Inbound marketing is a business philosophy that is based on helping, educating and serving people with useful and relevant content. As this content attracts new sales prospects, they begin to receive encouragement and incentives to become customers.
Therefore, Empowering customers with inbound marketing means giving them an active role in a community, in which they acquire new skills for their daily life; and their opinions and learning experiences are listened to to know how to improve the delivery of educational content and, in general, the sales process that occurs in parallel.
What does empowerment really mean?
Etymologically “empower” comes from the translation and verbalization into Spanish of “to empower”. The concept of empowerment is easy to understand: it means giving or granting power, but only that?…
Sam R. Lloyd and Tina Berthelot pointed out in their work “Self-empowerment” published in 1994, that to empower a person, they must be given the opportunity to make important decisions, but not before giving them, tools that guide them to do it appropriately.
In this sense, empowering others is about helping them bring out their own intelligence, intuition, experience and creativity.
In this regard, we could say that inbound marketing has been able to integrate this concept into its methodology and foundations; reiterating the importance of sharing educational information that provides value and responsibly informs about a concept, situation or reality.
Inbound marketing, together with content marketing, has proposed a set of formats to provide the consumer with educational information that can nourish their learning, among them:
- Web articles.
- Podcasts.
- Infographics.
- Ebooks.
- Guides.
- Tutorial videos.
- Webinars or webinars.
How to empower customers?
Customer empowerment is defined as the process through which a solid relationship is created with buyers; exchanging valuable knowledge and experiences. This relationship must be based on trust and transparency.
However, one of the great challenges for companies, when they want to empower their clients, is to understand the complexities of users and know exactly what educational content can be offered to them to help them gain more power in their workspaces.
Therefore, if you want to achieve this effect on your clients, you must know in depth their interests, needs, challenges, motivations and information of interest. How can you empower your customers if you don’t know what they need?
The first step to carry out this action is to interview or send questions to your existing clients with key questions to investigate the emotional, professional and physical context in which they find themselves.
To attract future clients who are interested in the educational content created, create a buyer persona or buyer profile, which consists of a semi-fictional profile of the characteristics that your ideal buyer owes and, in this case, the person you want to empower. with your content, products and/or services.
The buyer persona basically simulates a resume of a person: name, age, sex, profession, place of residence, tastes, motivations, problems, needs, among others.
If we want to further exemplify what empowering customers is all about and what type of content is useful for a particular audience, let’s imagine a company that is dedicated to web programming.
- Your main inbound strategy is based on educating your customers by giving them useful content.
- Its audience is companies that want to have a website that identifies them on the web.
Therefore, your educational content should be focused on helping companies monetize their website and take advantage of all the digital tools that can be incorporated. They can also be useful tips on how to start a corporate digital transformation and the steps to follow to create the correct information for a website.
In this way, this web programming company is empowering its clients. Providing them with useful information that helps them be smarter with their decisions and the services they are about to acquire.
Why is empowerment a practice that inbound marketing promotes?
The competition of digital markets, the need to achieve low-cost investment returns and new technological tools have demanded – all of them together – a radical change in the way in which consumers should be considered: now they are seen as active users and who demand more and more information.
Psychologists, sociologists and marketers, since the mid-20th century, have used techniques such as participant observation and market studies to understand the change in consumer behaviors as technology and competitiveness advance.
In this sense, the founders of inbound marketing, Brian Halligan and Dhamesh Shah, realized, in 2006, the role that new technologies and digital communication media were having in informing people and how they came to these spaces to learn and solve their problems.
Both authors thought of ways to increase company sales exponentially by involving the customer not from a passive position, but rather an active and participating one. That is why blog posts, social networks and audiovisual media became important channels to achieve this.
Thus, a new principle emerged within inbound marketing: empowering customers with educational information that is transformed into knowledge and intelligence.
However, transforming the way in which companies approach their audiences represented a drastic task that many professionals dedicated themselves to carrying out. But they finally achieved it thanks to the understanding that some people prefer to invest and consume useful content for their lives, over goods and services that they do not need.
In conclusion, empowering customers as a requirement for having a successful company represented a great effort for inbound marketing specialists.
However, this technique has had a strong impact in recent years, within the digital channels that abound on the internet, and more and more companies are joining in to empower their customers through inbound marketing.
