INBOUND MARKETING
The marketing world has evolved dramatically over the years. Take a minute and try to remember the last time you purchased an item. I am sure that instead of waiting for commercial advertisements to pop on TV, you went online and did your own research.
We as a whole are a part of this modern revolutionary marketing process even though most of us are not aware of it. It is a fundamental shift from traditional to digital marketing, a shift in the way we do business in this high tech super connected world we live in today, this is what we call as Inbound Marketing.
According to Google , Inbound Marketing is a technique for attracting customers to products or services with the help of Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Branding. Inbound Marketing is the technique of bringing the potential customers to you, as opposed to the company's effort in grabbing them.
The Inbound methodology involves four marketing actions.
Attract-: We want traffic for our website but not just any traffic. We require an audience that comes under our niche who will eventually turn into our customers. For attracting customers we start with blogging (content) since Inbound Marketing begins with blogging and that’s for sure. Following up with good SEO practices so that your blogs ends up or appears in your targeted audience searches.Finally, social publishing of these contents makes sure that the information is shared and considered valuable by your audience and engagement with our content increases.
Convert-: After attracting visitors, the next step is conversion. Getting your audience to your audience to subscribe to your email newsletter or filling up the contact information is of utmost importance. Tools such as forms,call-to-action buttons, landing pages ,etc. serve these purposes.
Close-: So,now that you have managed to attract the right audience and have also converted them into leads ,the next step is to transform or change our leads into customers.We can use various tools such as CRM (customer relationship management),email marketing ,etc. To close the relationship.
Delight-: Reaching new customers tends to be every business goal but it is also important to not overlook old customers that are the customers who have already bought something from your company. It is important to engage with them so that they feel delighted and serve your business as word of mouth promoters.
It is necessary to understand the buyer’s journey and figure out how your brand or business can truly fit with your audience needs. This is the inbound way of building trust with your audience.Inbound business means building relationships with your customers and having conversations with your audience, providing value. It’s all about drawing people in. Look at Amazon, Flipkart to name a few ,they have disrupted virtually everything, it’s just a better way to buy. People's needs and habits change in this dynamic environment so it is not necessary that what worked before will also work today. The inbound tactics and tools will change but the inbound philosophy remains the same.The inbound philosophy is all about pulling people in by being helpful.
Context within content that’s Inbound Marketing! Content can be of any form such as blogs, ebooks,infographics, landing pages and even videos.
The inbound approach to doing business is more humane and customer centered.Experiences that feel personalized,that felt relevant. In today’s world ,all the power lies within the customer. It is all about putting yourself in their shoes and asking how would I want to be marketed to? Or how would I want to get a service from a company?
Thus, in conclusion we can say that adopting an Inbound Strategy that will make a considerable amount of impact on the business and increase the sales process overall.
