inbound methodology

What Is Inbound Digital Marketing?

It’s a simple marketing strategy that has been growing in effectiveness since 2006. Its focus is about targeting and attracting the right visitors to your business. The “right” visitors being your key demographic, and those most likely to convert into long term customers. Marketing used to be about outbound methods like buying emails lists, buying ad space, sending direct mail, and keeping fingers crossed about word of mouth. Now, inbound marketing is about creating high quality content that brings people to you and your business, makes them realize they are exactly where they want to be, and keeps them coming back again and again. The goal is to align the content on your website with your potential clients (and current clients) interests. This attracts them to you initially and then allows you to convert them, close the deal, and keep them delighted with you, your products, and your services.

Why You Need It

Billboards, telemarketing, even direct mail are all becoming less and less effective every day. We’re all on the do-not-call list, we trash junk mail without looking at it and we DVR our favorite shows just so we can skip the advertisements. Don’t even get us started on spam.

People don’t want to be sold but they do want help making buying decisions. They don’t want to be interrupted during dinner, they want to find answers to their questions—when they’re looking for them.

The buying process has changed and your business needs to change with it.

The Key Components

Content Creation and Publishing

Create great content that answers specific questions your buyers want to know, then make it easy for them to find it.

Lifecycle Marketing

People will find your content at different stages of the buying process. Create offers that appeal your specific personas at each state of the process—awareness, consideration and decision.

Personalization

Customize your message for the person viewing it. The more you know about your leads, the better you can target your message to grab their attention.

Multi-Channel

Inbound marketing includes many ways to attract people to your content. You should utilize as many of these channels as you can to make sure you meet your customers where they want to interact with you.

Integration

Using tools that all work together means you can focus on delivering great content and not waste time piecing together data and reports.

Connection

Delivering quality content to the right people, in the right place, at the right time makes all the difference.

The Four Inbound Marketing Actions

Attract

All traffic is, essentially, good. But inbound marketing is much more specific. The name of the game is no longer traffic volume. The emphasis needs to be about the quality of the visitor.

This means bringing in the people who are most likely to become long time customers. Consumers have shifted to online research and what will make you stand out is your content.

How we attract website traffic

Convert

The obvious next step is to take the quality traffic you’ve attracted and convert them. You do this by collecting contact information – usually an email address. This is the golden currency of online marketing. But consumers are savvy and long weary of providing an email address which will get their inboxes bombed with irrelevant and unwanted marketing emails.

So in order to get the emails you need, it’s important to offer something of value in exchange. This is best accomplished by downloadable and exclusive content like ebooks, videos, tip sheets, etc. Whatever you’ve got that no one else has is a key step to optimizing lead generation.

How convert traffic to leads

Close

At this stage what’s needed is your personalized lead nurturing strategy. Fancy words for a simple action: sending the right content at the right time to convert visitors to clients. And to take this step further it also means that you are drastically shortening the sales process because you’ve educated your visitors and personalized your message in order to make a deep connection.

You’ve enabled your leads to make a qualified buying decision. They feel confident about choosing your products and services.

How we close leads

Delight

Closing may be where the money is, but for most small business owners, delighting customers is the reason you do what you do. With inbound marketing as your strategy, closing the deal is really just the beginning. You want to create long term clients.

You want to help people and you want to make a difference for them. This is the step when it’s time to think about the up-sell, creating promoters, developing brand loyalists, getting the referral, and expanding your base.

How we delight customers

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