The marketing world has several different strategies and different complexities.

This is why many businesses seek professional digital marketing help. The majority of businesses spend $50,000 on digital marketing each year!

While seeking professional marketing help is useful, you should understand some basic strategies. One of the most effective strategies is inbound marketing.

What is inbound marketing and how does it help your business? Continue reading to understand this digital marketing strategy and how to use it for your business and for your customers.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

In the competitive online world, inbound marketing is what will set you aside from competitors.

Inbound marketing doesn’t only seek to throw your brand and your imagery out to the public. Inbound marketing focuses on the significance of your brand and how your company is the solution to your leads.

Inbound marketing achieves this by using a number of different strategies. This includes on-site and off-site content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, email marketing, influencer marketing, and branding.

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

When you start digging into inbound marketing, you’ll likely notice another term — outbound marketing. What’s the difference between the two?

When most people think of advertising, they’re actually thinking of outbound marketing.

Commercials, billboards, cold calls and ads are all examples of outbound marketing. The goal of outbound marketing is to push your business out there so the public recognizes your businesses and what you do.

What doesn’t outbound marketing do? It doesn’t provide an answer, which is where inbound marketing comes in.

The modern consumer isn’t easily influenced by ads. Instead, consumers are educated and make conscious decisions before supporting a brand. Inbound marketing provides the information customers need in order to trust your brand.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

In order to understand the way inbound marketing works, you should know the benefits it provides to both you and your customers. Here are a few reasons to invest in inbound marketing.

Counting money

It’s Affordable

Since inbound marketing encompasses so many digital marketing strategies, it must be expensive, right? In reality, it’s affordable compared to outbound marketing.

Think of some of the advertising costs. This includes the cost to create an ad, to display the ad on billboards, the cost of video production, the cost to create an advertisement for radio, and the list goes on.

While you pay for inbound marketing consistently (such as monthly content marketing payments, etc.) you’ll still end up spending less because you’re relying on quality information rather than fancy ads.

Fits the Modern Buyer

As mentioned previously, the modern consumer is driven by education. The internet provides a plethora of knowledge, right at the fingertips of consumers.

people on phones

They’re researching your brand, your products, your reviews, your competitors, and even some specific information such as materials used and who you outsource.

Inbound marketing not only provides the information they need but makes it convenient for the consumer.

You publish blogs on your website, customers can post testimonials on your social media pages, and your customers can receive any updates through email.

In addition, inbound marketing doesn’t use tactics that force customers into a sale. The information provided helps entice customers to support your brand. This helps create long-lasting customers.

Better ROI

All of these benefits mean you’ll receive more sales with less overhead expenses. But that’s not the only reason why inbound marketing generates a better ROI.

Inbound marketing utilizes tasks that help you track your sales funnel, as well as customer and sales data.

Viewing this information can help you determine where your money is going, where more or less money should go, and what is working and what isn’t.

This helps you be more conscious of your inbound marketing budgeting and finding a plan that works for your business.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

whiteboard strategy

Now that you know the inbound marketing benefits and have a better understanding of this strategy, it’s time to put inbound marketing to use!

There are two main ways to use inbound marketing — as a marketing-driven approach and as a sales-driven approach. You use three main points with both approaches: attract, engage, and delight. Here’s how to do this.

Marketing

Marketing doesn’t only engage your audience as a whole.

The right marketing strategy attracts the individual to your brand. Each customer is different. Since inbound marketing is versatile, you’re able to tap into each buyer to understand their buying methods.

When it comes to marketing to your audience, marketing places heavy emphasis on content.

You’ll use a combination of video, blogging, and social media content to attract an audience. To keep them engaged, offering an email newsletter will help them stay up-to-date with your brand.

From here, you have a better understanding of your customers.

You can use attribution reporting to understand your customers’ behaviors. From here, you can implement marketing automation to tailor your marketing strategy to each customer.

Sales

Instead of attracting new customers with force, you’re attracting new customers with information and interest. To generate more leads with inbound marketing, you need a sales-centered inbound marketing approach.

To attract customers, you need to communicate with them. Offer a great customer service strategy, such as chatbots and optimize your social media for customer service tactics.

From here, offer an email subscription where you can send deals and even personalized promotions.

Content also plays a role here. There are popular sales-driven video strategies, such as unboxing videos and how-tos.

From here, you can automate your marketing processes so everything moves faster and more efficiently, resulting in better customer responses and more sales.

Use Video in Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing uses a combination of education and interest to drive leads and sales. You can’t have a successful inbound marketing strategy without creating compelling content.

The type of content you should focus on is video content. We make it easy to share your videos. View more information about Dubb here.