Inbound marketing is also known as attraction marketing is a marketing technique designed to attract potential customers by offering information of their interest through various means of content marketing (blogs, videos, newsletters, SEO, social networks etc), thus generating brand awareness and interest in their products. Instead of focusing directly on the sale as more traditional marketing does (that is outbound marketing or interruption marketing), the company that performs attraction marketing focuses on providing information to the potential consumer so that they take the company for an expert in the subject. Attraction marketing is often compared to relationship marketing, which is also based on the creation of a relationship with the potential consumer, with the difference that relationship marketing is also used to retain already acquired consumers. It also has great similarity with permission marketing, which is based on providing commercial information only to those consumers who have expressed an interest in receiving it.
Operation of Inbound Marketing
Today, consumers are bombarded with advertising from thousands of brands across thousands of categories. It is increasingly difficult for one of these brands to differentiate itself with a more attractive offer. What attraction marketing proposes is that these brands or people stop chasing their future consumers like an animal after a prey. Now it is proposed to place another message in front of your prospect. A message that is no longer loaded with offers and promotions, but with information that collaborates with it so that you can make a better decision.
The idea is that, when brands offer valuable information to their consumers, they automatically position themselves as experts before them, and consumers prefer to buy from a brand that knows what it sells and that teaches how to use it before a brand that only has the interest to sell.
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Concerning the other angles of marketing that are fashionable such as content marketing or social media marketing, inbound marketing covers the entire marketing-sales process, from the visitor’s first contact with the brand to the purchase. Including content production, social media, referencing, email marketing and analytical tracking.
The inbound marketing methodology applied to companies and/or organizations, both official and unofficial, has as its final objective the conversion maintaining the same in time and establishing beneficial relationships for all members of online marketing1being the four stages referred to of attraction, recruitment, conversion and loyalty, although some summarize it in three eliminating the stage of enthusiasm.
Phases of Inbound Marketing
The basis of inbound marketing is focused on offering the customer a concrete solution in each of the stages of the marketing funnel, differentiating in the upper part of the funnel in English TOFU (top of the funnel), central in English MOFU (middle of the funnel) and bottom in English BOFU (bottom of the funnel), and is based on a four-stage methodology.
Attraction
Attract qualified traffic to the target web resource. Generating traffic thanks to the combined use of quality content writing: infographics, videos, e-books, blogging; SEO: keyword optimization for search engines; SEM: advertising in the different networks of concentration of searches and mass traffic; and the mixed-use of different social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, etc.
SEO here is an essential part of achieving qualified visitors that generate potential traffic to feed the entire Inbound Marketing system on the web, being traffic that demands information.
Recruitment
The capture of contacts (leads) through recruitment elements, such as call-to-action (CTA), the publication of offers, preparation of landing pages with data collection forms, and elements in social channels.
Conversion
Conversion into customers. The cultivation of prospects or contacts, applying Social CRM, lead scoring and nurturing techniques together with software to automate the flows of information and activity, will allow us to offer the customer the most appropriate product or service at the right time.
Conversion is one of the main keys of any Inbound Marketing process, serving as a catalyst in each of the phases of this process and being able to establish different objectives depending on whether we talk about TOFU, MOFU or BOFU.
Loyalty
Process in which actions are developed mainly of lead nurturing and email marketing to guarantee repetitive purchase, brand value and branding, with personalized surveys, monitoring and RSS5
All this process is accompanied by the study of the data through web analytics tools and the study of user behaviours. Analyzing the marketing process to improve the offer thanks to tools such as Google Analytics6that allow you to know the behaviour of visitors, which results in the generation of benefits.
To implement the methodology of the work, it is important to have the following professionals, which will be mentioned below:
- a digital marketing analyst, who will be the project leader
- a social media manager
- a journalist and editor
- a programmer
- an expert in SEO and SEM.
These are the professionals that must be taken into account when doing a job through inbound marketing since this will help them a lot when directing a company strategy.
