Inbound Marketing as a Strategy to Attract Customers Through Engagement

I have seen a shift in the way businesses approach their marketing strategies from annoying knocks on the door, pop-ups and interrupting TV ads, to relative suggestions for products I may be interested in, based on my other unique interests. Gone are the days when businesses relied solely on interruptive advertising to reach customers. Today, inbound marketing has become the preferred method for attracting customers through relevant and helpful content and experiences.

Inbound marketing is all about creating a customer-centered approach that aligns with the way people search naturally for information and how they make purchasing decisions. Instead of pushing products and services in front of customers, inbound marketing focuses on attracting customers through content that addresses their needs, interests, and pain points.

One of the key benefits of inbound marketing is that it helps establish trust and credibility with potential customers. By establishing themselves as the source of relative information, businesses can prove their expert status and build up a relationship with customers that goes beyond just selling a product or service. This is when people start thinking of such business as a partner, a resource, a go-to page. But most importantly, people think about your business.

Both the biggest segments, Millennials and Generation Z heavily rely on the internet and social media for product research and feedback from their peers. A 2019 survey by RetailDive found that 60% of Millennials and 45% of Generation Z consumers use social media to research products before making a purchase. Additionally, a 2020 survey by Forbes Insights found that 88% of Millennials and 95% of Generation Z consider online reviews as an important factor in their purchasing decisions.

These statistics highlight the importance of having a strong online content presence and incorporating customer feedback into your product development and marketing strategies, especially when targeting younger generations.

Inbound marketing also has a longer-lasting impact compared to traditional advertising. For example, a blog post that provides a solution to a common problem can continue to drive traffic and leads for months or even years. In contrast, a traditional advertisement only lasts as long as the budget behind it.

It is important to remember that Inbound marketing is not a one-time effort but a long-term strategy that requires ongoing investment in content creation, SEO, and distribution. However, the results are well worth it. According to Hubspot, inbound marketing can generate a cost-per-lead that is 60% lower than traditional, interruptive outbound marketing.

To get started with inbound marketing, businesses need to understand their target audience and create content that speaks to it. Such content can be blog posts, infographics, videos, e-books, and more. Contact me for help, if you feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. Optimize all this content for search engines and promote it through social media where most of your potential customers are to reach the right audience at the right time.

Here are the key features of inbound marketing:

• Customer-centered approach: Inbound marketing focuses on attracting customers through relevant and helpful content that addresses their needs and interests. Design your content around topics most relevant to your customers because

• Relevance and value: The content created for inbound marketing must be valuable and relevant to the target audience to establish trust and credibility. 

• Long-lasting impact: Unlike traditional advertising, inbound marketing content can drive traffic and leads for months or even years, providing a longer-lasting impact. To speed up the reactions, promote your content to your engaged crowd, be that your social media followers, or email newsletter subscribers, or post it in relevant groups (sometimes this needs to be paid for, depending on the community).

• Ongoing effort: Inbound marketing requires ongoing investment in content creation, SEO, and distribution, but the results can be worth it. Start a written blog, a video blog or a podcast to talk about topics relevant to your target audience. No need to constantly talk about your product, pretty soon you will run out of topics and people will consider you self-centered. Talk about what is interesting to your crowd, about what unites you all, and what is on people’s minds. If you stop constantly selling selling selling, your content will finally look interesting on its own and this will work in your favor.

• Cost-effectiveness: Inbound marketing has a lower cost-per-lead compared to traditional, outbound marketing. 

• Content creation: The content created for inbound marketing can include blog posts, infographics, videos, e-books, and more. To get started with inbound marketing, you need to understand your target audience to be able to create content that speaks to their needs.

• Search engine optimization: The content must be optimized for search engines to reach the right audience. Long keywords, short keywords, topics, meta descriptions, picture names, and so on, keep it all organized and user-friendly.

And a few words about inbound marketing vs content marketing. Inbound marketing and content marketing are related, but distinct, marketing strategies.

Inbound marketing is a broader approach to attracting and engaging customers through relevant and helpful content and experiences. It includes content marketing as one of its components and other tactics such as search engine optimization, social media marketing, and lead nurturing. Content marketing, on the other hand, is a specific marketing strategy that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action.

So, in essence, content marketing is a subset of inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is the overarching powerful approach to attracting customers and building a strong, lasting relationship with them, while content marketing is one of the tactics used to execute that strategy.

Creating relevant and helpful content establishes trust and credibility, generates leads, and drives revenue. If you are not already incorporating inbound marketing into your marketing strategy, now is the time to start.