Inbound Digital Marketing

One of the significant differences between inbound digital marketing and traditional marketing is that, with inbound marketing, your business shifts towards nurturing and developing leads and more so than selling. An example between the two would be a billboard advertising your products or services (traditional) vs. a blog that answers a specific question for your audience (inbound). Inbound marketing emphasizes targeting specific but multiple audiences, from local to global and particular demographics, while traditional marketing typically targets one audience, everyone, and hopes that enough people will take action.

Thanks to platforms such as SharpSpring or Constant Contact, targeting specific audiences is becoming easier and easier, leading inbound tactics (such as personalized newsletters and email marketing) to produce greater results over the one-way, one-to-many traditional advertising tactics (such as a billboard). Providing your audience with relevant and valuable content, rather than focusing solely on what your business does, is another crucial difference in these methods.

With any strategy comes best practices, and inbound marketing has plenty. You can create more blog posts and more social media posts, but having an inbound strategy will ensure better results from your campaigns. An example would be one that we created for one of our clients, Burkholder Brothers. We developed buyer personas for their business and created a content plan that directly spoke to their customers’ needs, and as a result, the website generates more traffic and more people engaged with Burkholder Brothers’ content. Below are a couple of best practices to help your inbound marketing efforts.

The flywheel model is better because a long-lasting, recurring relationship between a business and their customers is better for long-term growth. Flywheel models allow your company to better serve your customers, which will lead to more of those customers returning and giving you more business. Retaining customers after a purchase is taken or a sale is made is important for companies to sustain and grow their business. Funnel models tend to think of all of your visitors or leads entering and going through a prescribed process together with customers being the result. Viewing customers as the result, rather than a driver of growth, can lead to businesses neglecting client retention after their clients have made purchase.

The 3 stages that the flywheel model emphasizes are: attract, engage, and delight.

Think of online marketing as a continual interaction between a business and a customer.

Demand creation is the process of generating awareness and developing demand for your products or services. Lead generation is the act of converting potential customers into actual customers. Both of these processes can be used in the inbound digital marketing stages. For example, giving people a free ebook (without requiring them to fill out a form or provide any contact information) creates demand for your business or services, and can be used to attract potential leads to engage with your business. An example of lead generation would be promoting an ebook your visitors have to fill out a form to download. Those visitors have now given you their personal and contact information to become leads, and now your sales team can engage with your customers even further.

Since inbound digital marketing is customer-centric, you need to know which customers you want to reach. Understanding your buyers will help you attract the right people (those with greater potential to become prospects and future customers) to your web properties. Buyer personas, also referred to as marketing personas, are fictional representations of your ideal customers. Base your personas on market research (including demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals) and real data (like surveys and interviews) about your existing customers. Knowing what personas your business needs to target will make selling your products and services easier, as these personas will be people more likely to buy from you.

Contacts are an essential component of your inbound strategy and resources of your business. Developing the criteria for these segments is the heart of inbound marketing. To manage contact segmentation effectively you must:

Segment your leads based on their location, interests, demographics data, their needs and desires, and many more factors.

Each time a contact interacts with your business, you obtain more information about them, which gives you more options to segment leads and create relevant content. This information is what you need to understand, segment, engage, and delight your contacts.

The buyer’s journey is the process by which customers engage with and purchase from businesses. While each buyer’s journey is specific to certain industries, the general stages are as follows:

Defining the buyer’s journey for your own customers will help you create more relevant content for each stage.

Determine how long the buyer’s journey is for your customers, what type of content customers search for before purchasing from you, and how your customers make decisions. For example, a business-to-business (B2B) buyer’s journey can take several months, with the target customers (businesses) heavily considering all possible options and looking for demonstrations or data about your products or services. Business-to-consumer (B2C) buyer’s journeys are far shorter, with the consumer searching online or reading reviews to make their decision within a day or two.

High-quality, specific, and detailed content is a core focus of inbound marketing. The more targeted quality content you produce, the more potential customers you reach. Relevant content leads to more users staying on your website, reading other content pieces, and overall increases conversion rates. Customers are also more likely to return to (and do business with) businesses and websites that continue to provide relevant content and content that helps them make a buying decision.