Marketing

Inbound Marketing 101: get started

October 10, 2016

Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention. Sharing is caring and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.

*Did you know? Inbound marketing is a term and methodology coined by the company HubSpot. To obtain a certification in Inbound Marketing, you must take extensive learning courses and complete a difficult test to prove your knowledge of inbound! Guess what? We’re certified.

There are 4 steps to inbound marketing. Ready to get EDUCATED? I promise, it’s not as fancy confusing as it may sound. Here we go:

1. Attract

Attract: Develop buyer personas. Leverage original content that provides value to the target audience and generates inbound traffic. Tasks include:

Blogging
SEO
Social Content Publishing
Site Pages

2. Convert

Convert: Don’t just provide value, swap your value for implicit or explicit data from your buyer personas. Tasks include:

1. Forms
2. Calls-to-action
3. Landing pages
4. Thoroughly evaluating and categorizing contacts

3. Close

Close: Follow up with leads or buyer personas that have made their way through the sales funnel (consideration/conversion time).

1. Email: follow up with a set of meaningful emails to help close the sale
2. Marketing automation: nurture leads by identifying how they have communicated with you in the past, which pages on your site they have visited and tailor messaging to their unique experience with your brand.

4. Delight

Delight. After you close, follow up with these very special people who have taken the chance on you!

1. Social monitoring
2. Surveys
3. Smart content: text or calls to action that reflect the buyer’s unique buying experience with your brand.

So there’s your crash course in inbound! Yes, it is a lot of work. But don’t start having anxiety over it. Inbound is a journey; it takes time and patience and a lot of effort, but when it’s done right, magic happens.

Do you want help with inbound marketing for your business? Contact me right now! What are you waiting for? It’s free to talk to me and I promise it’s worth your while.