We live in an evolving world, everything can change from one day to the other like we witnessed in 2020. Inbound Marketing is not the exception from change, every year there are new ways we can adapt our inbound marketing practices to an evolving market, that's why we came up with the Definitive guide to Inbound Marketing in 2021.

What is inbound Marketing?

According to HubSpot:

“Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.”

To get started here are the fundamental steps you have to follow to start doing inbound:

1. Attract your potential customers

Attracting potential customers is a key component to inbound marketing. In this step you will be creating amazing content that your potential customers will be interested in consuming. You can create your content via blogs, videos, infographics, etc…

Have in mind that the content you create has to generate real value to your consumers or else you will just be wasting their time. Content that creates real value is something that helps your customer solve a real problem they are facing. Once you have created this useful content you will have to optimise it for search engines like Google or Yahoo using an SEO strategy.

An SEO strategy basically uses keywords or key phrases that you know your ideal customer will look for on search engines, meaning that you will adapt your content or create content based on those keywords or key phrases. By doing this, you will rank your content and website on the first pages of search engines, because it's relevant to what your target audience is looking for.

Don’t forget that you are just giving them a taste of your knowledge so you have to keep them wanting more so they will contact you later. A recommendation is that you always place calls to action or contact forms in all your website pages so the visitors can make contact and convert from a prospect to a lead.

2. Engage your potential customers

The next step in the inbound marketing strategy is engaging with your potential customers once they have converted on your site. Converting on your site means that they consumed or are interested in your content and want to know more about your products or services. They have offered their contact information in exchange for more information via content or a phone call.

Once you get all the information from your visitors, they convert into leads and that's when the fun part begins. Remember that you are trying to build long term relationships with them so you have to find an effective way to communicate everything you need to say.

Nowadays there are a lot of communication channels our leads are using, feel free to ask them which way they prefer to be contacted. You can do this by creating multiple options on your contact forms. If you don’t know how to create such contact forms, you can sign up for a free Hubspot CRM account and create beautiful and effective contact forms within your website.

As we said before, there are a lot of tools you can use to engage with your leads, some of the most popular ones are:

• 1. Email
• 2. Calling
• 3. Instant messaging

Have these options in mind when you let your leads choose the one that they prefer.

Also keep in mind that when you engage with your leads you have to be careful of avoiding product selling, instead of trying to look desperate to sell your product, be helpful and make sure you are selling them a solution to the problem they contacted you for.

3. Delight your customers

Since we are trying to create long term relationships with our customers you can’t just give them a bad customer experience on their buying journey or simply forget about them once they bought something from you. The right way to delight them is to keep nurturing them once they've become customers.

On a side note : if you want to know more about how to give your leads the best customer experience you can read THIS related blog post.

Delighting your customer means you provide means to always assist them or be helpful in any way you can. This can mean starting a conversation on a chatbot to see if your visitors need any kind of help while they are on your site or a survey about the experience they had while buying from you.

Other ways of delighting your customers can be sharing useful information like a newsletter with blogposts related to their interests. This tactic helps reinforce their dcisionalso help customer reduce the customer fear of having made a bad purchase decision while you reaffirm to them that it was the right choice.

Delight also comes from social media, if your customers follow you on social channels you can keep communicating with them in an organic way without being intrusive while you feed them your useful content. Every business has it's own way of communicating with their clients in order to delight them, find out which one is the right fit for yours and start using it!

The 3 previous steps are part of something that inbound marketers called the Flywheel

What is the Flywheel?

The theory is simple, instead of using the traditional marketing funnel where everything is linear, you switch it for the flywheel, where attract, engage and delight keep spinning constantly. The more you nurture you flywheel the more results you will get for your business.

Other ways of seeing it is that the flywheel uses momentum between all departments in your business to align all their strategies and avoid friction when it comes to handing customers to other departments.

Now it's your turn to start using inbound for your business! You have a general idea so now all you have to do is adapt it to your processes. If you feel like you still need help, or you have some questions, we'd be happy to give you a free 30 minute phone consult to help you get started.  Simply fill in the form below to book a meeting.