You are a business owner, and you are currently thinking about what can be done to increase your company’s sales.
After a search on the internet, you find something called Inbound Marketing and ask yourself, “What is this?”. If this is his case, we at Robert will explain how this strategy works and how it can make a difference in your business.
What is inbound marketing?
Unlike traditional marketing, inbound marketing is a strategy that aims to attract the right people to know your product /service and turn them into customers using relevant content.
Applying this technique, the brand does not take action looking for customers but creates content to attract them. Thus, he feels more comfortable deciding when is the best time to close the purchase.
We call this decision process the sales funnel. Imagine a funnel; the first content is the top, information strategically created to catch the user’s attention. From the first sign of interest, nutrition work begins with subjects and materials about the difficulty that this potential client is going through and how your products/services can act in solving them. With each new step, the user goes deeper into this funnel until reaching the bottom, feeling safe and confident with the company. From a user, he is converted to a lead and becomes a qualified contact.
Inbound uses search engines, social networks, blog, email, website and landing page to disseminate the content of each stage of the funnel.
👉🏼 Let’s analyze a scenario: when watching a video on YouTube, a car advertisement interrupts you. You will feel uncomfortable and often won’t even pay attention and will skip the ad.
👉🏼 Now in another situation, you are interested in creating a garden at home. He does some research on the internet, and is impacted by content with tips on how to set up a vegetable garden with Viva’s seeds. In this material, you learn several things, read other information on the blog, watch the videos, and realize that the time has come to have a vegetable garden and that that brand will help you in this process.
What can we see differences between the two examples? In the first, at that moment, the subject “car” was not its focus, and therefore it did not consume the content. In the second, you were researching about “garden”, and naturally found materials with this subject of interest.
Inbound marketing is not invasive. It follows the flow according to the behavior of each lead.
Inbound marketing vs outbound marketing
Let’s see now what is the real advantage of inbound over traditional marketing (outbound marketing).
Consumer’s Journey
In inbound marketing, there is the consumer journey, which are the steps that the lead needs to go through to buy and become loyal. Are they:
Attract investment in content such as e-books, graphics, videos, etc. Distribution on websites, blogs, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads.
Convert: for people to have access to these materials, they provide some personal data. We initially asked for your name and email, and as the relationship progresses, we may ask for additional information.
Relate: At this point, a link is created with the lead. Contents are sent by email according to their opening. Here, we take the opportunity to talk about solutions that naturally interest the lead, and as they advance through the sales funnel, we adopt a more sales pitch.
Sell: according to the criteria we have established, we understand that the lead is ready to receive a commercial approach.
Analyze: after the commercial contact, it’s time to evaluate whether the return was positive or not. If yes, great. If not, new actions will be taken to continue nurturing the lead.
Enchanting: after-sales relationship actions are carried out, such as research, making exclusive material available or about the purchased product, etc. At this stage, many customers become brand followers and promoters.
Why does your company need Inbound Marketing?
Your business does not need to abandon traditional marketing, as it has its results, but you can align inbound marketing to your strategy, to increase relationships, sales, and loyalty.
According to our research, “Content marketing adoption generates 4x more visits and 5x more leads for businesses, on average.” It’s a very interesting piece of data, and it shows that inbound is a great tool to solve your question at the beginning of this article: How to generate more sales?.
