Introducing the Inbound Methodology

Inbound (‘content’) marketing is about understanding your customers, their aspirations and their challenges.

The key is helping your customers rather than selling to them – understanding exactly how customers research their purchases and then investing in creating engaging, helpful, and educational content which is very easy for them to find when they need it.

Inbound marketing effectively eliminates the most time-consuming and low-value activity in the sales process (cold-calling and prospecting) and replaces it with an investment in content creation.

The medium-term result is warmer, more relevant, inbound enquiries from better-educated prospects.

This is not magic.
This is a system.

There is a process for creating a predictable flow of inbound enquiries from content. This is not a quick fix, but sellers now provide toolkits for managing and automating this marketing process, which makes it easier.

The most important thing to recognise is that a consistent commitment to creating high-quality, helpful, online content is now essential to building a predictable, systemised approach to lead generation and sales.

"Content Marketing costs 62% less than Traditional Marketing and generates about three times as many leads" - (Demand Metric)

With an inbound marketing strategy, you will increase your ROI in the medium term and put clear distance between yourselves and your competitors – especially the ones who focus on offline marketing or short-term tactics.

Inbound marketing is an intelligent approach to understanding the modern, empowered buyer. This is all about building a strategic, competitive advantage based on your ability to help buyers understand their needs and their choices.

"Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or more increase in revenue in six to nine months time." - (Strategic IC)

 

Getting the Right Traffic to your Website

The goal is to attract the right visitors and for the right visitors to qualify themselves as leads. Traditional marketing tactics rely on outreach – meaning you must make efforts to interrupt the potential customer and pitch to them – whereas Inbound makes sure that the leads are coming to you.

Creating relevant, up-to-date content via your website gives bright people researching your field a reason to engage with your business online instead of your competitors.

Your prospects are searching for valuable information to help them in their buying decisions right now. Focusing on producing significant volumes of quality content can make a huge difference to the volume, but more importantly, the quality of your website visitors.

With the right content, inbound marketing brings the right visitors to your website.

If you're interested in bringing the right traffic to your  website, we have a blog going into more detail here!

The Three Pillars of Inbound Marketing are:

• Attract

• Convert

• Delight
  
  
  Which is ideally how you want your website to work.
  
  You need to see the content you create as an educational tool for your prospects and offer them relevant, helpful information. It is key that your content remains focused on helping the prospect solve problems – rather than pitching your services.

Inbound marketing blurs the line between helping and selling. It helps you boost the traffic to your website and establishes you as a thought leader.

This positions you and your business as someone that your prospects can trust.

When your prospects see how helpful and valuable your information is, they may take the next key step. They may cross the anonymity threshold and reveal who they are and what they are interested in.

Once your prospects have subscribed to your content, you have permission to deliver a stream of useful information to them over weeks, months, or even years. This process will both educate and inform while building the relationship with your business.

Over time the right website visitors will return time and again to consume quality content – content which is problem and solution-focused, straight-talking, accurate, useful, and completely devoid of hyperbole and sales spiel.

 

"Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0-4 monthly posts."

(- Hubspot, 2019)

We hope this blog was helpful in learning about Inbound Marketing

 If you'd like to read more, we have

A Guide to Marketing Automation Whitepaper

for you to download!