Inbound Marketing- A Cost effective strategy

Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that is designed to draw visitors and potential customers in, rather than outwardly pushing a brand, product or service onto prospects in the hope of generating leads or customers. HubSpot defines inbound marketing as the process of attracting, converting, closing and delighting customers.

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

As the names suggest, Inbound marketing focuses on drawing customers whereas outbound marketing is about pushing a business’s offerings. Inbound marketing is about earning attention, while outbound typically involves buying it.

Inbound marketing uses owned media and earned media in creative ways to reach potential clients.

The inbound methodology is composed of three stages: attract, engage, and delight. Inbound businesses use the methodology to build trust, credibility, and momentum. It’s about adding value at every stage in your customer’s journey with you.

From a business perspective, the methodology represents the growth of your business, and happy customers provide the energy that fuels that growth, either because they buy from you again or because they bring new customers to you by promoting your product to other people in their network.

But if you produce unhappy customers, either by selling to people who are bad fits for your offering or by overpromising and under-delivering, they’ll slow your company’s growth.

When all of your teams are aligned around an inbound approach, you can provide a holistic experience for anyone who interacts with your business, no matter where they are in their buying journey.

Attracting isn’t just the role of marketers. Engaging isn’t just the role of sales. Delight isn’t just the role of services. To create relationships that last and customers that stay, every customer-facing team needs to focus on how they can contextually attract, engage, and delight your prospects and customers and continue to build trust in your brand.

Measuring the impact of inbound marketing work in a way that demonstrates understandable ROI has always been a tricky one. The key is to be clear from the beginning.

It may be that you can’t track the number of leads generated as a direct result of your campaign, but you can track how many downloads your resource has had, the average duration people watched your video for, how many new social media followers you gained, etc.

When you’re planning your campaign, be clear about what it is you’re trying to achieve and measure that appropriately and honestly. That way, everyone’s expectations are set – and therefore, are more likely to be met.