Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a methodology that is education-based rather than interruption-based. Its focus is on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. This, ultimately, drives profitable customer action. Similar to content marketing, inbound marketing is the overarching strategy of combining several web marketing disciplines (including content marketing) with integration tools, measurement, and lead generation.

We’re all familiar with interruption marketing; it comes in the form of TV commercials that interrupt your programming, phone calls that interrupt your family dinner, and pop-ups that interrupt your online browsing. Interruption marketing is expensive, annoying, and doesn’t earn you loyal customers. Inbound marketing, on the other hand – when done right – serves to attract, convert, close, and delight your desired audiences by delivering them relevant and personal content driven by their needs and on their timelines.

Inbound marketing relies heavily on knowing and understanding your buyer personas. Only when you know who your real clients are and understand their unique wants, needs, and problems can you provide solutions. You can then meet those needs with solutions offered through strategic, targeted content. You deliver this content in the form of websites, landing pages, blog posts, email campaigns, e-books, case studies, and even direct mail. Inbound marketing requires a great deal of research into the buyer's journey because its different stages require different content

Attract

During this phase, website optimization, blogging, and sharing content on social media are the main focuses. These content vehicles work to let people know you exist, share your unique message, and build the know–like–trust relationship.

Convert

Once you’ve attracted people to your website or blog, you can begin to influence them with relevant content. Your website has one goal: to capture a lead. To do so, your content should focus on solving your visitors' problems. To provide a solution, you must know their problems, which you discovered during the research phase prior to creating your content.

Once prospects arrive at your site, you need a conversion process with a strong call to action that encourages them to leave their email addresses. This is critical. Without this, you may never know what opportunities you’ve missed, and you’ll have wasted time and money in getting those visitors to your website.

Close

Once you’ve attracted people to your website and converted them into leads using quality, targeted content, your content focus turns to the close. The best and most important content tool available is email. According to HubSpot, email has a return on investment of 4300%. By sending prospects likable, lead-nurturing content via email, you can continue building the relationship and advance the sales cycle. You can optimize successful email campaigns to provide further value to your customers and help them do their jobs better.

Delight

With inbound marketing, your No. 1 priority is serving people. When you focus on serving your customer throughout each phase of the inbound methodology, you build trust. Building trust is core to delighting your customers and creating lasting relationships. Once you’ve established a client relationship built on trust, you can continue to market new products and services indefinitely.

At Axia Public Relations, we help clients build inbound marketing strategies to attract, convert, close, and delight customers. We do the hard work of researching your buyer personas and creating required content and other content vehicles to turn prospects into leads and close deals.

Give us a call today to discuss how we can help you get started with an inbound marketing strategy for your company.

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The Buyer's Journey

The inbound methodology covers each and every step taken, tool used, and life cycle stage traveled through on the road from stranger to customer. It empowers marketers to attract visitors, convert leads, close customers, and delight promoters. The new methodology acknowledges that inbound marketing doesn’t just happen. You do it – and you do it using tools and applications that help you create and deliver content that will appeal to precisely the right people (your buyer personas) in the right places (channels) at just the right times (life cycle stages).