Inbound marketing: step-by-step instructions for launching. What is inbound marketing? I propose to analyze each point in more detail.

Inbound marketing (inbound marketing, from the English inbound) is a way of promotion through useful or simply interesting content. Content can be blog articles, illustrations, videos, answers to questions on forums, podcasts, presentations. Over time, content creates a loyal audience for the content creator, which converts or leads to customers in the future. In any case, like any other type of marketing, the ultimate goal of inbound marketing is sales.

How is inbound marketing different from content marketing?

In fact, nothing. In the Russian-speaking space, these concepts are mixed. The word “inbound marketing” came from the company HubSpot, which invented it and flooded the entire Internet with its content. When asked what is the difference between inbound marketing and content marketing, HubSpot representatives answer that content marketing is the first stage of inbound marketing and is only the creation of content. But everything that happens next: receiving contacts from readers, drawing them into the funnel, warming them up, selling and retaining them - this is inbound marketing.

In the Russian-speaking space, this difference is not taken into account, so I won’t either. So in this blog, “content marketing” = “inbound marketing”.

How content marketing works

The essence of inbound marketing is to form a relationship with the client before he becomes your client. Everything here is the same as in life - you trust more the advice of a person you know well.

By creating content, you create a history of relationship with your readers. The content constantly catches their eye, the reader gets used to the brand and begins to trust it. When he has a need, he will most likely turn to the company that constantly flashed before his eyes and provided him with useful content.

Here's a simplified illustration of how content marketing works:

For example, a person, let’s call him Petya, who is not yet familiar with my blog, accidentally comes across an article from Do It Inbound on a social network. Petya likes the article and subscribes to the blog. For some time it seems that nothing is happening (especially to me) - I don’t follow everyone - someone reads, someone doesn’t read. And Petya reads every new article. Over time, he develops a need for content marketing - either the blog convinced him, or the situation just happened that way. When this need matures, he turns to me, because he reads my articles, trusts me as a specialist, and he has the feeling that he has known me for a long time.

What you need to do to make inbound marketing work

Firstly, you need to constantly create content, and not quit after a couple of months. It will take time to turn a reader into a client, sometimes six months, sometimes a year. It all depends on the product you are promoting. So writing a blog for two months is not an option.

Secondly, the content should be interesting to your audience. Understand what questions your clients have, what advice they need, and how to help them. Be helpful to them.

Understand what questions your clients have, what advice they need, and how to help them. Be helpful to them.

Third, the content should be related to your product. If you create software and all you do on social media is post your office cat, it's unlikely to create an image of being a software expert.

Who is suitable for promotion using content marketing?

Content marketing takes time to work. The effect does not come immediately and takes a lot of work. Therefore, before you start inbound marketing in your company, think about it, do you even need it?

I usually say that content marketing is suitable for promoting complex products whose purchase decision takes a long time. While the buyer is thinking about which company to choose, you feed him with content and bring him to the point of purchase.

On the other hand, you can also come up with something interesting for simple products. It's just not necessary. For example, you make custom cases for iPhones with any picture that the client wants. This is not such a complicated service. It is understandable, inexpensive, and the audience does not need to explain anything. So it’s easier to set up advertising and get clients from it. Plus, with advertising you get full transparency on your return on investment - you can see how much you spent on advertising and how many sales you made. You can even calculate the cost of attracting an individual client. With inbound marketing it's not that easy.

The main difficulty of inbound marketing

The main difficulty is to consistently produce content. You shouldn’t assume that there needs to be inspiration for this - creating content is a routine job that you just need to get used to. Learn to create content regularly, often and consistently for several years, and consider that this is already half the success.

This article required:

Writing + editing + picture: 1 hour 18 minutes
Publishing: 10 minutes
Word count: 721
Number of characters (without spaces): 4368

*I’m sharing numbers to give an idea of ​​how much time content requires

In foreign blogs over the last couple of years, you can increasingly come across the phrase inbound marketing. Having rummaged around the RuNet, you can find only a couple of articles on this issue, so we decided not to ignore this issue.

So, what is Inbound Marketing? This is a marketing strategy whose end result should be interested potential customers who will come to you. As a rule, inbound marketing is contrasted with traditional marketing (outbound marketing), which uses cold calls, print and television advertising, email newsletters and other traditional marketing methods to attract customers. There is a visualization that has already become a real classic for these two strategies, where outbound marketing is a hammer trying to “drive” its offers into people’s heads, and inbound marketing is a magnet that attracts users.

David Meerman Scott explains the difference between these two strategies this way: in the case of inbound marketing, you “earn” user interest, for example, by publishing interesting, useful content on your corporate blog. In the case of traditional marketing, you buy, “beg” the interest of users: you pay for advertising, for printing your press release in a major publication, call and ask to listen to your proposals, etc.

Inbound marketing is based on three elements that are interconnected and form an integral system.

The second element is for your site to appear in organic search engine results.

And the third element is: share your content with people, motivating them to spread it further. If you did everything correctly, then clients will come to you.

Benefits of inbound marketing:

1) Costs less. Television advertising and some other standard marketing methods are simply not available to small and medium-sized companies. Tools for inbound marketing are free and available to everyone (you just need to know how to use them).

2) Unobtrusiveness. When people subscribe to RSS themselves, they voluntarily agree to receive news from your company and do not perceive these messages as spam. They themselves are interested in receiving information from you.

3) Viral effect. As soon as you have interested one person in becoming your subscriber on social networks, click the like button - his friends will also see this, many of whom will probably be interested in what exactly attracted their friend.

Inbound marketing is not only highly effective, but, importantly, it does not irritate people. This is probably what good marketing should be.

What is “inbound marketing”?

Inbound Marketing - This is a method of lead generation (attracting potential customers to a specific resource on the Internet) by creating interesting, exciting and useful content for the target audience and distributing it through various channels.

If you've created content that attracts people to check out your products and services, you're using inbound marketing. In other words, you will not be looking for a client to convey to him the benefits of your product, but he will come to you, interested in the content you offer.

Types of Content for Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing can use any content that you can make interesting and useful to your potential customer.

A very convenient content matrix was proposed by Michael Stelzner 1

Drawing from the book “Content Marketing” 1.

One of the main features of inbound marketing - no pressure on the consumer. Main - provide the target audience with information that will be attractive to them. Interesting news, useful video, necessary information attracts visitors and makes them loyal to the product. If a company provides useful and unique content for free, this encourages a potential buyer to “repay the company” with a good attitude towards it and possibly make a purchase from it.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Economical. Lower cost of use compared to traditional advertising methods.

Ability to work with narrow target audiences. You can take into account the detailed characteristics of your target audience and create materials that are more attractive to them.

Marketing is generally the process of growing a customer base and generating sales through various available channels. For the most part, marketing activities fall under one of two definitions: inbound or outbound marketing tactics.

Successful businesses can use a combination of these two options, but inbound marketing is an often overlooked and powerful solution for many businesses, especially those in e-commerce and related fields that thrive on automation.

Inbound marketing can be considered a “passive method” in the sense that after conducting inbound marketing campaigns, leads will generate themselves. Using a combination of tactics and strategy, a marketer can develop a conversion funnel that essentially works to sell the product itself.

Many aspects of a marketing strategy can be automated, allowing you to create a profit generator with minimal operating costs once the system is implemented. However, creating a successful marketing campaign takes time and effort, and may require experimentation before finding the right methods for your specific company. By understanding exactly how and why inbound marketing works, you can set yourself and your business up for greater success.

Inbound Marketing Concept

The core idea of ​​inbound marketing is to create your brand identity in a way that attracts and converts customers. Often these tactics revolve around establishing your business as an authority in your niche.

Rather than trying to sell a product or service directly, these marketing tactics serve to spark interest among potential customers and build their trust. In today's increasingly sophisticated consumer economy, inbound marketing plays a more important role than ever.

With so much information available online, most people prefer to research a brand or product before making a purchase. Companies that take the time to build strong brands have a better chance of success in the marketplace.

Today's successful marketing strategies must be:

• Focused on customer retention rather than customer acquisition.
• Targets individuals rather than all consumers.
• Focused on behavioral interaction.
• Appeal to fact-based decision making.

Traditional marketing and advertising methods, which used a more hunter-gathering approach to blasting advertising messages to grab a buyer's attention, are becoming less and less effective. That's why inbound marketing tactics are more important than ever.

What is inbound marketing?

Simply put, inbound marketing means attracting customers' attention through search engine optimization and related strategies. The goal is to create content that provides information and value to the people you want to attract to your brand.

People who have a specific problem or need will look for solutions. If your brand is willing to provide these solutions, you will be able to attract these customers.

Most forms of inbound marketing typically work by generating and sending leads through a “sales funnel.” This strategy aims to build trust between customers and the brand by providing customers with increasingly valuable content in exchange for higher levels of interest and commitment.

The process works as follows:

• Content, including blog articles and social media posts, is posted online. This content is optimized to be discovered by people who might find value in it.
• At the end of each piece of content there is a call to action that encourages the reader to take a specific step. For example, an article posted on the Internet may entice the reader to visit the company's website. The site may contain a link to subscribe to the newsletter.
• Increasingly better content can be offered in exchange for information from the client. A site visitor signs up for a mailing list by providing an email address in exchange for exclusive content such as a guide, webinar, or ebook.
• Once a potential buyer has given up their email address, you can use your mailing list to build trust with the buyer and ultimately entice them to purchase your product or contact you directly to discuss a service.

Sales funnel

A sales funnel is just one of several inbound marketing strategies that savvy marketers can use. Other methods help you better understand yourself, create a strong brand identity, establish yourself as a market leader, and much more.

Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

Traditional advertising methods can generally be described in terms of "outbound marketing". The general strategy for these methods is to send marketing messages out into the world, usually with little to no targeting, and hope that they attract the attention of interested buyers.

External marketing methods include:

• Print, television or radio advertising.
• Direct mail.
• Cold calling and telemarketing.
• Outdoor billboards.

These methods are based on cold leads. In other words, most of the people who will view these ads are not people who are specifically looking for the product or service you offer. You must rely on a combination of luck and persuasion to win over this type of audience.

Difference between inbound and outbound marketing

For a long time, outbound marketing was the main method of advertising. However, as the use of the Internet has become an increasingly common method and consumers have become more ad savvy, other marketing strategies have had to be developed.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a core part of inbound marketing. However, this is just one part of what could be a very big mystery. Marketing may consist of:

• Blog posts.
• Posts on social networks.
• Sites.
• Optimized paid advertising.
• Mobile applications.
• Viral advertising.

The goal of inbound marketing is to cross the path of potential customers and encourage them to learn more.

If you have something to offer, potential customers will readily give permission to receive additional content and promotions from you. Compared to outbound marketing tactics, which can be persistent and intermittent, inbound marketing strategies are permissive and value-added.

A lead magnet that collects people’s contacts in order to further sell to them using auto funnels.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing

A strong marketing campaign can help:

• Increase customer loyalty.
• Increase your site's ranking in search engines.
• Increase brand awareness.
• Allow clients to play an active role.

The obvious advantage of inbound strategies is that they are inherently interactive, built on two-way communication channels. This clearer form of marketing allows for more data to be measured and analyzed.

Another significant benefit of inbound marketing is cost efficiency. Since inbound strategies are primarily built around content and social media marketing, there is no need to spend money on expensive advertising space.

By skipping conventional channels, you can save money and have more control over your brand message. While you'll need to spend money on SEO and content creation or take the time to learn these skills yourself, the greater flexibility and lower costs of inbound marketing are ideal for startups and other companies that need to maintain tight advertising budgets.

Inbound Marketing Effectiveness

Consumers are becoming increasingly intolerant of advertising. With the ability to skip and block ads across multiple channels, traditional marketing methods have become less effective.

It is estimated that more than 58% of people surf the internet using some kind of ad blocking software. Inbound marketing methods that are not intrusive and provide value to the consumer do not suffer from the same limited visibility.

This makes them extremely valuable. While some inbound methods use paid advertising, such as pay-per-click advertising, others rely solely on organic content and search engine placement.

Inbound Marketing Channels

Inbound marketing strategies are varied and can span multiple channels. Although content marketing is primarily online, many of the same tactics that work online can be adapted for offline use.

The best marketing efforts will take place across multiple channels. By diversifying the ways you communicate your brand, you have the best opportunity to get your brand in front of potential interested buyers.

Some of the channels available to you include:

• SEO tactics.
• Email distribution lists.
• Books and other publications.
• Sponsorship of events.
• Press releases.
• Community outreach.
• Blogging.
• Participation in public speaking.
• Interaction on social networks.
• Viral marketing.
• Content creation.
• Video content.

In custody

No matter which route you take, the goal of inbound marketing is to reach people organically.

The best strategy will be one that plays to your company's strengths and meets the needs of your target customer.

By understanding what your potential customers are looking for and what types of content they will appreciate, you can create content that will attract attention and create positive brand awareness.

Once you've captured the attention of potential buyers, you can work to earn their trust, turning them into not only profitable salespeople, but also brand ambassadors who will work to spread the word about your business to their friends and family.

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