According to a HubSpot report, over 60% of marketers claim inbound marketing to be their highest quality source of leads. Inbound marketing tactics reportedly generate 54% more leads when compared with paid outbound marketing strategies.
More than 80% of Alphabet's (Google’s parent company) revenue comes from Google Ads. At the same time, Facebook’s advertising revenue stood at $84.2 billion in 2020. We’ve witnessed businesses allocate millions of dollars towards various other outbound marketing strategies like cold-calling, cold email, TV advertising, and many more.
And despite spending their top dollars on these outbound marketing strategies, most businesses find it extremely hard to generate high-quality leads and eventually turn them into paying customers.
“As marketers, we should be changing the mantra from always be closing to always be helping.”
- Jonathan Lister
For example, the cold calling success rate stands at 2%. And the same can be said for cold email rollout, print advertising, TV advertising, and more. When implemented right, these outbound marketing strategies may help you achieve great results – however, when compared with inbound marketing tactics, you’ll always find the number of high-quality leads that can be generated via inbound marketing to be on the higher end of the scale.
That’s because, with inbound marketing, you’re not pushing your brand (willingly or unwillingly) in front of your audience. Instead, you’re pulling your audience towards you.
We’ve produced this blog post to help you familiarize yourself with the concept of inbound marketing in an efficient manner. Not only will we learn what inbound marketing is, but we’ll also be having a look at how businesses and marketers can use it to generate the highest quality leads the right way.
Without further ado, let’s dive straight into the world of inbound marketing.
In the world of marketing, there’re two types of strategies.
First is the push approach – where you will put your brand’s products, services, and even your brand itself in front of your prospects and customers. For example, whenever one of your prospects or customers sees your ads on Facebook or while they’re watching TV, you’re reaching out to your audience via outbound marketing.
On the contrary, when your prospects and customers are looking for a solution to their problems on search engines, forums, etc. and find a meaningful solution being offered by your brand in the form of a blog post, eBook, webinar, or any content format, you’re pulling them towards your brand. Instead of pitching your services, you are focusing on their pain points and problems. And based on that, you’re offering them a brilliant solution, which by the way, is a great way to build trust and position yourself as an industry expert.
By doing this, you’ll be building a great impression and positioning your brand as trustworthy and authoritative – a business that can actually solve their problems. And when they further explore your website, an effective marketing funnel will further help you convert them. And that’s what inbound marketing is.
Inbound marketing is a business methodology driven towards pulling in your prospects and customers rather than pushing your products and services towards them. With inbound marketing, you’ll be focused on delivering value rather than selling your products and services. It’s a strategy that utilizes various forms of pull marketing like:
According to a report, marketers prioritizing blogging are 13 times more likely to be subject to a positive ROI from inbound marketing. Additionally, 80% of marketers claim social media to be their primary inbound marketing approach.
With inbound marketing being one of the best marketing practices and processes, it’s essential to apply the right set of tactics to turn your campaign into a grand success.
Hence, we’ll be learning how inbound marketing works exactly.
Following are the three stages involved in an inbound marketing strategy:
To tap into the unbelievable potential of inbound marketing, first, you need to gain more insights into your audience’s online behavior. Let’s look at each of these stages to gain clarity on what we’ve been talking about until now.
For different businesses belonging to different industries, supply and demand will be different. Not many people may be searching for a product or service like the one you’re offering. Or maybe there’s a huge demand, but along with this huge demand, the competition is fierce. There can be thousands of possibilities.
Hence, the first step is to understand who your target audience is and what their problems and pain points are – these should be related to the ones that your business can address and help them solve.
Right now – we are at the top of the funnel. Based on their problems and pain points, you need to build a fool-proof content marketing strategy that involves blog posting, lead magnets, webinars, and other content formats through which you’ll be delivering value.
Since you’re our target audience and we want to really help you out, we built this inbound marketing guide to help you understand what the concept is all about. Rather than pushing our services, we’re focused on delivering value and helping you dive deep into the process.
Similarly, you’ll find us rolling out many blog posts, crafting and offering lead magnets, scheduling webinars. All of these will be focused on delivering value. At the same time, we’ll be building trust and positioning ourselves as a credible brand – which we obviously are.
Once our blog posts start ranking on search engines for the desired keywords and as many of our prospects start landing on them, our website traffic will eventually increase. And when you thoroughly read our blog post from start to finish, you’d be left wanting more.
Now, we may even ask you to submit our lead generation form – which most brands strategically place on their website. And if you really loved the information we delivered via our blog content, you’ll definitely fill it out for more.
Let’s say you submit your information via our lead generation form. Now, you may either explore our website further or bounce off. Now, if you explore our website further, you’ll find that we offer results-driven marketing and advertising services. You may even schedule a consultation with our experts.
Or, if you bounce off after submitting your details, we’ll roll out value-packed newsletters to deliver further value. Now, this right here is a consideration stage.
People use different keywords at different stages of their buyers’ journeys. So, now, you’ll be building content like “how to find the best marketing agency” or “how to find the best advertising agency” or similar questions. This way, you’ll be putting your products and services in front of your audience again.
And by hitting your prospects in their consideration stage, you’re putting your products and services in front of them again. Let’s say they hop onto our “How to Find Best Marketing Agency?” blog post or guide; they’ll look at whether our agency has the listed qualities or not. Also, we’ll be putting our brand in front of them once again – which is another plus point.
So, let’s say we strategically produced different blog posts:
Now, here we are familiarzing you with what inbound marketing is and why it’s extremely important for your business. Now, once you have thoroughly read it, you may choose to submit our lead generation form or not – it depends. But then you’ll proceed forward towards searching “How to find the best inbound marketing agency?” or “best inbound marketing agencies in New York.”
These pieces will help you understand what to look for in an inbound marketing agency. As we will be delivering meaningful insights, you are likely to explore our website further. Similarly, you may have some of our competitors in your to-hire list as well.
Now building the end-stage of the funnel is important – as we’d like to boost our chances of you reaching out to us for a strategy call. Right now, you’re in the decision stage – and to boost the chances of converting the customer, we’ll roll out weekly newsletters and build features-focused blog posts as well as guides focused on converting you into paying customer.
Here, we may even combine our inbound marketing efforts with outbound marketing to maximize the chance of converting our prospects into paying customers.
That’s how inbound marketing works.
From awareness to decision, you need to strategically build your marketing funnel to generate the highest-quality leads and convert as many of your prospects into paying customers.
These days, people feel frustrated over the sheer number of sales-driven emails and calls they receive. And if you constantly pitch your services in front of your audience, they may end up not purchasing your products and services at all. Or worse – they may never want to see your business again.
With inbound marketing, you’ll be building long-lasting relationships and positioning your brand as trustworthy and credible. Most importantly, you’ll be delivering value to your audience.
So, what are you waiting for?
Tap into the unbelievable potential of inbound marketing today!