Inbound marketing is a popular marketing strategy where businesses curate quality content to attract customers. With this strategy, businesses try to subtly push the target audience into the buyer’s journey.
This starts with publishing high-quality content that informs readers about their problems. It continues by engaging them with more content, fulfilling their desire to know more. Later, it ends with offering them a solution: a product or service. Your business can improve website traffic and gain a genuine audience by learning inbound marketing. In this article, we will understand how it works and the benefits you will get from this strategy.
What is inbound marketing?
The goal of every online business is to generate leads. There are different ways to go about this. The traditional way is to reach out to your customers, tell them about your brand, and then offer your product or service. Although this method still operates, it is not as effective as it used to be.
Customers find this annoying, and they get the same feeling you get after receiving regular calls from cell phone service providers selling your new offers – “only for you.”
What is the alternative? Bringing customers to yourself with inbound marketing. This strategy involves creating video, text, social media, etc. content to educate your target audiences. Marketers curate this content with the intention of informing readers and selling products or services as a solution. This excites the target audience, as they want to know more about how their problem can be solved. And naturally, they are pushed into the buyer’s journey. Inbound marketing is one of the core principles of digital marketing, and every marketer should learn how to create content that brings leads and improves website traffic.
Benefits of inbound marketing
Today, all online businesses follow inbound marketing. Here’s how your business could benefit from it –
1) Brand visibility:
content that solves users’ problems gets more recognized and shared. So, if your content solves and answers the problems of your users, your brand will be applauded and recognized. Moreover, it strengthens the relationship between your brand and your customer base.
For example, a brand that provides high-quality and relatable content to customers will have a following. In the future, if you launch a product, service, or offer, there are chances that more users will try them out.
2) It can improve your SEO:
Inbound marketing directly aids in improving your website’s SEO. Whatever content you will publish—blogs, website copy, product descriptions, etc.—needs to be optimized. If the content gets more traffic, your SEO rank will improve with time.
3) Building trust and credibility:
You will find so much content available on the same topic. However, not all of the content has traction or visibility. Why? Because users care about relatable content. If you provide them with content that is well-researched and backed up, not only will it make it noticeable, but it will also help in gaining the trust and credibility of your brand. For this, ensure that your brand is not spreading any misinformation and that your content is factually correct.
An example of inbound marketing
You can find inbound marketing in all kinds of content types. Look at brand-owned content, such as blog posts, webinars, or newsletters. Marketers are becoming more strategic when incorporating inbound marketing. For example, you see many brands collaborating with other brands. Though this is influencer marketing, it helps them get more leads if, within this collaboration, you solve the problem of your user and offer a service as a solution.
Conclusion
Almost all businesses should have inbound marketing. Start by studying your target audience. Create a buyer’s persona and include all the things that your customers face: struggles, wants, needs, etc. After analysing that, perform keyword research to find what your customers are looking for. What are their requests on the search engine? Take the help of keyword tools and identify the topics that can provide content.
Create thoughtful content on the topic to solve your customers’ problems. You could create blogs, video content, social media posts – anything that is easy to target yet provides meaning to their needs. Keep doing this, and over time, you will be surprised why your DMs are getting flooded with so many requests.