What is Inbound Marketing?

Do you know the Inbound marketing? We explain to you what it is and why it is essential for companies.

Inbound marketing is a methodology people-centered that exists as an opposition to Outbound Marketing. The principle of Inbound is to attract your potential customers. Thus, while Outbound is based on pushing them to buy (Push), Inbound takes care of the opposite (Pull). To do this, it is necessary, first of all, to define the Buyer Persona to whom you are addressing, and then understand what it needs and offer it useful and valuable tools.

The term was defined in 2005 by the CEO and co-founder of Hubspot, Brian Halligan, and has been trending ever since in the marketing world. The main benefit of the method is that it generates customer trust in the brand, and the ground is gradually being paved to achieve the ultimate goal: to be a loyal customer and, perhaps, a brand ambassador in the future.

However, several years earlier, Bill Gates had presented to the world his article entitled with the famous phrase Content is King, in 1996.

How Does Inbound Marketing Work?

As we mentioned before, Inbound Marketing is a method, not a technique, that uses different tools to achieve its objective. It is essential to achieve Position yourself in search engines to be able to increase traffic to a website or blog, or to have more notoriety or improve the brand image.

4 Basic Steps of Inbound Marketing

According to Hubspot, the 4 basic steps of Inbound Marketing are:

1- Attract

To become well positioned, it is necessary to generate high-value content for the user, who is your target audience. We left out the direct channel (users who search directly for a specific name because they already know you).

2- Convert

In this second phase we will try to generate Leads and, for this, we need users who visit our website to leave their contact details to create a database in retrospect. La Strategy to follow consists of taking the user to a landing page where you can download content from a higher level on the condition that you provide us with your personal data in a form.

3- Close

The next phase of the process is to educate the contacts we have made before. This step is called Lead nurturing, in other words, it's about offering you content of interest. For example, personalized emails, preparing them to be open to a purchase of our product, accompanying them in the process until they are customers.

4- Delight

Finally, once we know better what the customer is like, we can offer them information, even more specific to their interests, improving their experience or even giving them purchasing advantages not only with the objective of building customer loyalty but also so that they can become brand ambassador.

Growing Trend in B2B

According to the study published by Content Marketing B2B Content Marketing Institute: 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends, 88% of B2B companies already use content marketing. In addition, 93% publish on social networks, with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube being the most used (in this order).

A real success story is that of Buffer, which has generated three different blogs: one of them called Buffer Open, focused on giving tips on productivity, transparency and a culture of well-being at work. It is intended for companies and, in its articles, it deals with issues that interest businessmen, but always talking about their brand. The posts are very elaborate, include many different formats and provide original content.

If you are thinking of applying the Inbound marketing method in your company, contact our marketing and digital strategy services to define a personalized strategy.

How can we help you?

If you need more information, do not hesitate to contact us.