Long gone are the days when marketers used to force their products or services down the throat of consumers. Those were terrible days for consumers when despite doubts, they usually bought the things. Now, instead of directly selling something, marketers make additional efforts to win potential customers’ trust. Then, they hope that such targeted customers will visit the website of a business to buy.  

Modern consumers prefer looking for information all by themselves online due to easily accessible smartphones and computers. They research extensively about the products they need to make an informed buying. So, it is after they are convinced that they spend money on purchasing something.  

So, the key to successful marketing today is to know how to help customers address their issues related to a product or service. This the marketers do by providing helpful content regularly so that they can win over customers’ trust.  

In other words, marketers today depend a lot on inbound marketing strategies for business growth.    

What is inbound marketing?  

Inbound marketing is a set of marketing strategies that aim at driving customers’ attention to your business. You do that by building a lasting relationship with your potential customers by engaging them with your business. The intention here is to make your customer feel special by focusing every marketing activity around the potential buyer of your products or services.  

Customer-centric strategy  

So, in inbound marketing, you find out your customers’ pain points in their buyer journey and educate them with the right content on how to resolve those issues. This way, you impress customers with timely help, and they start thinking about your business and, hopefully, visit your website.  

An inbound marketer goes for search engine optimization techniques, content marketing strategies, and social media marketing to reach out to customers. These three are distinctive marketing methods, but they are intertwined and work together to achieve the common goals of inbound marketing.  

But why should your small business aggressively use inbound marketing and prefer it over outbound marketing?  

Top reasons why your business needs inbound marketing  

A cost-effective strategy  

Inbound marketing is a boon for small businesses with a tiny budget as they can conduct the marketing without spending much.  

Write blogs  

Start with writing blogs, which do not require you to spend a lot of money. Your in-house team can develop those blogs and post them on your website. Then, as your business grows, you can subscribe to CRM platforms for a monthly fee to manage your contacts. 

Use social media  

Social media campaigns also do not cost much to start with, as all you need to do is open a social media account for free and post your content regularly. Your Facebook and Twitter pages, for example, can drive people’s attention to your small company.  

Authentic marketing with long-term value  

Content lasts long  

You do not have to create fresh content all the time. Instead, you can update your old content to make it even more valuable for your audience. So, if you have old infographics or case studies, just add some latest information to them. Similarly, republish your ebooks and instructional videos with renewed details to keep them relevant.  

Compare that with traditional marketing, where you spend a lot of time calling your potential customers and trying to convince them to buy your products or services. Despite that effort, your gain was just a handful of sales. Also, there was no surety of building trust and relationships with customers.  

It lets you focus on your target customers

The focus of inbound marketing is customers since the intention is to educate them about your business. There is no direct selling of products or services, as happens in outbound marketing. On the contrary, with inbound marketing tactics, the intention is to be present with customers at each stage of their buyer’s journey.  

Ensure better customer experience  

While targeting your customers with content, make sure that you do that with personalized content. For example, email marketing is amongst the most cost-effective way to reach out to your potential customers. But routine and boring emails will not yield the desired results.  

So, the subject line of your email should be enticing, short, and sweet. Your email body copy should accompany an exciting video that the recipients can click on to get your business message quickly. Or include engaging graphics so that customers can grasp information free of stress.  

Generate quality leads 

While a good amount of traffic comes from visiting your website and other online business sites, but that alone is not enough for your business growth. Instead, you need quality traffic, which is the one that becomes the basis of quality leads. So, it is these leads that have the potential to buy your products or services.  

Create useful content  

You will not benefit much from the visitors who do not connect well with your business and its offerings. But your inbound marketing strategies focus on helping customers by creating relevant content to address their issues, and that is the way to connect them with your brand. So, the more relevant and personalized content you post on different platforms, including your website, the higher are chances of bringing more leads that convert.  

To create valuable customer-oriented content that converts, you should first know your potential customers well by doing in-depth research to discover their different backgrounds and pain points.  

Make your business credible and trustworthy.  

Trust is as important in business as it is in life to make loyal friends. Winning customers’ trust is essential to do business and grow. People do not want to invest their valuable money and time with a brand that they doubt.  

Inbound marketing involves writing and posting various types of content as blogs on websites and short-length content on social media. Since you write quality content that people find helpful and relevant to resolve their pain points, it helps build trust in your brand. Those potential costumes who find your content useful will have faith in what your company does.  

By providing relevant content, you are signaling to your customers that you care about them. After you please your target audience with your content, they show their appreciation by posting testimonials and reviews.  

This strategy works across industries, from small businesses to educational institutions focused on generating prospective student leads, by addressing specific needs and concerns.

However, your visual identities like personalized logos also must be in place so that people can have a brand message, which is part of building trust.  

Create your cohesive brand  

One of the helpful features of inbound marketing for businesses is that its various components work together at the same time to target potential customers. 

Many channels such as social media, SEO, and content marketing come together to impact a business’s audience. You can easily integrate these channels for an effective, comprehensive marketing campaign. In this way, you make the marketing work well for the growth of your brand.  

This is contrary to the outbound marketing strategies where you have to take one aspect at a time, and other channels get ignored. So, if you lay too much emphasis on pricing, the brand values get ignored, and so on.  

But with inbound marketing, every aspect of it connects well with each other. So, you create content on different parts of your business and let the readers or potential customers decide which is helpful to them. In this way, you put the visitor in the driving seat.  

Moreover, consistency of style, tone, images across all your platforms makes your marketing look cohesive. As a result, your target audience has trust in your brand. But make sure also that your brand visuals are also impressive and have the consistency of colors, typography, and other elements. Finally, your logo is a core brand identity. So, if you are on a low budget, you can use a logo maker to design your logo all by yourself.  

Now that you know why you need inbound marketing for your business, you should follow some basic strategies.  

Here is how you can use inbound marketing to attract leads

Explore SEO to your advantage  

You have valuable information to share with your target customers, but if it does not reach them, then it goes to waste. This means they must find the information at the top of the search results as your website link. So, make sure that your search engine optimization techniques are perfect for bringing your websites for each of your keywords in the top search results on Google and other search engines.  

Optimize your landing pages  

Inbound marketing will work for your business when you have optimized your landing pages. This means that when your visitors click and go to your landing page due to your SEO efforts, they should get what they look for. The optimized page is a step to optimized lead generation.  

Therefore, make sure that your landing page has exciting visuals, engaging copy, and CTA. The aim here is to compel the visitors to buy or take an intended action.  

Create value-added content  

Since inbound marketing depends on content creation for its impact on customers, your content must have great value for them. Each piece of content you write should engage costumes while providing them information. Also, post various text and visual-based content such as lengthy blog posts, interacting infographics, videos, etc.  

Take advantage of social media  

Social media is a handy platform for inbound marketing. Post short and sweet content, both text and visuals, regularly to engage with visitors and customers daily. They respond to your content by offering their feedback right away in the form of comments and likes. But create a variety of content, including infographics and video, to make your social platform interesting.  

Wrapping Up  

Inbound marketing is an effective customer-centric strategy that works by creating helpful text and visual-based content. It is authentic and cohesive marketing as customers can find all the information as per their choice, which means businesses become credible and trustworthy.       

Author bio:  Aria Baker is a social media & brand manager with over 6 years of experience. She’s very passionate about anything related to business and spends copious amounts of time hidden behind a book or a screen and reading about business.