What is Inbound Marketing and How Can It Help You Grow Your Business?
Inbound marketing services help position your company and your brand as the go-to experts in your area of specialization.
The power behind inbound marketing is information. Helpful content in the form of blog posts, e-books, white papers, one-sheets, videos, webinars, podcasts, and infographics attracts potential customers.
It draws prospects in, demonstrates your experience and expertise, and gradually leads them to the conclusion that your company, product, or service is the one that they need.
With inbound marketing, the focus is on the prospect. You earn attention by offering helpful, quality content that motivates prospects to read, share, and engage.
The inbound marketing methodology aligns perfectly with the way buyers are researching and making purchases today.
When prospects begin their search for a solution to a problem, your blog posts, white papers, guides, and other content help them explore and evaluate their options.
When prospects want to download one of your informational items, they’re prompted to submit an email address to receive the item.
Once you’ve captured an email address, you can send additional emails offering related, helpful information to the prospect.
Since you’ve captured their email addresses when they downloaded one of your premium content pieces, you can nurture these prospects throughout the buying journey by sending them related, helpful content you know they’ll appreciate.
As you guide them through their buyer journey, they come to realize that you and your team are experts with the experience needed to completely solve their concerns.
Once they’ve decided which solution they want to pursue, your case studies, comparison charts, in-depth reviews, and testimonials help them decide that your company is the one to partner with.
Once your inbound marketing engine is running, it will continue to deliver a steady stream of quality leads.
Traditional marketing pursues the prospect. Inbound marketing attracts and persuades the prospect.
Traditional marketing can be effectively combined with inbound marketing, but because the way people buy has changed, traditional marketing rarely works well on its own.
A successful inbound campaign will follow customers along a carefully orchestrated journey where they are transformed from a visitor to a customer into a proud promoter of your brand.
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What is Lead Nurturing?
If the prospect is still in the decision-making process of their shopping experience, he or she may not immediately make a purchase.
That’s OK. You can continue to nurture this lead and work to close the sale by sending emailed spaced out weekly, sharing helpful articles and information about upcoming sales.
Eventually, the individual will conclude that a treadmill desk is a smart investment and will make an order. At this point, just because money has been exchanged doesn’t mean that the relationship is over.
A truly comprehensive inbound marketing strategy will continue to strengthen that relationship with additional helpful articles and videos, surveys, social sharing incentives, and other tools until that customer has become a promoter of your brand.
After a month of using their treadmill desk, this individual has lost ten pounds. He or she is feeling great and posting photos on social media, calling out your brand and saying positive things about the treadmill desk.
Your brand exposure has just exploded, and the individual isn’t even being paid to promote your business! Inbound marketing has allowed you to turn a stranger into free advertising.
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For our Inbound Marketing Strategy we focus on closed-loop marketing
Closed-loop marketing is about uncompromising data collection.
In order to be smart, efficient marketers, we need to know the whole story every time a potential customer becomes an actual customer (or fails to become one).
So we track everything. We follow each visitor and study their engagement with your site and content, helping us understand what influences their journey.
There is no more valuable way to invest your marketing and advertising dollars than in inbound marketing strategies executed effectively.
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Here's an Inbound Marketing Strategy Example
Let’s say you own a company that sells innovative ergonomic office furniture online. You want to attract more people to your website so you’ll gain more customers.
How are you going to make sure that a customer in California, who is trying to decide whether he should invest in a new treadmill desk, ends up browsing options from your company, which is based out of Charlotte, NC?
If you are a smart furniture company, then you have a blog that covers topics of interest to your target audience, like
- “What Ergonomic Experts Have to Say About Treadmill Desks,”
- “Is a Treadmill Desk the Right Choice for You?”
- “Five Things to Consider before Purchasing a Treadmill Desk.”
These articles organically incorporate keywords that prospects are searching for online. As search engines work to find relevant results to present to our prospect in California, they pick up on the keywords, consider how many people have
- Read and shared the article.
- Scan through and find lots of helpful pictures and diagrams.
- Decide that your article is a high-quality piece of information that would serve the prospect well.
The prospect clicks on your site’s search result and — Boom! A complete stranger is now a visitor to your site. The next step in your inbound marketing strategy involves taking that visitor and turning him or her into a customer.
You might include a pop-up form on your website that asks the visitor to share an email address in exchange for
- a comprehensive guide on how to stay active in an office environment
- or a 10% discount on their next purchase.
Get Your Inbound Marketing Machine Running
RiseFuel specializes in crafting successful inbound marketing strategies that help our customers succeed. We are experts at helping companies connect with customers and build their brand.
Contact us today to get started on crafting your custom plan, perfecting your strategies and building an army of brand ambassadors.
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