Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on building meaningful relationships with customers and prospects. In other words, inbound marketers focus on helping potential customers find the company, as opposed to outbound marketing strategies, where companies actively seek customers (ads, promotions, PR, sales, and more).
Therefore, it’s safe to say that inbound marketing is a less invasive method compared to its outbound counterpart.
Inbound marketing is what many digital agencies are focusing on nowadays. Since it aims to create long-term trust, it’s considered more profitable than some other traditional marketing techniques.
Who Can Use Inbound Marketing?
Every business, organization, or individual seeks to create long-lasting relationships with its customers or leads. Nowadays, even schools and universities use inbound techniques to attract prospective students.
The Attract-Engage-Delight Process
There are three processes that inbound marketers usually follow to achieve their goals. The first one is attracting the right people who are interested in your product and service. To do that, you need to present them with the right content. After you get the lead’s attention, you need to engage them by pre- sending the right solutions for the problems they might have. It’s important to recognize and acknowledge some of their “pain points” to keep them inter- ested and engaged with your content.
Perhaps the most crucial process is offering adequate support to potential customers and leads them to a successful purchase. Not everyone who becomes a prospect will buy your product or service. However, those who showed any kind of interest in what you offer are widely regarded as your leads. One of the main goals of inbound marketers is to keep leads engaged via a lead nurturing process. It’s not an easy task, but it can be achieved if a proper customer relationship management process is applied. This leads us to the very next segment — CRM.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The goal of every company is to position itself better on the market and achieve better sales. To do that, it needs to maintain valuable relationships with its current, past, and future customers. Even small businesses could get lost in all that customer-related data and lose plenty of clients if they fail to interact with them adequately. That’s where customer relationship management comes in to save the day.
CRM includes a wide array of techniques and requires using various tools to analyze, manage, and interact with the customers. If done correctly, CRM can help you improve your business relationships, resulting in higher customer retention. Consequently, you will have better sales.
But how does one start utilizing CRM processes? Marketers agree that one of the essential steps is to start growing your CRM database.
This may sound like a lot of work, but the good news is that most of it is actually automated. You just have to set the right parameters. That’s why automation is one of the essential elements of inbound marketing.
Marketing Automation
Tools that marketers nowadays use facilitate all inbound marketing operations by automating various processes. Marketing automation helps you maximize the use of your resources and focus on your goals rather than doing the grunt work. It can help you with measuring ROI, managing your email campaigns, nurturing leads, and more.
When combined with CRM, marketing automation can help you achieve significant results as an inbound marketer.