What is Inbound Marketing? Here Are 5 In-Depth Tips to Help You Ace It!

Inbound marketing is an effective approach to acquiring the best results for your business. According to research, businesses that adopt inbound marketing save more than $14 for every customer they acquire.

In addition, effective inbound marketing is 10x more effective for converting leads than outbound marketing. Inbound marketing is how you attract your target customers to your brand naturally, without being patronizing.

In return, it saves you tons of money and generates organic leads that turn to loyal customers.

Are you looking for new ways to improve your inbound marketing skills? Or are you new to inbound marketing, and are wondering how to get started? Then, you are in the right place.

This article explains what inbound marketing is and the five best inbound marketing tactics you can employ to grow your inbound marketing strategy. Keep reading to find out what they are.

What is inbound marketing?

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Inbound marketing refers to the activities involved in enabling prospective customers to find your business.

Unlike outbound marketing that utilizes push marketing efforts (such as ads) to gain customers, inbound marketing uses a pull marketing strategy (content creation, social media, SEO) to attract customers to a company.

It channels every marketing effort into generating leads, building trust, establishing relationships, and sustaining these relationships.

It works for all businesses, including SaaS businesses. This SaaS inbound marketing resource is a great way to find out more about it for your SaaS business.

5 Ways to build a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy

Building a working inbound marketing strategy for your business combines consistent efforts and an effective strategy. Below, we show you five strategies you can adopt to build and improve your inbound marketing strategy for your business.

1. Start with the sales funnel

Understanding and strategizing your inbound marketing efforts based on your sales funnel is crucial to growing your inbound marketing.

The sales funnel is your buyers’ journey. It is the process every prospect passes through before they become a customer.

It consists of four major stages: the Awareness stage, the Consideration stage, the Decision-making stage, and the Delight stage.

The awareness stage is when your prospects come into contact with your product or service. They are aware your product exists and know your product can solve their problems.

In the consideration stage,  your prospects research competitors and pay attention to your offerings to consider if you are the best fit or worth every penny spent.

The decision-making stage is when the prospect finally decides to buy from you.

In the delight stage, you make your customers happy and turn them into loyal advocates with a positive customer experience.

Understanding each stage of your customers’ journey can help you strategize your marketing efforts to meet their needs at every stage of their journey.

For example, you can create content that talks about your product and how it solves your customers’ problems at the awareness stage.

Then, you can create blog posts that position you as an authority in your field to convince your customers at the consideration stage.

You can also consider providing how-to blog posts and videos about using your products to support your customers during the decision-making stage. Then, you can offer discounts and freebies at the delight stage.

Understanding the sales funnel gives you the insights to channel your efforts to the right people at the right time to achieve maximum results.

2. Build an intuitive website

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An intuitive, easy-to-use website helps you scale your inbound strategy. Inbound marketing attracts your customers to your brand, which drives tons of traffic to your site.

So, if your website is not seamless to use for your customers, they will get stuck and not get through to the other stages of the sales funnel.

Which means they won’t get to buy your products and or use your service.

However, those promising leads can be converted into paying customers when your website provides a positive user experience.

When your website is easy to use, you make it easy for your customers to navigate the sales funnel effortlessly. As a result, they can find what they want on time and get them to do what you want them to do.

Treat your website as a fundamental tool in helping you generate and convert leads through inbound marketing because it is. Invest in an excellent User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) to attract and sustain your audience’s interest in your brand.

3. Establish a strong social media presence

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More than half of the world uses social media, which is about 4.48 billion people. Building an active social media presence across different platforms can get your brand noticed and attract more people to your brand.

Create a strong social media presence by actively portraying yourself as an authority in your field. Keep in mind that inbound marketing is more about providing value than being patronizing.

Therefore, dish out content that provides authentic information about your industry and helps your target audience navigate any challenge they may have in your niche.

When you post valuable content across your social media pages, you portray yourself as a problem solver and an expert in your field.

When your audience visits your page and leaves with additional knowledge or answers to their questions, they respect you and trust you better.

This positive perception attracts them to do business with you without directly promoting your products and services.

4. Embrace email marketing

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Email marketing is a powerful tool for lead generation and lead conversion. This is why many B2B and B2C marketers adopt this type of marketing in their inbound strategy.

According to research, 59% of marketers prefer to generate leads with emails, while email has proven to be 40% for leads conversion.

Email marketing can be used to help facilitate your customers’ sales funnel from the awareness stage to the delight stage.

This involves the period when your prospects decide to sign up to your email list to the point where they can buy your product to become loyal customers.

Segment your emails to customize every stage of your customers’ buying process to convert them better.

Your customers want highly personalized experiences, and email marketing helps you deliver personalized experiences for your visitors.

Therefore, drop insightful and engaging content to nurture an established relationship with your customers through email marketing.

This will help speed up the sales funnel, increase conversions, reduce churn rate, and retain your customers.

5. Measure and optimize your growth

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To know if your inbound marketing strategy is generating expected results, you need to track and improve your performance.

Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as qualified leads, organic traffic, social media traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rate metrics.

Your qualified leads KPI provides insight on the number of people highly qualified for nurturing.

Your organic lead KPI shows you the number of people your inbound marketing attracted to your website. It helps you know if your content marketing efforts are bringing the right audience to your site.

Social media traffic KPIs help you track your social media marketing efforts across different social media platforms. This way, you will know what platform is attracting the right audience and what platform to focus your marketing efforts on.

Bounce rate KPI informs you of the number of people who leave your website immediately after landing on your website. This helps you know how many visitors your website isn’t converting and how to improve.

Conversion rate KPI gives insights on the number of prospects taking the desired action based on your inbound marketing strategy. The action could range from the number of customers that click a CTA button or buy a product.

Tracking your growth with these metrics can help you monitor how successful your inbound marketing strategy is.

So that if it’s not generating the desired outcome, you can identify the loopholes and make the needed improvements.

Benefits of an effective inbound marketing strategy

When you invest in an excellent inbound marketing strategy, you pave the way for your business to thrive. Below are some of the ways inbound marketing is beneficial to your business.

1. It increases your brand’s visibility

Effective Inbound marketing involves creating the right content your audience needs. By investing in effective inbound marketing, your audience will be able to find you easily when they make searches on Google.

This increases your brand’s awareness and drives traffic to your site.

2. It generates more leads

Inbound marketing attracts leads to your site through effective content marketing that meets your prospects at every stage of their journey.

It is targeted, timely, and valuable; it, therefore, attracts the right people to your business.

3. It helps you build authority

Customers want to buy from brands they can trust. Inbound marketing helps you build the authority that fosters trust with your customers.

When you educate, engage, and inform your audience, they see you as a brand they can rely on. You also become their go-to brand for all things relating to your industry.

Conclusion

This article explained the top five inbound marketing tactics you can use to grow your business.

They include tracking the sales funnel, embracing social media and email content marketing, creating a simple-to-use website, and monitoring your results.

Use these practical strategies to improve your inbound marketing strategy to achieve massive growth.

Author Bio:

Lydia Iseh is a writer with years of experience in writing SEO content that provides value to the reader. As someone who believes in the power of SEO to transform businesses, she enjoys being part of the process that helps websites rank high on search engines.

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