Inbound marketing - how to succeed

Inbound marketing has quickly become a buzzword in marketing. No wonder, given how effective it is at creating personalized content that converts visitors from prospects to loyal customers.

More and more companies are realizing the benefits of using inbound marketing as a model for their communications. Inbound marketing is based on the same principle as all marketing: understanding and responding to customer interests and preferences. In addition, inbound marketing is cost-effective - a study by HubSpot shows that leads generated by inbound marketing cost 62% less than those from outbound marketing.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is about attracting traffic in the form of visitors and potential customers to your website by creating attractive and relevant content. It's about earning attention organically, without interrupting anyone. Unlike outbound marketing, which is more about pushing out messages that disrupt the recipient's flow of activities to get attention. You can read more about our inbound marketing services here.

Inbound marketing vs. Outbound marketing

Inbound marketing is often referred to as the new modern way of communicating, as opposed to outbound marketing, which refers to more traditional marketing. Figures show that inbound accounts for 90% of online clicks while outbound accounts for the remaining 10% and that it is much more cost-effective to acquire new customers using inbound. Inbound often requires a little more creativity and greater human effort, while outbound is created through higher budget and repetition. At the same time, you get a cumulative effect by working with inbound marketing while outbound activities end the day you don't want to invest more money.

Digital customer journey

Inbound marketing is closely linked to the digital customer journey and makes it possible to create interest in your messages in a positive and exciting way and thus generate traffic to your website. Traffic that in the next stage can be converted into leads and then customers.

How do you get started?

To get started with inbound marketing, you need to set your business goals, study your target audience's behavior and analyze your current sales patterns based on the digital customer journey to see where you can improve. Then you have a solid foundation to build successful campaigns and outperform your competitors.

Create personas

A persona is an imaginary person who symbolizes your ideal customer. By creating personas, you can gain a better understanding of your customers' needs and wants and use this information to create a marketing strategy. Marketing activities based on personas feel both personal and memorable to the customer.

Conversion patterns

A conversion pattern shows how the customer moves through the buying process, also known as the customer journey. The goal is to turn potential customers into buyers and to turn current buyers into repeat customers (and ultimately brand ambassadors). To lead the customer through the customer journey, you need to engage them. This is done with exciting and relevant content, call-to-action buttons and landing pages. Well-designed websites and other channels lead to more conversions as they demonstrate that they can solve a problem or fill a need that the potential customer has.

Start with your customers' digital journeys

The digital customer journey consists of four stages: attract, convert, close and engage. By using different inbound marketing solutions at each stage, you turn the customer from a prospect into a loyal consumer. In the coming sections, we'll dive deeper into the different phases of the digital customer journey.

Attract

It's impossible to generate leads if no one visits your website. But how do you get people to find you? Quite simply, you need a plan to drive traffic to your website, so you can attract new customers and, perhaps most importantly, keep them coming back.

Blog

Running a blog is a great way to drive traffic to your website and continuously add new content. Creative, informative and entertaining content that is relevant to your target audience is key to inbound marketing success. HubSpot conducted a survey measuring the success of blogging for businesses and the results were clear.

"Companies that blog get on average 55% more traffic to their websites."

"57% of businesses that blog have converted customers thanks to the blog."

Another important aspect of being found is SEO, i.e. search engine optimization. Search engine optimized content ensures that you rank high on Google and that people searching for words related to your business find you first. We'll come back to SEO later, but for now we want to emphasize what a great tool the blog is for adding relevant and search engine optimized content. The blog not only creates content for the website, but also for social media. New blog posts should be promoted across all social channels to engage followers and drive traffic to the website. Sharing the posts also allows followers to quickly and easily spread the content further, broadening the reach.

Social media

This brings us to social media. To be successful in your marketing, you need to be where your customers are, which right now and in the future is on social media. The importance of social media as a communication platform for both potential and existing customers cannot be emphasized enough. Yet we see many companies forgetting or neglecting social channels, resulting in lost leads.

To increase your visibility on social media, it is important to be active and share relevant content. Earlier, we mentioned how blogging is a good basis for posting to social channels. Another good and complementary approach is to share other people's posts and content, as long as it fits the interests of your target audience. Usually the service is reciprocated, allowing you to reach more potential customers and broaden your network with other organizations and brands that might be good to have a relationship with. A good rule of thumb for maintaining the balance between your own and other people's content on social media is to think 50% promotion of your brand and 50% engagement through other content.

Optimization of the website

Now it's time to take a look at the hub of all digital communication - the website. We can see that company websites no longer function as digital brochures. Instead, it's important to realize the power of having an optimized, effective and functional website. By keeping the digital customer journey in mind at all times when creating your website, you create a logical path for the visitor to go from stakeholder to customer. Customize the website according to your defined personas, create educational content and use call-to-action buttons.

SEO

To succeed with inbound marketing, it is incredibly important that your website is search engine optimized and that you rank high on Google. The position you have on Google is called ranking and the lower the ranking, the higher up among the search hits. The best is if you rank 110, which means that you are on the first hit page. What words are your personas searching for?

It's on those keywords that you need to make sure you get found! Always keep your personas in mind when deciding which keywords to optimize your page for. Disregard phrases that you already rank high on if they are irrelevant to your target audience's search behavior.

Another important factor to consider is search volume, i.e. how many people search for a particular word each month. The higher the search volume, the more people will visit your website if you rank high. More specific search phrases will result in lower search volume but higher quality traffic to your website. There is always a trade-off between quality and quantity, but when it comes to generating leads, quality in the form of customers in your target audience is preferable.

There are several good tools to monitor how you and your competitors are doing. We at Navigator use Ranktrail. In the various SEO tools, you can enter words that you want to monitor, see how many people search for that word each month, check how high you end up on a Google search for a specific phrase and see how well optimized a website is.
Hopefully, traffic is now flowing to your website and it's time to take the next step - turning visitors into leads. This requires contact information from visitors, which is best obtained in exchange for something else. A common solution is to offer e-books, reports or webinars in exchange for an email address. This gives you the opportunity to contact the person with more interesting information about your offer.

Thank you pages

Once you have converted the visitor into a lead, it is time to thank them for their interest. The thank you page has a different function than the landing page, but should be designed in a similar way. The thank you page gives the customer access to the offer they have requested and there is also the chance to suggest other content that may be of interest, such as your social media. Make sure to follow up the contact with a thank you email.

Different types of content offers

Converting content is perfect for promoting your business without being too intrusive. Here, we move away from the digital customer journey for a moment and instead consider the sales process as a funnel, where the potential customer gets closer to a purchase the further down the funnel they go. At the top of the funnel, it is therefore important to offer a broader type of knowledge that is not directly promotional for your brand, such as e-books or whitepapers. When the customer is closer to the middle of the funnel, you can move closer to your own business and offer FAQs, webinars and case studies. At the bottom of the funnel, the customer is so close to a purchase that it is mainly about pushing them over the threshold with free trials, demos or other offers that increase the propensity to consume. All this is done in exchange for something as simple, but precious as contact details to turn a regular visitor into a lead.

Landing pages

Every content page should contain a call-to-action button that directs the visitor to a landing page. The main function of the landing page is to convert a visitor into a lead. On the landing page, the offer is presented and the visitor is asked to fill in a form with their contact details. Well-structured and clear landing pages increase conversion rates, so it's important to spend time on the design of the page. We've listed a few things to keep in mind when building a landing page.

Now that you have several leads to go on, it's time to close the deal and turn customers from potential to actual. But not all leads are ready to buy right away. About half still need to be convinced. There are two good methods for continuing to process leads, known as lead nurturing. The first is automation in the form of emails offering content that your lead has previously shown interest in. This is best done using a tool, but can also be done manually. If a visitor has downloaded your e-book (i.e. content from the upper part of the sales funnel), it is good to email a tip about an offer from the middle part of the funnel. This way, your lead will slowly but surely move forward in the sales process to eventually buy. Thus, the deal is also approaching closure. If the customer is already close to closing, it's time to build an even closer and more personal relationship. Then the sales team is usually the right way to close the deal.

Email marketing

Many people think that email marketing is outdated, but the fact is that it is an incredible tool for building relationships, creating brand awareness and increasing social interaction with stakeholders, leads and existing customers. It is also a cost-effective method. To be successful with your email marketing, it is important to have segmented your contacts by area of interest. Segmented contact lists will help you send content that feels relevant and personalized to recipients. This also increases the likelihood that they will buy your products. Emails in the form of newsletters and offers are a great way to guide your leads through the buying journey.

Analyze your data but not least, it is important to continuously analyze the information you have collected via landing pages, visitor statistics and email results. In short, it's about reviewing how many conversions your landing pages provide and how many leads become customers from your relationship building. Take advantage of the conclusions and adapt your marketing to what works and dare to try new methods.

Engage

Hooray! You've attracted, converted and closed the deal. But it's not over yet! The relationship with the satisfied customers also needs to be nurtured. By keeping in regular contact with customers and offering exciting content and discounts, they will buy from you more often and may even recommend you.

Engage with customer campaigns

In fact, it's easier to sell to existing customers than to brand new ones. And that's why it's important to engage them. You'll go a long way with a loyal customer base that is constantly fed with new, interesting content that keeps them coming back. Promotions are a great way to engage your existing customers. Again, it's about being personal and offering something that they want. Such offers can be conveyed through a dedicated newsletter, time-limited discounts and premium content available only to existing customers.

Engaging with social media is important and brands that engage their customers through social media close more deals. This is because followers become interested in the brand on a level that feels personal and natural. One example of how social media can be used is to ask customers to showcase how they use the product/service they bought from you under a hashtag. Another option is to hold competitions where the entries consist of posts from your followers. Both of these also spread your brand to your customers' followers, generating both new followers and customers for you.

Getting started with inbound marketing

By now, you hopefully understand what an effective tool inbound marketing is for achieving business goals and selling more. To get started, you need a strong team that knows campaign development, SEO, copywriting and social media. At Navigator, we've been working with inbound marketing for years and are happy to share our expertise. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you want to know more about how we can help you.