Without a doubt, it is a predominant commercial philosophy: it is difficult to talk about digital marketing without coming across Inbound Marketing and its methodology and foundations.
These foundations have impacted the way digital marketing is applied today and, especially, in building clients. Below, we explain this better:
What is inbound marketing about?
Inbound marketing consists of a philosophy that promotes the construction of potential customers through the distribution of valuable content.
Building a potential customer requires attracting people who may feel interest in the product or service that is being offered. Converting said person into a lead requires them to share their contact information. Then, interacting with it, via email or other channels, offering educational and informative content, will help you make the decision to buy.
Obviously, it is not like traditional marketing, which was dedicated to persuading people, without their authorization, through phone calls and spam emails, and also massively repeating commercials in the media. Let’s say, then, that the traditional marketing philosophy was: the more they know about me, the more they will buy from me.
The result of these practices generated consumers dissatisfied with the relationship that companies wanted to have with them: a relationship where the first is considered a passive entity that must endlessly consume content, good or service, and the second, an entity with a great power to be noticed.
Inbound marketing sought to break with this paradigm and harshly criticized this exhaustive search for clients, above a natural and voluntary attraction.
So part of their philosophy is to recognize that potential customers must have a leading and participatory role in the purchasing process . In this role, they must have the power to choose what information they want to receive from brands.
How do you build leads?
To do this, take advantage of technological search and communication tools on the Internet, such as search engines, social networks, emails and websites.
In this sense, it builds its potential clients through everyday tools. Simply put, they are tools that people use to find very useful information for their daily activities.
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram represent mobile and web communication channels with a high information component. Therefore, this type of marketing encourages companies to design communication campaigns that educate the communities that live on these platforms.
What is the added value that social networks and blogs represent in building potential clients spontaneously? That people can decide which pages, accounts and profiles they want to follow.
In themselves, these platforms give users the opportunity to decide what content they want to consume. This makes inbound marketing an important strategy in creating valuable content for a particular audience.
If Internet users already share this new ability to choose and give their attention to brands and people of their choice, then now the new challenge is the positioning of a brand on a platform with millions of users.
How is it applied in the construction of end buyers?
Connecting with the interests of the public is vital for inbound marketing
This first step aims to attract customers spontaneously through valuable content that is strategically generated on social networks and blogs.
This would be the first stage of their methodology, which is “attract”. Therefore, you must think about what is the most suitable content and channel to connect emotionally with your target audience.
Building an ideal community that gives value to your business is not an easy job. You must create information that, at the same time, promotes the importance of your products and/or services within the market, and what are the benefits that your community will have when purchasing them.
Drive traffic from your social networks and blogs to your sales platforms
Since “converting” is the second step of the inbound methodology, your goal after linking your content with others, will be to transform those strangers who “coincidentally” stumbled upon your website or company profile, into followers or recurring visitors.
This is where the possibility of building potential clients becomes much more tangible since you have already completed an important step in your journey through the inbound methodology: making people interested in you.
After reaching this stage, you are more likely to transform your potential customers into buyers. Directing traffic from these communities to your sales platforms can be much simpler: the user already knows you and likes your content.
This is where calls to action or better known as “call to action” on websites and social networks work to invite your users to perform a desired action such as visiting an online store.
Measure the impact of your progress
The great challenge of 2018 is to monetize content production. The purpose behind it is to convert all that effort and time spent creating content into concrete sales.
For it, It is important to determine if the content you place on your channels is really motivating your audience to buy and acquire your products.
This is where you truly know the profitability of your business and how successful the content you used is to attract your potential customers.
It is important that you analyze if you are really having the impact you want on your audience and if the strategy you are carrying out is generating returns on investment.
If you don’t, you have time to modify some features of your inbound strategy so that you can finally transform your potential clients into final buyers.
In conclusion, inbound marketing is positioned as a prodigious technique to build potential customers and convert them into sales opportunities.
It turns out to be an effective method that adapts to any business model that wants to definitively leave behind the fundamentals of traditional marketing and approach new techniques focused on the digital world and new technological platforms.
