What drives you to buy a product? If we look back at the evolution of marketing, we’ll see a pattern of continuous transformation. In the past, marketers tried to sell their products by reaching out to potential customers. They do this by sending them calls, spamming them with email, and filling out every second of tv commercial airtime.
But gone are the days of those types of marketing. In the digital era, the marketing industry was able to thrive through various mediums of promotion, creation, and selling of products and services. One of which is inbound marketing.
The term inbound marketing is actually an umbrella term that encompasses many marketing strategies. Basically, it is a collection of marketing efforts integrated to achieve a single goal.
In an inbound marketing strategy, you don’t search for customers. Customers search for you. So it is extremely vital to understand how your target customer thinks before setting out a plan.
In this blog, you’ll learn what inbound marketing is, how it works, and how it can be useful for you as an online entrepreneur. You’ll also discover tips on how you can create a website dedicated to inbound marketing and produce another stream of income.
What is Inbound Marketing
What is inbound marketing, and why do you need it? Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy and business methodology that is geared towards a potential market without sending them unnecessary advertisements. From your buyers’ perspective, this means that they won’t receive unsolicited targeted ads from you unless they expressed otherwise.
As a comparison, traditional marketing techniques often rely on expensive, highly-produced commercials, advertisement billboards, and banners. But no one these days likes them anymore. The current trend in marketing involves a conscious action from the buyer’s journey to reach a specific product. Don’t know what a buyer’s journey is? We’ll get into that later.
Why is Inbound Marketing Important
Inbound marketing is a lot less aggressive and definitely more controllable than any other kind of marketing. Normally, brands would shove their new releases to you, and oftentimes, their techniques feel very invasive. If you’re in the process of marketing a product, you don’t want your costumers to feel this way.
Just by analyzing different examples of inbound marketing, we can get an idea of the various benefits you can derive from this method. Here are some benefits that make inbound marketing important for your business:
- Builds Credibility and Trust - The likelihood of a successful purchase is higher when a customer associates trust with your brand and company. Think about this: which exudes credibility and trust more? High-quality promotional content or invasive advertisements? Customers will trust you more if you give them content tailored to their tastes.
- Less Costly - Inbound Marketing is undeniably more affordable compared to other marketing techniques. Setting up an inbound marketing campaign will cost you less money than a heavily produced commercial. And TV airtime isn’t cheap either.
- Drives Online Traffic - As a business with an online presence, your authority over other sites depends on the volume and quality of traffic you receive. High-quality traffic is necessary because you want people to be invested in what you’ll offer.
How to Make an Inbound Marketing Strategy
It takes more than inbound marketing tips to make a comprehensive strategy. Despite being a powerful endeavor on its own, many still fail with their strategies due to poor planning and organization. So how can you make a good inbound marketing strategy that sells? It’s all about the buyer’s journey.
The buyer’s journey refers to a set of actions that a customer takes before he or she purchases a product. It involves three major phases: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
- Awareness: Recognition of Pain Points
This is the phase where your customer realizes that they have a specific problem that needs a solution. These specific problems are their pain points, and these would define the way you’d tailor each content for them.
Awareness is the stage where they’ll realize that they need something to fill their need. For example, a customer may see that he has pests in his home. Now he is aware of that problem, and he knows that he must do something to solve it. This leads to the second stage, consideration.
- Consideration: Analyzing of Options
After realizing the problem, a person would normally conduct an immediate web search. But knowing how vast the online space is and the millions of results that would come up, deciding which link to click can be a tough choice.
This is the consideration stage where a customer begins to select various options and analyze the pros and cons of each. For example, a customer may be comparing two different brands of pesticides according to price, availability, effectiveness, and use of use.
- Decision: Selecting the Best Choice
A customer ends the buyer’s journey with a decision. This happens the moment a buyer finally clicks on that Buy Now button of a product. The decision seals the source of the problem and gives the ultimate customer satisfaction.
Creating a Page for Inbound Marketing
Building an inbound marketing campaign wouldn’t be possible without an online page to launch it. Creating an inbound marketing content strategy is vital, but a great webpage builder shouldn’t be overlooked.
Fortunately, there’s Strikingly, a free website builder that offers a wide set of tools, features, and functions to help bring success to your inbound marketing efforts.
Here are some tips to help you create a page for your inbound marketing:
Produce Compelling Content
The success of your inbound marketing efforts relies on the quality of the content you produce for your target market. When we talk about content, we’re talking about content in various formats and platforms. You have multimedia content such as videos, images, and audio. You can also do inbound marketing social media which focuses on social media channels.
Image taken from Strikingly product
Another way to produce content is to write blogs. The great thing about blogging is that you can highly personalize the content. Not to mention, it is also one of the best ways to integrate SEO practices, which we’ll get to later.
To create an inbound marketing strategy centered on blogs, you can use Strikingly blogging features. You’ll get various features with their blog editor, including the ability to change the style and background of the blog. You can also add additional resources such as images and links.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Effective SEO is what drives potential customers to your website. To put it simply, if a customer types in a query and it matches a keyword you have on your content, there is a high chance that the customer will see it on their main results page.
Image taken from Strikingly product
SEO is all about keyword research and keyword density. You need to match a query with a keyword and produce content related to it. Just be careful not to put too many keywords into your content. This wouldn't be SEO-friendly.
With Strikingly, you'll have an SEO checklist integrated under your promotions. As you can see in the image above, you can tick off the box once you've accomplished each action.
You can also see on the image that some features are reserved for pro Strikingly users only. Upgrade your account to unlock these SEO features and more exclusive tools. This enables you to fully optimize your content.
Send Newsletters
Newsletters are a fantastic way to conduct inbound marketing towards customers who are already subscribed to your services. You can add your emailing list to your Strikingly website, add custom messages, and manage sharing options.
Image taken from Strikingly product
You can prompt customers to sign up for your newsletter through pop-ups. These pop-ups are usually placed on landing pages. Add a Call to Action or CTA to make sure that your customers know what they should do.
Image taken from Strikingly product
Pop-ups are also a great way to make announcements. Why do you need announcements? Maybe you're launching a new product, going on sale, or offering discounts for certain buyers. All these need announcements.
Announcements also keep your loyal buyers informed of what's new. For potential customers, it's a way of getting to know what's in store for them.
Strikingly offers pop-up features under their promotions menu. Utilizing this allows your inbound marketing strategies to get to more people.
To sum it up, inbound marketing is a marketing technique where buyers get to you rather than the other way around. It's important because it drives traffic to your site, it's less costly, and it builds credibility and trust.
You must follow the buyer's journey to create an inbound marketing strategy. There are three phases in this journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
Finally, after learning all the essentials of inbound marketing, you need a website builder like Strikingly to create your inbound marketing page. Strikingly offers features such as content creation, SEO checklist, audience or newsletter lists, and pop-ups.
Inbound marketing is now the best technique to use to market your products. What are you waiting for? Head on to Strikingly today to unleash your product's potential through inbound marketing.
