What is inbound marketing?

Today life runs at a very fast pace. Much of this is due to the advancement of new technologies, which we are constantly learning about with the help of the Internet. If we talk about marketing in general, we can see how new techniques develop over time, so that many, today, are considered obsolete.

Printing brochures with the information, products and services of your business, calling on the phone or paying for advertisements in the newspaper are long gone. Now the aim is not to get closer to the customer, but rather the same customer is attracted to the products and services, and in this way establish relationships.

Inbound Marketing

The inbound marketing, which translates as, attraction marketing, is a method that combines marketing and advertising techniques, which are not invasive. It is intended to contact a client that is at the beginning of the purchase process of a certain product. From this point, you are accompanied throughout the process until you reach the final transaction.

In this way, touch points and brand awareness are maximized.

Throughout this process, appropriate content is created for each of the sales stages, in order to guarantee the purchase of products and services.

Source

The concept of inboud marketing, was coined in 2005 by Brian Halligan, CEO of a major company. He published a book on the subject himself together with Dharmesh Shah and David Meerman Scott in 2009, which ended up successfully pushing the concept forward.

The 5 pillars of inbound marketing

1. Ideal buyer: This strategy helps to understand the customer and makes it easier to find content that meets the customer's needs.
2. Content Marketing: After identifying the ideal customer, content is created to help you make your purchase decision.
3. Segmentation: the inbound marketing accompanies the customer throughout their purchase process, by creating valuable content. This content depends on your profile and the phase of the purchase where you are. The phases are: awareness, investigation, decision and action.
4. Marketing automation: This strategy consists of using software to perform specific tasks automatically. Thanks to this, it is possible to send the ideal messages, at the right time, to the ideal audience.
5. Analysis: the inbound marketing allows to analyze the actions developed and the response of the users for the simple fact of being a digital methodology.

The 4 phases of inbound marketing

This method is based on the following phases that correspond to the stages of the customer's purchase process:

1. Attraction or attract: Through social networks, SEO or events, it is possible to bring and direct a user to a web page with important information to understand and know its needs. This is accomplished through the use of marketing and advertising techniques; the most used is content marketing.
2. Conversion or convert: In this phase, the visits to the web pages are converted into records for the company's database. To achieve this, relevant and personalized content is provided to users. The user fills in a form with their data in exchange for downloading the material.
3. Education or educate yourself: In this phase, users receive in their email, useful information for each of the phases of their purchase process. To achieve this, companies make use of two marketing automation techniques: the lead scoring and the led nurturing.

The lead scoring It allows to know to what extent to know which users are close to making a purchase and in this way to discover and predict the position of potential buyers.

The lead nurturing allows you to email personalized content based on the user's behavior, profile and phase of the purchase cycle

1. Closure and completion: Inbound marketing not only aims to get final customers, but also focuses on offering useful information, keep customers satisfied, and take care of records who will never become customers, but are interested in the brand.