Inbound Marketing Explained

Inbound methodologies relate to practices that help your business grow through the creation of strong, long-lasting relationships with both current and potential customers. It relates to the empowerment and appreciation of these customers, helping them to realise the goals throughout your dealings with them.

That’s because your customer’s success is your success.

Inbound methodologies offer a three-pronged attack:

1. Attract: bringing in your target audience with great content and interaction that shows you to be an authority and a company to be trusted.
2. Engage: offering advice and addressing their pain points to engender trust that leads to you gaining the business.
3. Delight: providing support that enables your customers to get the utmost from purchasing from you.

When you help your customers succeed, they naturally tell others, providing new business leads as part of a self-perpetuating loop. In this way, your business creates momentum - illustrating why inbound methodologies are a powerful part of the flywheel concept.

So, What Is the Flywheel Concept?

Well, it’s a model that HubSpot has adopted to demonstrate how your business can gain momentum by focusing on the delivery of a superlative experience for your customers.

It’s possible to make your flywheel spin faster by making an investment in strategies that draw in customers and retain them.

Conversely, ‘friction’ slows down the speed of your flywheel, which often exists in areas like team handoffs, so it’s vital that every employee is aligned with this approach in order that your flywheel isn’t held back.

When you base your flywheel around inbound methodologies, all your service, sales and marketing operations apply force and reduce friction during the three aforementioned tages (Attract/Engage/Delight).

For instance, during the Attract stage, your marketing will probably be most prominent, in the form of paid ads, event marketing and blogging. That said, by delivering exceptional customer service and employing social selling, you can do much to speed up your flywheel.

Once you reach the point where you’re engaging and delighting customers on a regular basis, your clients become promoters, bringing in new business. Eventually, the work you’ve done to speed up your flywheel enables you to expand without the need to constantly find new customers.

Read on to find out more on strategizing with inbound marketing.

What we’re talking about are strategies that enable you market effectively to your ideal customers the ‘inbound way’. Next, we’ll discuss the particular strategies that are used to attract, engage and delight your customers to allow your flywheel to spin and your enterprise to grow.

Strategies for Attraction

The inbound strategies used to catch the eye of your target market and ideal buyer personas are centered around the creation and development of content.

To make connections with your target audience, begin by producing content like content offers, blog articles and social media posts that offer value to the reader. This might include product guides, posts illustrating how you can address customer pain points, testimonials from satisfied clients or exclusive discounts and promotions.

If you want to connect to your audience more deeply using inbound marketing,ensure that your content is fully optimised for SEO. Strategies like this call for the use of specially chosen short and long tail keywords that relate to the ways you can help customers and the products and services you offer. Do this and you can’t help but attract the right kind of new business - and lots of it.

Strategies for Engagement

When employing inbound strategies to improve audience engagement, make sure you’re interacting with potential customers in such a way that long-term relationships are fostered. This means using strategies that provide lots of insight into the value you offer.

Your engagement approach could include the methods you use to manage inbound sales calls that you receive. Pay attention to how your sales teams interact with potential customers over the phone, as well as ensuring that you’re selling solutions to problems, as opposed to selling products. This makes sure that your sales interactions conclude in mutually-beneficial solutions both for your business and customers - leading to delivery of value to your ideal clients.

Strategies For Delight

When you focus on strategies for delight, you greatly increase the likelihood that your clients feel satisfied and supported well beyond the initial purchase. What’s required is your team fulfill the role of experts and advisors who are able to help customers whenever necessary.

Including thought-out, timely surveys and chatbots to help, support and gather feedback represents a surefire route to customer delight. These elements can be used at precisely the right moment along the buying journey to ensure they’re relevant and provide lots of value.

For instance, chatbots are there to assist existing customers in setting up new service offerings that they’re interested in. Also feedback surveys can be provided 6 months post-purchase to review any areas that could do with improvement.

Another vital strategy for achieving customer delight is ‘social media listening’ where followers are able to ask questions, share experiences and offer feedback about your services and products. Then you can provide answers that support your followers in a way that demonstrates that you care about their needs.

Finally, the hallmark of a delight-focused inbound strategy is one that supports customers, regardless of what your business stands to gain by doing so. Keep in mind that customer delight results in brand advocacy, so you need to make sure you approach every interaction with the same dedication.

When employing inbound marketing techniques, your main aim is the attraction of new business, engaging with potential customers at scale and providing delight to each and every lead.

You also collaborate with your service and sales teams, allowing the flywheel to quickly spin and your business to grow. It’s no small task, but using inbound methodologies you’ll get there!

HubSpot’s CRM supports inbound methodologies over it’s customer service, content management, sales and marketing Hubs. This allows you keep your focus entirely on the relationships you have with customers. Each hub is powerful in its own right, but when combined they allow you use inbound marketing methods that allow you grow.

When employing inbound methodologies via HubSpot software, the time customers spend with you and the purchases they make increase. That’s because they invariably tell everyone they know about just how amazing you are.