Attract, Engage, Delight:

In today's digital world, consumers are bombarded with advertising, with the average American being exposed to 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day, so it's easy to turn a blind eye to pop-ups, banners, digital billboards, and other types of ads. Inbound marketing works to draw prospects and consumers in with information that's relevant to their pain points and helps them to build a sense of trust in your company.

Inbound marketing provides your prospects and customers with the information they want, allowing them to build a connection with your brand. When prospects are able to get to know your brand before they make a purchase, it can be easier for them to take the next step.

When you use inbound marketing, whether on your website, on your blog or on social media, you boost brand awareness and build thought leadership, helping your customers to feel familiar and comfortable with what you have to offer. This type of marketing is especially effective for B2B brands that have a considered buying cycle. Inbound helps you inform your ideal prospects, so they can see how your solution solves their pain points. This also makes it easier to get in front of prospects who are more likely to make a purchase, as you're catering your content to an audience who mirrors attributes of your current customers.

You'll need to follow the buyer’s journey using the flywheel model: Attract, Engage, Delight. Inbound can help you to attract prospects, nurture leads into customers, delight customers and get referrals, turning the old funnel model into a flywheel. We’ll take a look at each step in the flywheel  in this section.

Instead, sales representatives must change their perspective from selling to helping in order to succeed in sales in the modern era. And the best approach to begin this process is to gain a thorough understanding of the buyer's profile and the route they travel to make a purchase: the buyer's journey.

A buyer's path to purchase is described by the buyer's journey. In other words, consumers don't suddenly decide to buy out of the blue. They follow a series of steps to learn about, consider, and decide whether to buy a new good or service.

Sales representatives can more effectively relate to and position their product or service for the consumer by recognizing the buyer's journey, the issues and challenges they encounter throughout that journey, and the influencing circumstances that affect their thinking. Now, let's probe a little deeper.

How does the inbound methodology fit into all of this?  We are so convinced that the flywheel model and inbound methodology work collaboratively together in ensuring business results that we use it ourselves.  The three stages of your flywheel when using the inbound methodology as a basis are attract, engage, and delight. You deliver a fantastic customer experience by using the right content and tactics during these three phases.

In the attract phase, you draw visitors in with helpful material and remove obstacles in the way of their attempts to learn more about your business. Gaining people's attention is crucial. Content marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, social selling, targeted paid advertising, and conversion rate optimization are some of the strategies you can use.

By letting customers communicate with you on their preferred timelines and channels throughout the engage phase, you make it simple for customers to browse and buy from you. Instead of just closing deals, concentrate on building connections. Personalization of websites and emails, database segmentation, marketing automation, lead nurturing, multichannel communication (chat, phone, messaging, email), sales automation, lead scoring, and programs that offer customers product trials are some of the elements at work.

Lastly, during the delight phase, you assist, encourage, and enable clients to realize their objectives. Always keep in mind that happy customers mean it was a success. Self-service (Knowledge base, chatbot), proactive customer service, multichannel availability (chat, message, phone, email), ticketing systems, automated onboarding, customer satisfaction surveys, and loyalty programs are among the strategies you can use.

Inbound marketing ensures that you aren't just attracting any prospects to your content–you're attracting the prospects who are most likely to engage with your brand and get on board with what you have to offer. While other types of marketing cast a wide net and hope to catch the eye of potential customers, inbound marketing works to give customers the information they already want, providing them with high-value experiences through your content.

Outbound marketing is what most people think of when discussing traditional advertising. Billboards, commercials, print advertising, and other types of advertising that are designed to catch the eye of the public at large are considered outbound marketing. With outbound marketing, brands work to catch the eye of anyone who ends up with the ad in front of them – which means outbound marketing ads are ignored by many. Unless a billboard is particularly eye-catching or a print ad is particularly provocative, most people don't notice what's being sold.

Inbound marketing is different. Since inbound marketing starts by attracting people who are more likely to engage with a company or purchase a product than the average person, the process creates the possibility of a better ROI from the start.

With inbound marketing, customers aren't getting advertisements, rather, they're getting valuable content that would be helpful to them, whether it came from a company or another source.

Inbound marketing doesn't take the place of outbound marketing. It's smart for companies to use a combination of both types of marketing to maximize growth. Creating targeted inbound marketing content can help to draw in customers who are most likely to engage with the company based on their demographic, while high-level, strategized outbound marketing can help promote brand awareness and trust by getting your name in front of new audiences.

An inbound marketing agency works with clients to help them align with their target prospects and create and distribute information that's most likely to attract, engage, and delight their audience, helping them to grow their customer base.

There are many different strategies when it comes to inbound marketing and working with an inbound marketing agency can help your company utilize the strategies most likely to promote growth, rather than going through an internal trial and error process.

When your company works with an inbound marketing agency, you'll be able to outsource the creation of buyer personas, content development, form creation, development of landing pages, creating thank you pages for customers, chatbots that can interact with prospects, and more.

Many agencies find that creating content is the toughest part of developing an inbound marketing strategy, especially if they aren't familiar with the niche interests of their target market outside of what the company has to offer. Working with an inbound marketing agency can make it easier to create the type of content that draws in your target market. Find out more in the article 7 Signs You Should Hire an Inbound Marketing Agency.

If you don't have a social media or marketing manager on staff, working with an inbound marketing agency can also help take content development and other strategic marketing decisions off of your employees' plates. One of the most important parts of an inbound marketing strategy is figuring out where your target market hangs out online. An inbound marketing agency stays on top of social media and other digital trends. The world of social media changes quickly, and it's key to meet your target prospects where they're at online.

It's important to note that it takes time for an inbound marketing campaign to get up and running, and you'll want to work closely with the agency you choose to get a clear timeline on what to expect. Your agency will also work with you to help you develop your inbound marketing goals, and can help you understand how the results you'll get will be different from the results of more traditional marketing campaigns that you've used in the past.

Types of inbound marketing content include:

• Blogs: Easy to update blogs are a simple way to constantly provide your audience with the content they're looking for. Whether you decide to produce blogs in-house or hire an inbound marketing agency, daily or weekly blog posts that are high-value can help your users both get to know your brand and keep them coming back to your website or social media platform(s). The Honest Company does a great job providing their target market–parents of young children–with the content they need.
• Videos: Offering your prospects video content that appeals to their interests and needs is a great way to help them get to know your brand. There's not necessarily a need to feature your products or services in videos, rather, use the opportunity to provide potential clients with the chance to get to know your brand's personality. Precision Nutrition's YouTube channel provides their prospective customers–people in the health and fitness industry, and those who are looking to improve their overall health–with valuable video content.
• Pillar pages: Pillar pages don't offer super in-depth content, rather, they cover topics that appeal to your target prospects with a broad scope, allowing them to get a general understanding of a topic. This can be a great way to show off your brand's communication style, drawing in potential customers by offering easy-to-understand information that provides them value. This pillar page from The Atlantic provides potential customers with a solid overview of the topic of population health without diving into content in such a deep way that makes it tough for users to understand.
• Guides and eBooks: Sometimes referred to as "freemium" content, free guides and eBooks can be a great way to provide your prospects with information that's useful in their day-to-day lives. When you provide your prospects with information that's helpful to them at no cost, you're building trust and brand awareness and making it more likely that they'll come to your brand when they're ready to make a purchase. This free eBook from TrendToFit provides their target market with weight loss tips, which helps to build trust in their brand and help their users consider their paid offerings.
• Social media: Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok can be the perfect way to reach your target prospects. As social media platforms change, it can be tough to stay on top of where your target market hangs out. Working with an inbound content marketing agency can be helpful to be sure you're promoting your content on the right social media platforms. The National Academy of Sports Medicine, a personal training certification organization, uses social media to provide users with information that's useful to anyone interested in getting fit or pursuing a career in fitness. By building trust in their organization through social media, their target market learns that they can trust the NASM brand, increasing the likelihood that they'll choose NASM if they decide to move forward with a certification.
• Infographics: Many people prefer getting statistical information in the form of an infographic instead of in a list of information. Whether you choose to publish infographics or send them out as a part of an email marketing strategy, infographics provide your target market with key information in an easily digestible way. This infographic from Nissan shows potential Juke buyers all that they can expect from their new vehicle, and includes social media handles that make it easy for potential customers to learn more.
• Email marketing: Using newsletters, bulletins, and other forms of inbound email marketing strategy options can help you stay in touch with prospects who signed up for more information during the engage portion of your marketing strategy. In your email marketing, you can delight customers by providing them with the information they need–before they even realize they need it. Clothing giant Modcloth does a great job of keeping signed-up users in the know with their email marketing.

Goals allow you and/or your marketing agency to change your strategy if necessary, and to ramp your strategy up if a particular part of what you're doing is going exceedingly well. It’s important that your marketing goals be aligned with your business and revenue objectives. We have found that one of the best ways to do that is through the SMART goal process. A solid inbound strategy will work to achieve your goals and objectives rather than focusing on vanity metrics.

Inbound marketing lead generation is also known as attraction marketing. When you release content that's targeted toward your ideal prospects, you're beginning a relationship that allows the customer to make the choice to interact with your brand throughout your process of lead generation in marketing. This is different from outbound marketing, in which brands reach out to customers directly to try to get them on board with what they have to offer.

Take a look at these examples of inbound marketing campaigns:

• Patagonia: The outdoor clothing brand offers prospects interesting stories that don't mention their products, rather, they pull readers by creating rapport.
• SAP: The global software company utilizes inbound marketing while preserving a unified feel and design for all consumer segments. They developed customized communications for each industry, enabling them to reach all of their target audiences.
• Salesforce: A well-known CRM company had issues sustaining constant traffic and leads. To improve the search results, they had to implement an inbound marketing approach, among other things. They used innovative marketing and sales videos as part of their content marketing strategy.