What Is Inbound Marketing?

Even with the best products or services, you need to market your business to bring in customers. One way to do that is with an inbound marketing strategy.

Read this guide to understand what inbound marketing is and how you can use it to attract customers to your business. 

The Importance of Inbound Marketing

With inbound marketing, you publish valuable pieces of content that attract customers to your business. It’s a long-term marketing strategy that can yield benefits like:

• Increasing your brand's online visibility 
• Targeting customers at all stages of the sales funnel
• Increasing trust among potential customers
• Generating quality leads
• Boosting your web traffic

Many businesses focus primarily on outbound marketing, like paid digital ads, but you shouldn't neglect the power of inbound marketing. If you’re strategic and stick with it, inbound marketing can generate an excellent return on investment. 

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

It’s easy to confuse inbound and outbound marketing. After all, they’re both ultimately about getting more customers and sales. However, there’s a key difference between the two. 

The definition of inbound marketing is marketing that pulls customers in with organic content. By contrast, outbound marketing is about initiating the contact and pushing your marketing message out to potential customers. 

Take events, for example. When brands run events, they’re trying to draw in customers who are interested in the experience or information the brand is sharing. Customers seek out such events rather than you paying to reach them.

The Inbound Marketing Methodology

An inbound marketing campaign typically focuses on the first stage of the customer journey, awareness. You’re trying to get your business in front of customers who might be interested in your products or services by sharing relevant content. 

But it doesn’t stop there. The inbound marketing methodology has three main stages:

• Attract: Draw in potential customers with valuable content that interests them or answers questions they have. 
• Convert: Direct customers who view your inbound marketing content to engage further by completing an email sign-up, contacting your business, or registering for an event.
• Close: Convince the customers to actually complete a purchase from your business. 

Key Components of Inbound Marketing

Once you know the general meaning of inbound marketing, you can dig a little deeper to start crafting your own campaigns. 

Make sure to include these key components:

• Realistic goals: Setting goals helps guide your campaign decisions, but make sure they’re realistic. Instead of something bold like “increase sales by 25%” at the onset, try a more specific and grounded goal, like “increase web traffic by 10% through SEO-focused blog posts.”
• High-quality content: If you don’t care about the content you’re posting, your target audience won’t either. Put in some time to create relevant content that represents your brand well.
• Understanding buyer personas: A buyer persona is a representation of your target customer. You need to understand your target customer's needs, attitudes, and concerns to launch effective inbound marketing campaigns. 

Types of Inbound Marketing

When you’re crafting your inbound marketing strategy, you have many options, from e-books to social media posts. One thing many types of inbound marketing have in common is internal links — hyperlinks to specific pages on your brand's website. That way, interested potential customers can click these links to learn more about your business. 

Select some of these popular types of inbound marketing based on what will best appeal to your target audience. 

Blog Posts

Blog posts are informational articles you post on your website to drive organic traffic. They typically address topics or questions your target customers are interested in. 

For example, an auto body shop might share blog posts with titles like “What to Do If Your Check-Engine Light Is On” or “Why Are My Brakes Squeaking?” 

When you incorporate relevant keywords and other SEO best practices, your blog posts can improve your website's rankings on the search engine results pages. That way, customers searching for topics related to your business can discover your site and potentially complete a purchase. 

E-Books and White Papers

E-books and white papers are similar to blog posts — except they generally cover specific topics in more depth. They’re often highly effective as lead magnets. 

Instead of making this valuable content freely available on your website, you ask interested customers to share their name, email address, or other personal details to access an e-book or white paper. The customers get the information they’re looking for from an expert (your business), and you get their contact information to nurture those leads. It’s a win-win. 

Infographics

Infographics are visual representations of data and other types of information. Because they combine text with graphics or images, they’re usually eye-catching. As a bonus, they’re also shareable, which can extend the reach of your inbound marketing efforts. 

Share infographics in your email marketing messages, in your social media posts, or right on your website to engage your target audience. 

Videos

More and more brands are using videos as part of their inbound strategies. These can be short-form social media clips that are under two minutes or long-form content like video podcasts. 

Either way, videos are an engaging way to share information, so it's no surprise that more than 80% of consumers want to see more videos from brands. 

Social Media Content

Finally, the content you share on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok is also a part of inbound marketing. Over time, you build up an audience of people who want to see your content. As they engage with your posts and get more familiar with your brand, you can direct them to your website to drive conversions. 

Note that running paid digital ads on social media is an example of outbound marketing, not inbound marketing. Only organic social media content qualifies as inbound marketing. 

How Does It Work?

Once you set up your inbound marketing campaigns, don’t forget to track your results. Monitor key metrics like:

• Web traffic growth
• Number of qualified leads generated
• Click-through rate
• ROI
• Social media engagement (likes, follows, comments)

Google Analytics is the industry standard for tracking the results of inbound marketing campaigns. You can also use social media analytics tools and your customer relationship management (CRM) software to gain insights into your inbound marketing efforts. 

Generate More Leads With Inbound Marketing 

Implementing inbound marketing for your business may seem intimidating, especially at first. Luckily, the experts at Optimize Digital Marketing are here to help. Our team has years of experience crafting customized marketing strategies to grow all types of businesses’ customer bases. 

Contact us to start generating more leads for your brand with inbound marketing campaigns.