What Is Inbound Marketing? 10 Things You Should Know

Inbound marketing has many different parts to it that can help your customer base. Inbound marketing is a business fundamental based around helping people. Although that might sound a little cheesy at first, inbound marketing really does help the approach you could be taking in doing business with your customers. At Going Clear Interactive, a Boston Inbound Marketing Agency, we can help you create, implement, and optimize a full inbound strategy to bring you the best leads possible.

1. Examples of Inbound Marketing

There are so many different types of inbound marketing. The number of platforms on the world wide web are endless, as well. From blogs to social media websites to SEO (search engine optimization) website content, the possibilities go on and on. 

Our Boston Inbound Marketing Agency, GoingClear, focuses on making sure we pick the right drawing boards for your company’s goals. Inbound marketing focuses on connecting and engaging with your audience through different sites organically. Let’s say you have a blog on your website, but it needs a little TLC. With efforts working towards enhancing that blog and all the blog posts within it, the content will speak for itself. Your customers will love reading about a service or product that grabs their attention in a way that other types of marketing effort cannot. 

Social media campaigns through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for example, can also enhance your company or business. Depending on your customers and audience types, different social platforms might be more beneficial than others. For example, if you are selling motorcycles compared to showing off your insurance agency benefits, Instagram might be better for you. Instagram focuses solely around pictures and videos, where as Facebook is more complex in reaching an audience and writing more content based around your products or services.

SEO is one of the main types of inbound marketing. Through search engine optimized content, you are able to reach as big an audience as your text efforts allow you. SEO isn’t all about how much content you have either (although that does help). It’s about the details and quality you put into it. At our Boston Inbound Marketing Agency, GoingClear has specialists that can write exceptional SEO pieces for your services or products. We pick the right keywords to focus around, as well as creating new content and optimizing your current content to bring in more qualified leads. To learn more about our SEO services, you can follow us to our SEO service page.

2. Creating Relationships

Inbound marketing helps your company in a very human way. As a Boston Inbound Marketing Agency, we take pride in creating meaningful relationships with anyone your company could benefit from – strangers, prospects, or your current customers. This means meeting people on their own terms and interacting with them using sites, platforms, networks, or any online program that they might value most.

Our Boston Inbound Marketing Agency is also very confident in not just creating relationships, but maintaining them.  No company wants a client to leave after one interaction with your company. That’s why it is vital to make sure you build trust from the first exchange with a customer. 

Building a customer base is also a specialty of ours. If your company or business is brand new and you need to distinguish your customer base, our Boston Inbound Marketing Agency can help. We don’t make short term decisions that can sacrifice long term relationships. Building that customer base is a huge part of inbound marketing. 

3. Draw People In

After all, the name, inbound, speaks for itself. Draw people in through inbound marketing. This strategy and its efforts is more of a mentality than it is business-related. When you get inside your audiences heads and their thoughts, you can tailor your content to match their intent. Inbound marketing is kind of like a way of understanding why your customers buy your products or services. For example, if you go to a website and read something that aligns perfectly with what you’re thinking, you are going to say engaged and start to trust the brand little by little. 

Remember, customers want to be educated, not sold to. Inbound marketing tactics can deliver the knowledge and information your prospects or already-existing customer base might need to help them make a smart, well-informed decision. This will definitely draw in a bigger amount of customers than other marketing techniques.

4. Customer-Centric

Since inbound marketing is more customer-centric, it’s vital that the approach you take to doing business with your buyers is a positive experience that helps build a relationship with them. 

When you build a strong website and have the right content on it, you will attract the right audience, not just any audience. This is another huge aspect of inbound marketing – attracting the people who are more likely to become a lead and a happy customer for life. You can make sure you have the right people by creating buyer personas. These will help you along the way to becoming a customer-centric business.

5. Empowering Prospects

Inbound marketing guides you in such a way where you are able to empower your prospects and customers rather than forcing them to engage with you through other types of marketing. Through our Boston Inbound Marketing Agency, we create an experience that will make your audience feel like they have value. It’s important to make them feel valued rather than just throwing information in their face that doesn’t make them feel like they have a purpose with your company. When you empower your prospects, you are able to attract them to your services or products in such a way that your competition can not.

6. Grow Your Company

Inbound marketing is a great way to market, a great way to sell your service or product, and a great way to help your customers. When the quality content that revolves around inbound marketing is good for your customer, it is also, in turn, good for your business. This can help you grow in the long term realm of things compared to the short term. 

Inbound marketing also helps you let you share your knowledge with the world. You can build awareness fast through inbound marketing efforts, which in turn, builds trust with your target audience. When you share your knowledge with prospects and clients instead of forcing them with interruptive experiences, you empower them. This can lead to a customer base for life. To grow your business through inbound marketing, you need to think like your buyer thinks. This also means aligning with their research and final purchase. 

7. Create the Best Experience

You can have the best product or service in the market, but buyers still might not pick you. It is all about how you market your business or company. When your marketing efforts and branding align with how your buyers perceive you, then you can start creating the best buying experience for them. 

With inbound marketing, you can use a strategy that involves a model called a flywheel. You might be used to hearing, or even utilizing, the marketing funnel. Well, the flywheel is a better model to follow when it comes to inbound marketing. What this includes is attracting, engaging, and delighting your prospects and customers. You can’t do all three with other forms of traditional marketing. Inbound marketing allows you the time you need to complete this flywheel and turn prospects into new customers into customers for life. 

This is a great business model for startup companies as well as businesses that have been around forever. The more effort you put into the wheel, the faster it spins. What this means is basically you can keep referring to these stages to see success and create a great experience along the way for buyers. 

Inbound marketing is all about having a better business model than the next company. Every company has competition, but you see the one that puts the most effort into their brand has the better outcome. Look at computer brands, shoe companies, cell phone companies, car services. There is always one brand that will come to your mind for each. Why is that? Are their marketing efforts different than the others? Do they value their buyers more than the others? 

When you think about these questions, you can start to put yourself in their shoes. By using an inbound marketing strategy compared to other, more traditional types of marketing, you can really get ahead of the game. By leveraging the content your buyers want to see, you can attract them, engage with them, and delight them – more stages included within the inbound marketing strategy. 

8. Opportunity to Help

When you start to implement inbound marketing, you really get the chance to educate your prospects and customers. When you get the opportunity to attract, engage, and delight your buyers, you can use this cycle as an ongoing process for your company. What’s better than making your buyer feel inspired about your business, too?

At the end of the day, inbound marketing gives you more wiggle room for educational information and passionate content that can really draw in a customer for life. After all, your customers and prospects don’t want to be sold to, but rather educated and informed about your service or product. Compared to other, more traditional forms of marketing, inbound doesn’t have certain limits that can scare away customers or leave them hanging. Inbound marketing allows you the opportunity to help.

9. Your Company’s Purpose

By figuring out your company’s purpose and rallying your teams and departments around it, you can have a beacon to guide your inbound strategy methods and every other initiative you take on. 

When you list out the pros and cons of your business and what each individual employee brings to the table (also both good and bad), you can start to map out where your company is headed. Once you get a good grip on the base of your company, you can start to map out more details.

Inbound marketing is all written in the details.

For inbound marketing, it’s important that you know your company’s purpose. Without a direction, your prospects and average buyers will be just as confused as you and your company are internally. 

Customers also like to have faith in the company that they are about to buy a service or purchase a product from. This is when you have to make sure your company knows why it sells what it sells, and why it does what it does.

10. Consistency

Inbound marketing is all about consistency within your brand. When you have consistent messaging and content at the core of your website, SEO content, campaigns, or blogs, you can start to build trust with your customers. Our Boston Inbound Marketing Agency makes sure to align all our inbound marketing efforts with consistency.

Your team members should also be consistent. For example, if a customer asks a question to people on your internal team, they should all be able to give the same answer. This ensures your customer or prospect that the information you are feeding them is accurate and holistic. It can also help build confidence internally as well as externally.