How does inbound marketing work?

Can you really create personalized advertising? Yes and no. Not for every customer, unless your target audience is extremely small. However, you can for certain groups of people. You will have to choose between the most effective types of marketing. One of them is inbound marketing. Do you want to know what are its characteristics and how it is done? Find, in this post, the most important elements.

More information: What is inbound marketing ?

✔ 1. Establish your Buyer Persona

Inbound is, among all existing types of marketing, one of the most personalized. In it, any strategy or action carried out revolves around the customer towards whom it is directed. To know what to offer them, it is important to know their characteristics.

Even if it is said that inbound marketing is less massive, it does not mean that it works only with a few people. Its target audience is usually also large, although less than that of its predecessor. What does this mean? That it is impossible for you to really know everything about each of these potential customers.

That’s why a Buyer Persona is established. This term refers to a characterization of your company’s ideal customer. This is both fictitious and real, since it is based on the real traits of those groups that are your target audience. It is not enough just to take into account demographic data, but also their social and psychological profile.

More information: What is Buyer Persona?

✔ 2. Optimize your website

The most effective element to attract potential customers is your website. Therefore, many online marketing strategies are based on its positioning in search engines. Keeping your website updated and optimized is essential. This way you provide important information to consumers and make them feel good about browsing your site.

If you have one of the first positions in the searches, you will have more volume of visitors. Then you must offer them the data they are looking for and a good user experience. Thus, those who enter the profile of potential buyers will end up becoming your customers.

✔ 3. A good marketing plan

This is an important step for any company. What is a marketing plan? A document where the current state of the company, its various objectives and how you plan to meet them are collected.

Performing this step helps, among other things, to reinforce the commitment of the different members of the team. It also helps to keep the long term in mind and to correct possible errors in time. Do you want to know how to draw up your own marketing plan? The main sections you should keep in mind are:

• ✅ Analysis of the company’s present: in order not to leave any details loose in this research, you can resort to the classic SWOT matrix. This is based on detecting your company’s weaknesses, threats, strengths and opportunities.
• ✅ Analyze the competition: it is important to dedicate a whole section to establish the characteristics of your main competitors. This way you will know in which areas you can beat them and how.
• ✅ Set goals: don’t go overboard dreaming big in this section. Set specific, relevant and, above all, achievable goals. Also, keep in mind which ones you hope to achieve in the short term and which ones in the long term.
• ✅ Plan: here you only have to answer one question: what will you do to achieve your goals? No one said it would be easy. Get together with your team and map out the actions to be taken. Among them, a good marketing strategy.
• ✅ Real-time evaluation of the plan: when you have finished all these sections, you can’t just sit back and relax. It is important to perform constant evaluations of the plan. Only then will you be able to quickly change any of its elements if necessary.

✔ 4. Generate traffic

Having your website well positioned ensures more visitors and, therefore, more potential customers. For this reason, you should never stop working on increasing traffic to your site. Focusing your strategies on a group of people does not mean failing to attract new customers. How to increase web traffic through inbound marketing? Well, by using any of the following assets:

• ✅ Blogs: Google’s algorithm enhances information that is constantly updated and that, due to its quality, generates interaction. Therefore, having a company blog can be perfect for climbing positions. In addition, you can improve your reputation both by the good content you provide and by external links.
• ✅ Social networks: They are mostly used to disseminate the contents of your website, but it would be good if you also generate special content. There are formats, such as Lives or Stories, that you can exploit and are native to the networks. Create social media marketing strategies.
• ✅ SEO/SEM: These are two practices that can help you gain positioning and traffic to your website. Use them together and they will give you maximum results.

✔ 5. Transform visits into leads and leads into sales.

You must make sure that those people who visit your website start receiving your content on a regular basis. If you publish quality stuff, many will subscribe on their own. For those who don’t, you can offer them certain items in exchange for their subscription. Special downloadable content, for example.

Once subscribed, they will have to provide a set of personal data. Use this to provide them with value based on the demographic information they provided. Create purchase cycle tracking plans and they will end up becoming loyal customers. Similarly, they will give you their email address. With a good email marketing strategy, you will be able to convert them into buyers through this channel as well.

Traditional marketing and inbound marketing: how do they differ?

Even though inbound marketing is a departure from everyday marketing, it doesn’t work in the same way. You may have already noticed this. In the case of traditional marketing, its main objective is to attract attention. To achieve this, plans are drawn up to reach as many people as possible. And therein lies the main difference: in inbound marketing, you don’t want to reach everyone.

Who, then, is the target audience for this last variant? Specialists in this practice design marketing strategies based on audience segmentation. In other words, they focus their plan on the characteristics of groups of people who are potential customers of a brand.

This change has come about as a result of the evolution of society itself and of technology. People no longer interact with advertising and brands as they did before. Instead, they tend to be much more engaged and expect a certain value in return. Therefore, strategies based on smaller groups are more effective than those aimed at “the masses”.