Most of today’s businesses go for digital playbooks that attract more customers and offer valuable content online. In the country, more companies are leaning towards the best inbound marketing strategies to draw more people to brands.
Some might say that the methodologies of inbound marketing, in a way, go against the tenets of traditional marketing in the Philippines. Despite how you view it, inbound marketing strategies are winning more consumers. How it creates today’s foundation for better customer relationships shows us that consumer thinking continues to evolve. Marketers should also have the right smarts to capitalize on the changes.
Thanks to how the United States-based marketing solutions developer HubSpot came up with the science behind inbound marketing, more businesses are discovering new ways to keep quality customers on their rosters.
However, there are different inbound marketing tools, elements, and strategies to consider before applying them for different business goals. For businesses looking to amplify their digital marketing efforts, knowing the best inbound marketing strategies that will work can offer so many benefits while cutting down on their marketing budgets.
Let’s look into all of those factors to paint a clearer picture of what your business can get out of them.
What is Inbound Marketing, and How Did It Evolve?
In 2005, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan came up with a revolutionary concept to optimize brands’ reach and attract customers online. During the time, HubSpot was already synonymous with developing marketing strategies that didn’t resort to disruptive outbound approaches.
However, the best inbound marketing strategies didn’t get the traction they deserved until the better part of 2012. Yet marketers were slowly learning the ropes of attracting, engaging, and delighting as early as the first decade of the new millennium.
Before the best inbound marketing methodologies were even created, search engine optimization was already being practiced since 1997. Pay-per-click ads were also becoming prominent in 2000. Consumers began seeing value in mailers and content that they see online. SEO later became a massive part of the best strategies for inbound marketing, and more businesses started to take notice. SEO, along with other factors that help shape better customer experiences, eventually became the force that inbound marketing is today.
By applying strategic inbound marketing methods, target audiences become drawn to brands that take long-term customer relationships more seriously. Brands became keener in addressing customer pain points and developed shareable content in different inbound marketing formats and platforms. Soon, the best inbound marketing strategies became processes that various consumer types found beneficial throughout the buying cycle.
The HubSpot Flywheel
Inbound marketing strategies continue to help brands target their audiences in three specific strategic approaches: attract, engage, and delight. HubSpot introduced its Flywheel concept for marketers to better understand how inbound marketing works towards growth.
Inbound marketing elements within the Flywheel include:
- Content management and search engine optimization;
- Marketing sales alignments;
- Channels and platforms; and,
- Inbound marketing tools and technologies.
In terms of content, formats that work best to attract include ads, blogs, videos, and social media. When engaging more customers, you can focus on email marketing strategies, lead generation tools, and automating your marketing strategies. When automating, focus on categorizing your customers according to their journey on the Flywheel.
Lastly, consider using inbound marketing tools that give you attribution reports, appropriate email marketing content, and marketing automation feature when performing strategies to delight your customers. These tools will help you align your sales and service teams to come up with appropriate and memorable content that your customers prefer.
When you offer them content that they might consider intrusive, they might only foil all your Flywheel efforts.
To better understand how each inbound marketing strategy works, here’s a rundown of things to consider per stage of the Flywheel journey.
Attract
One of the best inbound marketing strategies a business should focus on involves knowing where to reach and attract quality audiences. Based on recent studies, 90 percent of online consumers are still unsure about making a purchase upon completing an online search.
Inbound marketing attraction strategies are different from how outbound marketing attracts online traffic to landing pages and websites. Inbound marketing elements that intend to attract customers have higher chances of persuading them to buy products, and here’s why.
Utilizing inbound marketing tools that help you research your target audiences’ online habits and platform preferences gives additional helpful insights. From developing content to your buyer personas to establishing deeper relationships, inbound marketing strategies for attraction can spark your Flywheel into action.
As you gather more information about your various buyer personas, you can tweak what you offer via blogs and social media. Push your content further with efficient SEO strategies to reach more people. Use keywords and terms that they frequently enter on search bars so you can humanize the way you connect with them.
Incorporate these keywords with the content you create to build brand awareness and reach more targets. Of course, it goes without saying that you should review and assess the reports that come in in terms of content performance. This way, you can tweak your content into something that strikes a chord with your audiences more efficiently.
Offering them helpful guides and product FAQs to come up with intelligent purchasing decisions can help give your content more traction. When your target audiences find more value from your brand, they become more open to taking the next step in their Flywheel journey, which is to engage.
Engage
One benefit that both brands and consumers get from the best inbound marketing strategies out there is how it aligns the relationships based on behavior and psychology. HubSpot’s brand of inbound marketing reinforces this fact by enriching the two-way communication between brands and consumers.
When focusing on your inbound marketing strategies to engage, always bear in mind that the main objective is to create relationships for the long term. Buyers don’t want to be left out once they buy a product. Instead, they want to be a part of your brand’s growth by offering feedback. In fact, 29 percent prefer to talk to sales agents rather than do an online search to learn more about a product.
Using the right inbound marketing tools for social listening will help you determine a consensus of your target audiences’ most pressing needs. You can then provide them with more in-depth information, such as personalized troubleshooting via inbound calls or proper community management. You can achieve better brand loyalty by developing specific content for specific audiences. HubSpot offers several tools to help you with this task.
Remember, inbound marketing strategies for engagement goes beyond just showcasing your product. It should be dynamic and attentive when it comes to consumer pain points. HubSpot’s arsenal of inbound marketing tools offers automation and customer relationship management. These tools are practical in providing your customers with the value that they expect from your brand, which takes us to the next phase of the Flywheel.
Delight
Offering thoughtful content to your engaged customers assures them that you keep them in mind. Buyers expect to be supported and satisfied. If you go to great lengths in providing them with their needs and wants, the more you can keep the buying cycle going.
Inbound marketing strategies to delight can foster long-lasting customer relationships via continuous information delivery and two-way dialogue. After drawing them in and establishing communication, the last step is to convince them that they trust a credible brand.
Again, the content you’ll have to develop to delight your customers differ in this stage. Around 50 percent of buyers are more open to talking to brand representatives once they know they are authoritative within the niche market. So, provide them with content that establishes your trustworthiness and credibility but in a non-intrusive manner. You can accomplish this by using inbound marketing tools that help you generate the appropriate content for your various Flywheel stages like GatherContent.
While you’re at it, develop content for various formats your loyal customers can share online. However, be thoughtful on how you provide content to delight. By this stage of their Flywheel journey, customers will more likely expect content focused on assistance, support, or offers that can be of more value to them.
Finally, schedule each posting properly so that customers find them sensical rather than a ploy to oversell.
Why Inbound Marketing Strategies are Here to Stay
Building brand trust is complicated and complex, but with the right inbound marketing strategies, your Flywheel efforts can continuously flourish. Your customer relationships will strengthen and can do well for your brand reputation and online visibility.
Utilizing the right tools to attract, engage, and delight your customers, will constantly improve your strategies for better-assured growth. Perhaps, the best benefit businesses get from the best inbound marketing strategies is how it churns up more loyal customers—customers that are excited about every content released and become brand advocates by heart. The best thing about inbound marketing strategies is that they work for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) approaches and can offer win-win results each time.
The key is knowing what matters to your audiences, which stage they are in the buying process, and being genuinely concerned about what they need. The moment you achieve all of this, the better you can expect to reach more customers who’ll be willing to stay with your brand.
