

HOW DOES MARKETING AUTOMATION HELP?

Maintaining and organizing customer relationships and leads is a central aspect of inbound marketing. Marketing automation can simplify processes and provide valuable support. These are software platforms that digitize certain processes in marketing and sales. Specifically, marketing automation supports you in the following three points:

  • Lead generation: Customer relationship management systems, or CRM systems for short, function as databases in which all information about your leads is stored. But the CRM system also supports you in collecting this data.
  • Lead nurturing: You know which topics a lead is particularly interested in and which phase of the customer journey they are in. You can use this stored information about your leads to take targeted measures, for example in the form of email marketing. With the right settings, emails can be sent automatically to the relevant people. This improves communication and makes it easier to maintain the interest of the leads.
  • Purchases: The information collected helps to identify leads who are ready to buy. Sales can then contact them specifically and close deals more quickly.

8. Who can benefit from inbound marketing?

WHO IS INBOUND MARKETING SUITABLE FOR?

Inbound marketing offers numerous advantages for both B2C and B2B companies. It helps both types of companies to acquire more customers and build long-term relationships with them. Inbound marketing can be particularly beneficial when a purchase is preceded by a lengthy decision-making process or when several people are involved in it. Inbound marketing is less suitable, however, for fast-moving consumer goods that are intended for the masses and where the individual lead is not important.

CONCLUSION: THIS IS WHY INBOUND MARKETING IS RELEVANT

Inbound marketing solves the problems of traditional outbound marketing by attracting potential customers instead of actively searching for them. Inbound marketing measures only take effect when there is already interest in the products or services offered. High-quality content gives the potential customer the opportunity to familiarize themselves with your company without feeling pressured by intrusive advertising.

Downloadable content such as white papers or eBooks also boost lead generation. This type of content also gives you the opportunity to consolidate your expert status and the trust customers have in your company. In summary, inbound marketing is an effective, sustainable and, above all, customer-friendly marketing concept that benefits every company that values ​​long-term customer relationships.

Would you like further advice on inbound marketing? Please feel free to contact us at any time.

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