What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on attracting customers to your business. Instead of going out and finding potential customers, you attract them to your site by creating helpful, interesting content that solves their problems and interests them in your company.

Today, many businesses use both inbound and outbound marketing strategies. However, inbound marketing has become the preferred method for many companies because it is more cost-effective and effective at generating leads.

In this blog, we look at what inbound marketing is, how to create an inbound marketing strategy, and examples to give you an idea of what works.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing focuses on creating valuable content and experiences tailored to the needs of a specific audience in order to build everlasting long-term relationships. The focus point of this strategy is that it provides solutions based on the needs of your customers.

Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

Both strategies are used to engage and convert leads. Here’s a look at the the differences between the two:

Inbound marketing

• Digital content is targeted and specific to audience
• Content includes blogs, ebooks, SEO, social media posts, webinars
• The main goal is to entertain or educate your audience
• Messaging in tailored and personalized
• Cost-effective approach

Outbound marketing

• Non-digital content is used to grab customer attention
• Content includes billboards, TV advertisements, direct mailers, media ads
• The main goal is to sell
• Messaging is catered to appeal to a broad audience
• Tends to be an expensive approach

Creating an Inbound Marketing Strategy

An inbound marketing methodology can be applied in three ways. Attracting, engaging and entertaining all have different content that will engage and convert your leads. Two of the most effective methods for your strategy will come from social media and email campaigns.

• Promote your content – It can take time for organic content to get views. Promoting your content on social media allows you to create targeted campaigns to a niche audience who are more likely to convert.
• Build a community – Channels such as Twitter and TikTok offer a great way to build a community on social media through real-time posts and eye-catching videos.
• Track performance and optimize – By using paid campaigns and analytics you can learn what ads are working and tweak those that are not performing. This could be image changes, content format or messaging used.

Develop or tweak your social media strategy to drive brand awareness and ROI if you don’t already have one in place.

Examples of Inbound Marketing

Here’s a look at some examples from other brands that you can gain inspiration from.

Patagonia

Patagonia has been using their brand to advocate for societal change and equality. They’re an outdoor clothing brand but have spent many years publicly showing their support for climate change and sustainability. They are able to promote this by sharing short stories, videos and other types of media.

Cisco 

Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software and other high-technology products and services. They have created a healthcare blog that covers a wide range of topics written by experts in the field. The purpose is to create relevant content that informs people about the healthcare industry while also informing them about Cisco and their hand in the healthcare field.

Final Thoughts

Inbound marketing is an essential marketing strategy that many people use today. It’s a great way to engage with your audience and build trust and offer value at the same time.