What is Inbound Marketing and why you need it: 3 basic keys to understand it

You may have heard about it, but, what is inbound marketing? Perhaps you still don’t know exactly what it refers to or what it is for.

Inbound marketing is a technique that answers to the new behaviours of users or clients, which are not as easy to convince with a sales idea as they were a few years ago when it was enough to publish an ad on some platform (tv, press, radio, billboards, etc).

Sales techniques have changed over time, we have become more demanding as an audience and we need something more from a brand or business, not just for them to tell us how good a product or service is.

This marketing technique focuses on the creation of content, which, as we have discussed in previous posts, plays a very important role when it comes to achieving our business goals in the digital environment.

1. What is Inbound Marketing?

As we could understand from the word itself, inbound refers to the fact this is a type of marketing technique that makes the results come to us instead of us going for them. Your customers will reach you organically thanks to the actions offered by inbound marketing.

With this technique, we create content, tools or carry out actions that indirectly attract the attention of our potential clients.

Today, brands need to connect with their audience and for this, they must appeal to other interests that are not only the need for a product or service. Thanks to inbound marketing, it is easier to achieve these goals.

2. How can Inbound Marketing help you get more customers?

This technique consists of creating and disseminating content through various channels in which the goal is to offer valuable information and content related to our activity.

In doing so, we will create a medium-long-term strategy in which we will get to know our users better, we will understand their needs and we will offer them the solutions they are looking for in order to finally convert them into potential customers or subscribers.

Instead of forcing our clients to make a purchase, we are offering much more. We will be able to do this because we will have been listening and taking note of everything they are looking for so that our brand or business solves their queries better than our competition.

The two main pillars on which this technique is based are the buyer persona and the purchase cycle.

Buyer Persona | What is Inbound Marketing?

This term refers to the fictitious description of our potential clients. In this description, we define in detail a few examples of what our typical client is like. That is how we will have a very useful tool that will allow us to know our audience much better.

These details, which we already know are fictitious, must be a representation of reality as accurate as possible. That is, if our business works in financial advice, our buyer persona would not be, for example, high school students. Our realistic buyer persona profile must have characteristics that align with our business objectives.

Purchase cycle or buyer’s journey | What is Inbound Marketing?

Any process of sale or purchase of a product or service goes through a series of stages, it is not an immediate action that is carried out just like that. Therefore, this part is important in inbound marketing, since it will be in these different stages of the process where we will try to convince our users that our solution is the most convenient.

3. How to promote content in Inbound Marketing

To obtain the maximum result, we must be able to attract traffic to our channels (web, RRSS, blog, etc.) in order to convert our visits into potential clients.

To do this, it is important that we understand where they are in the process at all times and act accordingly. The previous purchase cycle simply helps us to know what we should offer at each stage of that journey. Our users do not need the same at the beginning of the process as they do at the end, so that is why it is important to constantly adapt our message.

The way we do it is thanks, in most cases, to automation actions with which we establish that for point X of the process, we offer content Y.

Tools such as Hubspot or Mailchimp are some of the most popular when it comes to performing automation actions, such as sending reminder emails, limited promotions or an abandoned shopping cart notice in an online store.

Analytics | What is Inbound Marketing?

Once we put these actions into practise, we must analyze their performance and determine if they are working as expected or we must make modifications that ensure better results. It would be useless to put all the previous actions into practice if we do not have real information on how they are working.

Some common indicators that we should normally look at with the CAC (customer acquisition cost) that tells us how much we have invested in making a user who reaches us a final customer.

Another interesting metric to analyze would be the ROI or return on investment. With this, we will know how much we have invested in a campaign and how much profit it has generated for us.

There are many more indicators to know how our campaigns are working, you can see some here.

In summary, inbound marketing would be defined as the non-intrusive sales technique in which our potential customers find us and we offer them valuable content throughout their purchase process.