The Only Inbound Marketing Guide You’ll Ever Need

Inbound Marketing is at its core about the fundamentals of marketing. With inbound marketing, you develop content that gets customers to buy from you naturally and organically. This sounds simple on paper, but you have to take visitor engagement into account.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of Inbound Marketing terms, strategies and tactics. And though it seems like you need a team of experts to help you get your company and product out there, the truth is that any organization, big or small, can benefit from an inbound marketing campaign. This guide will help you understand the basics of inbound marketing and how to execute this strategy as a beginner.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategy used to attract and convert customers. It focuses on attracting customers by creating valuable content that they want to consume. Inbound marketing campaigns are based on attracting customers who are already interested in your product or service, through content like blog posts, infographics, videos, social media posts and more.

Inbound marketing is not about spamming your audience with ads or sales pitches — it’s about finding the people who are already looking for what you have to offer and then converting them into customers (and hopefully fans!) because they like your brand and what you stand for.

Why should you care about inbound marketing?

The internet has made it easier than ever before for companies to reach out directly to their target audience by using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. As well as being able to reach new customers directly through these platforms, businesses can also use social media to engage with current customers by responding to their questions and comments and building trust through personal interactions. This creates an environment where potential customers feel more comfortable investing time in learning more about a company before making a purchase decision.

Understanding the Inbound Marketing Methodology

The inbound methodology focuses on establishing relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers by providing them with helpful content. This approach helps you build credibility when prospects are at any stage in their journey with your business.

The inbound methodology consists of three key steps:

1. Attract - The first step involves attracting visitors to your website through content marketing, social media, search engine optimization and other strategies.

2. Engage - Once visitors arrive at your website, you want to convert them into leads by providing information that addresses their needs or solves their problems. You can also convert them into customers by selling your products or services directly on your website.

3. Delight - The final step in the inbound methodology is delighting customers after they've made a purchase from you so that they'll come back for more - either repeat purchases or referrals.

The Inbound Marketing Flywheel

HubSpot's inbound marketing flywheel illustrates the momentum you gain by prioritizing and delivering a consistently exceptional customer experience. The idea is that if you can attract visitors, convert them into leads, nurture those leads into customers, and provide them with excellent service — all while staying focused on your target buyer persona — then you'll have an irresistible brand and product offering.

A flywheel is a circular disc that's mounted on an axle. When you spin the wheel, its momentum causes it to continue spinning for a long time after you stop pushing it. That's because it has more energy than it would if it were stationary.

The inbound marketing flywheel works similarly: once you've built up some momentum, your efforts will continue to pay off and grow more effective over time.

The Basics of Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are well-rounded profiles of your ideal customers. They are based on research into your target market, and they include concrete details about who these people are and what they care about.

There are three stages in the buyer’s journey:

Awareness - At this stage, potential customers are aware of a problem or opportunity that they want to address, but don’t know how to solve it yet. They might visit your website or social media profiles to learn more about you.

Consideration - At this stage, potential customers have identified a problem or opportunity that they want to address, but have not yet decided on a specific solution. They might visit your website or social media profiles again for more information about your products and services.

Decision - At this stage, potential customers have decided on a particular solution for their problem or opportunity and have begun comparing different options from different brands and vendors – including yours! They might contact you directly via phone call or email with questions about your product range.

Creating Your Buyer Persona

Creating a buyer persona is one of the most powerful steps you can take in the buyer’s journey. It helps you understand how people think, what their needs are, and how they behave when they interact with your company’s products or services.

Personas can be created for specific stages in the buyer's journey. For example, when you're thinking about creating buyer personas for a new product launch or campaign, it helps to create a persona for each stage in the buying cycle:

Awareness - This is where prospects first hear about your brand or product. This stage includes gathering information through research and trials.

Engagement - Prospects decide whether or not to buy from you after comparing options and researching more details about your product or service.

Decision - Prospects make a decision on what to purchase at this point in their journey—they might choose you over other brands but still need convincing before making their final choice.

Here are the steps to creating buyer persona:

1) Identify Your Business Goals

The first step in creating buyer personas is identifying what you want them to accomplish for your business. What are their goals? What actions do they take? How can they be reached? These questions will help you create buyer personas that are more tailored toward your business goals than generic ones found on the internet.

2) Conduct Primary Research With Your Customers

The first step is to find out who your best customers are. You can do this by surveying them — or better yet, interviewing them — about their needs, wants and concerns. You'll want to ask questions about specific features of your product or service that appeal most to users and why those features matter so much to them.

3) Creating Content for Each Persona

Content is king. If you want to attract visitors, you need to create content they want to consume. And if you’re trying to convert them into leads, you need to create content that educates them on your product or service and makes them feel like they need it in their lives.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

Get Found

The first step to any inbound marketing campaign is to get found by your ideal customers. This means creating an online presence that your customers can use to find you. This is where keywords come into play. You need to make sure that your website, blog, social media accounts and other online profiles are optimized with keywords that will help searchers find you when they search for products or services like yours.

In addition to optimizing your website and blog posts, you should also optimize your social media profiles with the right keywords so that when people search on Facebook or Twitter for information about your industry or business, they’ll find you.

Nurture Leads With Email Marketing

Email marketing is also a great way to nurture leads. The average consumer now has more than 100 email addresses in their inboxes, so it’s important for brands to use tools like drip campaigns and segmentation to ensure that the right message lands in the right person’s inbox at the right time.

Convert Leads With Landing Pages & Forms

Landing pages are the best way to convert leads into customers. They’re a great tool for optimizing conversions and driving more traffic to sales-ready leads.

A landing page is a page on your website that’s focused on getting people to take a specific action. It could be signing up for your email newsletter, downloading an ebook, or making a purchase.

Landing pages are most effective when they're designed for one purpose. If you're using your landing pages to sell products, you should create separate landing pages for each product category or sub-category. This makes it easier for your visitors to find what they're looking for, and increases the likelihood that they'll complete an action like making a purchase or requesting more information about your company.

Create Content That Works for Your Audience

Content marketing isn’t just about selling products — it’s about helping people solve problems. This can be as simple as writing blog posts that answer commonly asked questions or more complex like developing an ebook or webinar series that teaches people how to do something they care about.

Helpful content reduces customer anxiety and increases trust between your brand and potential customers. It also positions you as an expert in your industry — which leads to more sales down the road!

Social Media is the Fastest Way to Share Your Content

Social media is the perfect place for building relationships with people who are interested in your brand, so it’s a great place to promote your blog posts and other content you want to share with the world.

If you want to drive traffic to your site, social media can help you do that too. You can use social media as an SEO tool to get more links and shares by using relevant hashtags on Instagram and Twitter, for example.

Survey Your Current Customers and Leads

This is one of the most important parts of the process: asking your existing customers and leads what they want. A survey will help you gain insight into their motivations, interests, and preferences. It will also give you a chance to ask them about their goals and how they plan to achieve them.

The questions you ask should be specific enough that they give you actionable information, but not so specific that they limit your options or create confusion. For example, if you’re looking for feedback on an upcoming product launch, don’t ask respondents to choose between two options when there are more than two choices available.

If possible, include some open-ended questions at the end of the survey so that respondents can provide additional comments or suggestions. This gives them an opportunity to share ideas with you that may not have occurred to them during the course of answering multiple-choice questions about their priorities and needs.

Use Storytelling in Your Content

Think about how people absorb information. They don’t read blog posts like they would a textbook or an encyclopedia entry. They skim for information that applies directly to them, then dive deeper into the parts that interest them most. They want stories that make them feel something — joy, anxiety, anger — so give it to them!

It’s not enough to simply publish blog posts on your company website and hope that people will read them. You have to create content that provides value to your audience and encourages them to share it with others.

Host a Free Webinar

If you’re not already hosting webinars, then you’re missing out on one of the most effective video marketing strategies. In fact, a recent study found that businesses that host webinars have a 43% higher conversion rate than those who don’t.

Create an outline for your webinar. You can use this as a guide when speaking during the session, but it also helps keep you focused on providing value and answering questions from participants.

Write out all of the questions that you think people will ask during your webinar and answer them in advance. This will help keep the conversation flowing naturally throughout the event. You might also want to conduct some practice calls or run through a mock session with someone else who will be participating in your webinar (such as another member of your team).

Build a Relationship with Influencers

Influencers have the ability to make or break your brand. Influencers can be thought of as people who have a large following on social media, television or through other media channels. They are also more likely to have a positive effect on your brand than your average customer, because they are usually very passionate about their interests and hobbies.

Write an email asking if they'd like to collaborate. If they're interested, set up a call or Skype session so you can discuss your ideas more in depth. Ask them if they would be willing to write a guest post on your blog or social media page, which gives them exposure while helping you build your audience.

Build Effective Email Campaigns

Email marketing is a key part of any inbound marketing strategy. It’s easy to get started and the results can be immediate and impressive. However, if you’re not careful, your emails can be ignored by subscribers who have unsubscribed from your mailing list.

But it’s a lot more than just sending out a blast and hoping for the best. You need to plan your campaigns carefully, target them to your audience, and use email marketing best practices to maximize their effectiveness.

If you want to learn how to build an effective email marketing strategy, check out this guide: Getting Started with Email Marketing

Make Your Website Convert Like Crazy by Making it Mobile Friendly

Your website is the most important part of your inbound marketing strategy. It's how people find you, and it's how you convert them into leads and customers. But if your website isn't mobile friendly, or if it's not optimized for search engines, then you're missing out on a huge opportunity to grow your business.

Make sure it’s responsive. You don’t want to lose potential customers because they can’t view your website properly on their mobile devices. A responsive site allows people to browse seamlessly from any device and easily navigate between pages without having to zoom in or out or scroll back and forth. Make sure that the font size adapts for different screen sizes and resolutions so that the text is always legible regardless of what device someone is using.

Analyze and Optimize Inbound Marketing Results

The only way to know if inbound marketing is working for your business is by measuring its results. That means tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), like new leads, conversions and sales.

There are many ways you can analyze and optimize inbound marketing results. Here are a few of them:

Look at Google Analytics data on your website's traffic and conversions. If you're using a platform like HubSpot or Marketo, you can also track how much traffic comes from email and other channels.

Use Contentsquare or HotJar to see how visitors interact with your site and which areas they find most engaging.

Use Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to test different messages and offers on the same audience over time. You'll be able to see which ones get more clicks and leads, then use that information to optimize your inbound marketing campaigns.

Inbound Marketing Software

Choosing the Right inbound Marketing Software

Inbound marketing is the use of content marketing and sales funnels to attract and convert leads into customers. It's a relatively new strategy that has proven to be the next big thing in marketing. It relies on generating high-quality content to attract your target market and position your business as the authority in your industry. You then use various sales channels to convert prospects into leads, and further convert them into customers. Inbound marketing softwares makes it easy for you to track and measure everything related to inbound activities so that you can continually improve your efforts.

Hubspot

HubSpot’s powerful tools make it easy to create blog posts, landing pages, email newsletters, social media messages, and much more. The software automatically tracks your website visitors so you can see who they are and what they do online. This allows you to retarget them with relevant ads or content so they’ll come back to your site again or sign up for your email newsletter list.

Marketo

Marketo lets you easily create personalized email communications using templates and segmentation rules. This allows you to send targeted emails based on what stage a lead is in your sales funnel. You can keep track of all your leads, including their status and contact information. Marketo also helps you nurture leads until they're ready to buy, while providing sales teams with access to real-time data so they can make informed decisions when they're on the phone or in meetings with potential customers.

Jumplead

With Jumplead, you can create landing pages and campaigns, manage your email database, track leads and much more. You can also integrate with other tools like Hubspot and Salesforce to create an all-in-one solution for your business.

Jumplead has been around since 2010, so it’s no surprise that the service is easy to use and packed with features. It’s also widely used — over 10,000 businesses use Jumplead across industries including finance, education, technology, law and more.

SEMRush

Semrush is a powerful SEO tool that helps you find your competitors' backlinks, keywords, and more. You can use their service for a variety of purposes, from keyword research to competitor analysis to keyword tracking. The tool allows you to track your website’s performance and see if there are any improvements that need to be made. It gives you access to data on over 1 million domains and 80 million keywords. It tracks any number of keywords and gives you detailed information on competitors as well as your own sites. This provides you with a competitive edge over your competitors.

Pardot

Pardot is a Salesforce Marketing Cloud that competes with Hubspot and Marketo. Pardot is known for its powerful automation tools, advanced email marketing capabilities, and integrations with other popular Salesforce products. It also offers a robust set of tools to manage website visitors and leads in real time.

Pardot users can create landing pages, forms and webinars without coding. Pardot also provides a number of integrations with other CRM systems such as Salesforce and HubSpot.

Conclusion

Ultimately, inbound marketing is about creating a sustainable, consistent lead machine that utilizes both inbound and outbound initiatives to put your business at the forefront of your target consumer's mind. As we've shown here, these are very real goals that can be accomplished through strategic planning, clear communication objectives, top notch content creation and distribution, and consistent measurement. Of course, practice makes perfect. So as with any campaign that you set out to execute, it's important to do your research and tie each initiative back to its measurable outcome. By keeping them in mind, you will be well on your way to becoming an inbound marketing expert.