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Learn how inbound marketing strategies can grow your business.
As a marketer, it's your goal to attract customers to your business… but that's often easier said than done.
Lead generation in marketing can be a tough hill to climb, but thankfully, having a solid inbound marketing strategy can help you drive company growth.
Here, we'll take a look at the key elements of an inbound marketing strategy and how you can use an inbound marketing campaign to attract customers from your niche market to your business.
Let's dig in.
Essential Elements of an Inbound Marketing Strategy
There are three components of an inbound marketing strategy: attract, engage, and delight. Each stage serves to allow your target market to understand your brand persona and learn more about what you have to offer.
- Attract: During this stage of inbound marketing, you're pulling your potential customers in by offering content that appeals to their needs and interests. It's smart to offer some content that features products and services that your brand offers– while also providing content that's strictly related to your potential customers' niche interests.
Take a look at this Silver Airlines campaign. Potential customers were attracted through geographical targeting, allowing them to feel a connection to the airline before they learned more about what they had to offer. Over the three-year course of the campaign, Silver Airlines experienced a 250% ROI.
- Engage: In the second step of an inbound marketing campaign, it's key to engage with the potential consumer. This can be passive–asking the consumer to sign up for personalized marketing information–or it can be active and involve actions like responding to comments on social media. Here, potential customers further get to understand a brand's persona, and can begin to entertain the idea of making a purchase. It's key to continue offering potential customers content–while continuing to educate them on what you offer.
- Delight: This stage occurs after customers have made a purchase and can serve to bring more potential customers into the inbound marketing funnel. Responding to reviews, providing excellent customer service, and sharing customers' social media posts can all contribute to the delight that a customer feels after they purchase your product and continue to interact with your brand.
The delight phase can prompt customers to share your brand with others, allowing potential new customers to already feel a sense of trust and familiarity as they begin to learn more about your organization.
If it's your first time thinking about incorporating inbound marketing strategies into your advertising plan, it's normal to feel overwhelmed about exactly how to implement this new approach. Check out our guide on How to Run an Inbound Marketing Campaign to learn more about the steps you need to take to get started.
How to Attract More Prospects with Inbound Marketing
Already running an inbound marketing campaign? Congrats: you're at the forefront of the latest in marketing trends, and it's not going unnoticed by your potential customers.
There's always room for improvement when it comes to inbound marketing and staying on top of how to attract the customers you want is smart to boost your campaign's effectiveness.
Main Strategies of Customer Attraction
If you're already working on an inbound marketing strategy to boost your business, congrats–you're on the right track. Inbound marketing is proven to have a higher return on investment than traditional outbound marketing strategies, so you can rest assured that you're moving in the right direction.
While inbound marketing is likely already serving you well, it's key that you continually improve your campaign so that you're able to create the content that keeps drawing your target market in.
Keep your customers coming back for more. Here’s how you do it:
- Social media engagement: Share customer stories that mention your product and tag them when you share. This helps customers know that they're important to your brand and can boost your brand to their friends and family.
- Get personal: Don't just create articles and blogs that align with your customer needs–develop your brand's persona so that it's a good fit for the people you want to attract. Check out this campaign developed to entice vacationers to Key West. Car culture is super stressful in Florida, and the campaign works to identify a pain point–driving everywhere–and showing how it can be solved.
- Invite customers to contribute: Reaching out to customers directly to ask them to contribute to your social media accounts boosts both your trust in the brand and helps others relate to what you're offering.
With inbound marketing, customers are making the choice to interact with your brand, rather than being hit with an onslaught of unwanted marketing.
When the customer is in control, they're more likely to see your brand as a viable, interesting option, rather than a social media annoyance. Check out our 30 Inbound Lead Tips and Tricks to keep potential customers coming back for more.
How to Attract Your Ideal Customers with Inbound Marketing
If inbound marketing is new to you and you're not sure where to start, you're not alone. Attracting strategies that can help bring your target market to your brand include:
- Social media content: Creating content that appeals to the needs of your target market, even if it's not exactly in line with the products and services your brand offers.
- Targeted ads: You'll need to research where and how your target market tends to hang out online so you can meet them where they're at. For example, if your target market tends to spend their time on TikTok, you could create the greatest inbound marketing campaign of all time on Facebook–but it wouldn't matter.
- Problem-solving content: When sharing stories about your product, don't just stick to the surface. Interviewing customers on how your product changed their lives for the better–and sharing that information as a part of your inbound marketing campaign–can help push potential customers to take the leap and try what you have to offer.
When you create inbound marketing content that appeals to your target market, you're building trust with your brand, and helping them to feel understood. This creates a sense that your product is the right fit for them, even if they're still in the process of learning about exactly what problem your product or service can solve.
Creating content that appeals to your target market can be tricky at first, and you'll need to keep an open mind as you delve into the data of what's drawing in your market–and what isn't. It's normal to go through a bit of a trial-and-error process as you learn more about inbound marketing, and it's ok to figure it out as you go
Why an Inbound Marketing Agency Makes Sense for Your Business
If you're interested in learning how an inbound marketing strategy can help your business move forward, it's smart to partner with an inbound marketing agency as you begin the process of moving forward with your campaign.
When you choose an inbound marketing agency, you're getting all the benefits of years of inbound experience–without having to go through the trial-and-error period on your own. Reach out to us today to request a consultation so we can help your business start to get the attention it deserves.
