What is Inbound Content Marketing, & Why Should You Care?

Most people believe that inbound marketing and content marketing are the same, but these terms aren’t interchangeable. While each marketing strategy is based on creating valuable content to sell your products or services, there are differences.

The Inbound content marketing strategy involves using:

• Blog posts
• Ebooks
• How-to guides
• Videos
• Email newsletter

The Inbound marketing strategy takes it a step further by using strategies from content marketing plus:

• Lead generation
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media
• Website design
• Email marketing

Responsify offers its customers its Inbound content marketing services to aid your business in becoming more visible in the life of your target audience. You will see how offering your potential customers help, even though they don’t want to make a purchase right now, will fuel your marketing and sales with qualified leads to increase sales in the future.

How Does Inbound Content Marketing Work?

The idea of inbound content marketing is to be present along your buyer’s journey so your company will be the first place they go when they need your products or services. The key to success is creating the right content at the right time to steer strangers toward becoming promoters of your brand.

Let’s review the four stages of the inbound content marketing strategy and examples of each.

Attract

Before you can begin to attract prospects, you have to determine the specific buyer persona you want to reach. The better you understand your potential customer’s main interests, questions, challenges, and objections, your inbound marketing strategy will be more efficient. Some of the most effective way to attract your buyer persona is:

• Blogging
• Getting on social media
• Using keywords efficiently
• Optimizing your website

Convert

Those strangers that you’ve drawn to your company now have the potential to become future customers. But to achieve this, you have to get their contact information. Unfortunately, as identity theft and fraud becomes more common, this task won’t be so easy.

The key to successfully converting visitors into leads involves providing something of value to your buyer persona so they willingly give you their contact details. Some of the most effective tools for exchanging information include:

• Call-to-Action (CTA’s) words or phrases
• Landing Pages

Close

No one enjoys those pesky emails that offer you every product imaginable. To make sure these new leads become customers, you have to use the right strategy combined with essential tools to focus on the customer’s needs. Some of these tools include:

• Marketing automation. Refers to the technology used by marketers to manage specific marketing processes and multifunctional marketing campaigns, through various channels, automatically. Although you may think it’s a bit impersonal, these automated processes actually focus on nurturing each lead by tailoring to each stage of the customer’s lifecycle.

• Closed-loop reporting. Refers to “closing the loop” between the marketing and sales teams. Combining the data collected from marketing through tools like marketing automation systems and the data collected by sales through tools like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will identify efforts that have the highest return on investment (ROI).

Delight

The key to increasing ROI isn’t accomplished just by creating new customers. The success of your business depends on continuing to find new customers and providing valuable, relevant content to existing customers. Show your current customers how much their opinion matters with these effective tools:

• Surveys
• Smart text
• Social monitoring

Inbound Marketing: More Than Just Blog Posts

Clearly, inbound marketing is more than just about blogs. It requires the effective use of multiple marketing and sales tools to attract strangers that fit your buyer persona. The reality is that one of the best ways to accomplish this is through blog posts. 

What makes them an effective tool? Anyone can write tons of information about random topics, but the right blog provides every potential customer with information they can use immediately. Of course, the topics must coincide with your product or service while still giving your customer something they need.

But the best inbound marketing strategy combines effective and valuable blog posts with:

• Videos
• Tutorials
• Infographics
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising
• Landing pages
• Social media marketing

The goal is to provide interactive opportunities that attract different types of people from your target audience.

The Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Inbound content marketing is becoming a vital part of the function of every business. As we shift to increased use of the internet, great content will contribute to the many benefits inbound marketing yields, including:

• Reduced costs. Inbound content marketing has proven to be more cost-effective because it attracts a client to you, which is half the job of creating loyal customers.
• Higher quality traffic. When you provide great content, potential customers create a solid bond to your company, which means they are more likely to be loyal customers.
• Educate your prospects. The content you’re providing allows you to educate visitors on how your service or product benefits them.
• Provides data and greater measurability. The tools used in inbound content marketing give your company the information they need to know what strategies are working and where you need to adjust.
• Marketing automation. Any part of your inbound marketing that’s automated will save you time and resources so you can focus on nurturing your leads and customers.

The Difference Between Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing

Does outbound marketing and inbound marketing accomplish the same goal? The bottom line is that both of these strategies are trying to create loyal customers.

We’ve discussed the various aspects of successful inbound content marketing strategies. The concentration is on promoting your business with great content in the form of blogs, search engine optimization, social media, and more. 

On the other hand, outbound marketing is referred to as interruption marketing. Traditional methods in this type of marketing include:

• Direct mail
• Cold calling
• Radio and television ads
• Telemarketing

Although outbound marketing has been successful, inbound content marketing has adapted to this technology-driven world by understanding the buyer’s journey.

Inbound Content Marketing Made Easy: Let Responsify Help

For your business to succeed, it’s imperative to refine and optimize your inbound marketing strategy. But, unfortunately, understanding how it works may be an obstacle to reaping the benefits of this strategy and creating loyal customers.

Responsify is here to help your business by providing expert customer-centered services to gain more traction and make a more significant impact. So contact us today, and let’s talk about your marketing challenges and goals.