I is for inbound marketing

Your business’ balanced diet

Our Business Boosters are built around good business nutrition, and if anything brings the value of this to life, it’s the methodology of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing helps your business grow by building meaningful relationships with both your prospects and your customers. Instead of firing adverts at them, you find out what makes them tick, so you can to speak to them.

Think of it as the ultimate strategy for a healthy business. Being healthier is not an overnight fix – instead you would focus on cooking quality meals, exercising well and getting a good night’s sleep. In the same way, inbound marketing nourishes your business through attracting, engaging with and then delighting your audience.

In other words, you’re creating wholesome content that has absolutely nothing to do with the instant gratification of a fast food burger and chips. This is about high quality communications that are relevant and informative. It’s a longer, slower, more powerful process of driving sales and increasing revenue by building long-term customer relationships.

And there lies its power – because by not blatantly focusing on a die-hard sell, you’re actually promoting sales. By putting the time and effort into creating quality content, for your prospects and/or customers, you’re giving your business the best kind of promotion possible. Win win. So let’s take a look at how the component parts of inbound marketing feed into each other.

Attracting – aka a balanced diet

Attracting your audience with good content is like a healthy, varied diet. You can’t just go hell-for-leather for one type of content – like living on juice drinks, that isn’t going to sustain you long-term.

Firstly, you need to build a picture of what your audience actually look like, before you target them. Spend time scrutinising your prospects and customers to get under their skin. Create personas, so when it comes to developing your content plan, you clearly know who it will resonate with.

Secondly, think of your customers as people, not consumers. People who may have sleepless nights worrying about demonstrating their department’s value to the business, but who also adore their garden, kids or pets. You want to create a variety of content that empowers them to do their job better, but that also boosts them and speaks to them as humans.

So serve up the content you create in a balanced way. Make your landing page your slow-release carbs, your blogs a regular dose of protein, your email marketing a serving of leafy greens, and your social content a sprinkling of colourful fruit. Then focus on optimising your content with SEO. Tie in keywords related to your product/service, as well as the challenges these solve for potential customers – so you’re nicely relevant.

All of this comes together to target the right people for your business, with the right content.

Engagement – aka building healthy habits

In B2B land, business decision-makers are often interpreted as being a tad… one-dimensional. Apparently they’re not juggling work with life – getting their kids ready for school, cursing their commute and worrying about the fact the cat’s eaten something they shouldn’t have. They’re polishing off a whitepaper on conversion rates before breakfast, optimising their go-to-marketing strategy during the lunch hour and attending a webinar on the state of marketing in today’s economic environment after they’ve put the kids to bed.

You and I both know that no-one is like that. No person ever works in a vacuum, which is why engagement is so important. Engaging content is built around a longer-term relationship, not just a quick fix. Think of it like forming sustainable healthy habits – good quality food, meal prepping, regular exercise, a spot of mindfulness.

So when you create content, consider the value your product/service brings to your audience. What does it do to make things easier for them? It doesn’t need to be transformational, but by serving up content that’s built around your customers’ needs, it becomes useful – the sort of stuff people may come back to, or learn something from. It also sets you up as a thought leader, rather than an entity that’s just trying to sell things.

The bonus of doing this well is that you’re building a long-lasting relationship with your audience. While it may seem a bit of a drag in today’s “I want it here, now” society, there’s a lot to be said for the slow-burn, the steady build-up of trust, the focus on doing things well and properly (in fact, we talk about this a lot in our blog: F is for Full Funnel and Growth Marketing).

Delight your audience – aka set up your health advocates

When a health plan works, you feel energised and confident – and likely to recommend it to others. Similarly, inbound strategies that delight your audience mean they’re satisfied and engaged – and thanks to their positive experience with your brand, they become natural promoters of it.

In short, all that groundwork is paying off! Your useful and enriching (maybe sometimes entertaining) content has helped customers connect with and value your brand. The formats your content appears in makes it feel varied and fresh, and you’re building a long-term relationship that doesn’t feel one-sided and like a continuous sales push.

Don’t stop now, as those engaged customers are a gold-mine of information that will help you shape further comms. Customer feedback and surveys give you real, human feedback, while scrutinising your campaign metrics can help you see which content is getting engagement.

And finally? Treat your brand advocates like the kings and queens they are. Maybe develop loyalty programmes and reward schemes to show them how much they mean to you, which in turn will mean they will keep spreading the word.

Beware a crash diet

If inbound marketing is about creating content that draws people in, then outbound is all about pushing your message out – in the form of ads, cold calls and cold emails. It’s effective in its ability to disrupt, however, it shouldn’t be relied on too much.

Because while inbound marketing is your healthy eating regime, an overreliance on outbound marketing is the equivalent of relying on a crash diet. It might get your business quick results, but it isn’t sustainable in the long term – mainly because customers and prospects don’t like getting disrupted that much.

Our recommendation? Balance the two to get the best results – boost your brand awareness with outbound marketing, while cultivating those strong customer connections with your inbound marketing strategy. That way, you’re serving your customers the good stuff they deserve.