Inbound marketing is a new sales strategy that emerged a few years ago, with the distinctive feature that customers themselves flock to sales representatives. It’s a well-thought-out strategy that has enabled a large number of companies to increase their sales. What is inbound marketing ? How does it work? What are its advantages? We’ll answer all your questions.
What is inbound marketing?
Let’s start with a bit of English: inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing, which refers to a sales strategy in which the sales people are the ones who go to customers to sell them the services or products of the brands they work for, whether through flyers, sales campaigns, advertising, etc. Unfortunately, this sales strategy is showing more and more weaknesses these days and is becoming outdated. Unfortunately, this sales strategy is showing more and more weaknesses these days and is becoming outdated, as customers feel assaulted by overly intrusive and blunt ways of acting, with no subtlety shown in the promotion of the products sold. What’s more, outbound marketing is a very costly strategy, both in terms of the human resources and equipment needed to bring a service to market.
Inbound marketing avoids these problems and does away with the idea of mass advertising. The aim is no longer to try to attract just anyone and psychologically force prospects to buy, but rather to give them the impression that if they buy, it’s only by their own free will. First of all, you need to start by offering content that might appeal to prospects, not the services sold directly, but only content relating to them. In this way, you attract them to your website, where they shouldn’t feel violated by mass advertising; you need to arouse enough curiosity in them for them to direct themselves towards your products.
What are the stages of inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is made up of a number of essential steps to ensure that your target customers take the bait and end up signing up with you. Here are the four main stages of inbound marketing:
- Visitor attraction;
- Converting visitors into leads ;
- Converting leads into customers;
- Customer loyalty.
Attracting visitors is certainly one of the most complicated steps to implement in the above list, because unlike an outbound strategy, we remind you that the prospect must not feel targeted and attacked by your marketing, in this situation only an SEO agency is in a position to carry out this implementation. An SEO agency takes care of maximizing your visibility on search engines and optimizing your indexing on an ongoing basis, so that people interested in your sector can easily come across your content without having to search for it themselves.
Converting prospects into leads is also a fairly tricky stage, because once again, now that they’re on your website, you can’t directly encourage them to buy your services; they need to feel confident that they’re in control of the situation. You need to get your prospects to leave information about themselves on your site, most of the time, the white paper technique is the most common, you leave a possibility to download content online, through a chatbot, which will be sent to the potential customer by e-mail address collected by the bot for example.
How do you create content that converts leads into customers?
It’s essential that your content is of the highest quality. Customers need to feel that your site is providing real information they can refer to, which will give them confidence and encourage them to browse further.
Your content should have a very rich semantic field relating to your function sector, which will make it easier to appear on search engines with any word relating to one of your semantic fields.
Now you know more about inbound marketing, its definition and how it works.
