Inbound Marketing is a relatively recent concept that deals with the most effective way to attract customers. Inbound Marketing is far from traditional marketing strategies. To create an Inbound Marketing strategy, we propose you to follow 8 steps. The main objective is to captivate and attract users to a website or blog to convert them into leads or registrations. After a maturation process during which we will send them the information they expect or need, we will transform them into the real customers we expected. It is not a matter of attracting attention so that potential customers come to us, but to create content thinking about providing answers to the needs of our users.
Did you know where this concept comes from? Inbound Marketing emerged in the United States and became popular in 2009, among other reasons, because of the book by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs“. Soon after, this “attraction” marketing expanded to the rest of the countries, differentiating itself from Outbound Marketing in which the company was looking for the customer and not as now, that the customer is attracted to the company and looks for it. Many new terms came from the other side of the world, here we leave you a small but key list so you don’t get lost in the marketing world.
What is Inbound Marketing for?
- Increase the visibility of your business, i.e. the ability of your brand or website to be seen through Google results, paid campaigns, blog content, videos, email marketing…
- Attract more traffic that generates leads, thanks in large part to content that is more tailored and not so generic.
- Attract quality traffic that corresponds to your target, or “buyer persona” which are real potential customers.
- Reduce investment in advertising, “paid media”, such as Google or Facebook Ads, and reallocate the budget to own media, such as a blog or a YouTube channel.
- Generate eye-catching content: the more relevant the content, the more likely you are to convince visitors to your website or application to follow you and in the future to make a purchase or contact you. Inbound Marketing is basically composed of different contents that are disseminated through different channels. Ideally these contents complement each other, making the user access them from several channels.
- Ease of closing the sales process. How? To implement an Inbound Marketing strategy we will invest time in studying what each person needs at each moment. The creation of content that adds value is based on knowing in detail our “buyer personas” and the individual buying process. In this way, with all the information obtained from our database, we will observe what to offer and the stage they
arein. In the face of a known need, a solution on a plate.
How to create an Inbound Marketing strategy in 8 steps?
But how do we create an Inbound Marketing strategy? If you read any blog that talks about this type of strategy, you will see that not all of them are the same or organize the steps in the same way. But we can guarantee that in summary they all coincide in the same verbs: attract, convert, relate, sell and analyze.
From EMD we will tell you in a summarized way which are the steps we use to create an Inbound marketing strategy in 8 steps.
1. Knowing the business
We must know its vision, values and mission. Define the objectives, the difference between our project and the competition, the available resources and the priorities…
2. Describe our buyer persona
It is one of the fundamental pillars around which marketing actions should be planned. In other words, it is a way to fictitiously personify our target customer. We do this so that the company can understand its customer and thus improve its customer acquisition ratios, sales or the format in which it presents its services.
If in the past we were satisfied with having a segmentation of the public based on age, sex, place of residence or socioeconomic level, today we can go much further. Knowing their concerns, relationships, interests, intentions, hobbies, day-to-day life or friends is now possible… And the more we know about our buyer persona, the closer we will get to making the right decisions related to product or service development, communication actions, sales and brand messages… As you can see, business strategy depends on detailed knowledge of what our customers expect.
There are different methods and tools to obtain this information; we will explain them soon in another blog post.
3. Purchase process
Once we have identified our buyer personas, we need to know what they are and what they are not. stages they go through from the moment they discover they have a need/problem to the moment they decide to purchase a product or service to solve it. To analyze the phases of a process The well-known AIDA model, which consists of 4 guidelines, can be used:
4. Key words
Not all words are good keywords, nor only a few are the right ones to create a great strategy. Keep in mind that they will be present in your SEO strategy, social media and in all the content you create. To choose them you must understand what needs your target customer has, so you can choose the ones that best suit and fit your target. A good way to understand which words are the closest to your target is by doing an in-depth study such as a semantic analysis, which we explain in this blog post:“Semantic Analysis in your SEO strategy“.
There are two factors to take into account when choosing keywords:
- User intent, with searches:
- informative: corresponding to a search for information in general on a specific topic
- transactional: corresponding to a search for an already identified product, a supplier of this product and its price, delivery conditions, etc.
- navigational: which are more playful searches, without a clear intention.
- Search volume:
- Head tail: correspond to very broad searches and with a high volume of searches, i.e. a lot of competition…
- Middle tail: these are more specific searches, but are still very general.
- Long tail: correspond to very specific searches, with little competition and which are mostly transactional.
5. Organize content and plan its dissemination
In order to offer the solution to the needs identified in our buyer persona, a good planning of the content calendar is key. It is a matter of assessing which of our publications are included in the dissemination plan. In addition to good planning, we must bear in mind that content is king, as long as it has the added value that attracts the user we are interested in. We could say that there are some rules when it comes to consider the publication of this content, it has to be:
- A specific content that attracts those who are looking for something specific. “NO to eternal texts. We have less and less time and we don’t want to waste it in eternal searches among endless texts or empty posts. Let’s apply the rule of less is more.
- The content has to be entertaining or at least educational, but not promotional, since in 80% of the cases it scares people away. This rule is valid for the website, social networks or blog, for example.
- The design of what you show is important. Remember that the first impression is the one that counts the most, but a good impression without valuable content is worthless.
Owned, earned, paid
Once we have the perfect content we will have to see how to distribute it successfully. One of the simplest and most typical ways is with our own media and dissemination channels, through a blog, email, networks, videos.
A second way is through earned media, it is a very easy and fast way, since it is the publications made by our users of social networks, whether comments, links, repost… An organic way to be known through the opinion or activity of our audience, being able to get future customers thanks to the experiences of the first ones.
Finally, with paid media. In this case it will have a cost, although we have much more control over it, we can decide, in most cases, the segment that will receive it and its temporality, such as banners, external links…
Inbound Marketing turns your brand into a powerful magnet
Raquel, from EMD
6. Take off with advertising
Organic positioning is the pillar of an Inbound Marketing strategy, but let’s not fool ourselves, to be well positioned we will need time and sometimes Google plays tricks. That is why we should consider betting on other actions that allow us to attract traffic in the short term, such as SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with ads in Google Ads (Paid Search, Display, Remarketing) or Bing. Another interesting method to get visits to our content is with Paid Social, that is, placing advertising on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, among others.
Note: if you get dizzy with all these terms we advise you to read our “glossary of marketing terms”.
7. Automate processes
Once the previous steps have been completed, the next step is to create the automation process. You will have understood that sending personalized content at the right time and on the right channel can be a real puzzle if you have many users. There are platforms that allow you to automate and manage from a single place most of the digital marketing processes, we could call them “all in one” tools.
These software help us to execute our marketing strategies in an automated way, and allow us to have a much more complete control of the whole process, since we can know if we have achieved leads with our strategy, how and what has happened in the sales process. Among the best known platforms are HubSpot, Pardot, Zoho, Marketo, Eloqua, Spokal. Although we can also find more specialized tools in the various aspects of automation.
8. Analyze traffic and results
A regular and detailed analysis of the traffic we receive, of the audience, of the content read or consumed, is a fundamental step in modern marketing. Assessing whether the decisions taken are the right ones and are yielding positive results or whether, on the contrary, our strategy needs to be reoriented seems obvious. However, it is surprising how little time companies devote to this work.
Basic data such as the number of unique users, the evolution of the bounce rate, time spent on pages or conversions, cost per lead, acquisition, etc … are KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that we cannot ignore. To go further and get more out of analytics, current tools allow us to obtain precise data on audiences, conversion funnels or attribution; in short, key information that will give us a better understanding of our users and allow us to adapt our actions.
CONCLUSION
In this article we have presented how to create an Inbound Marketing strategy in 8 steps. Soon we will develop each of the points with case studies and interviews with experts in the marketing field.
Do you have doubts about a specific point? Do you want to ask us how to define a strategy for your company? Follow us on LinkedIn, on our blog or contact us directly through this form.
