Inbound Marketing Definition | What is Inbound Marketing and How You Can Implement the Methodology

Inbound Marketing Definition | The Basics

If you are here, it probably means that you’ve heard about inbound marketing and would like to know the inbound marketing definition. But, who are we to explain what inbound marketing is? Growth Hackers is part of the best inbound marketing agencies and this is why we believe we have the authority to explain you in details what it is. So, what is inbound marketing?

The goal of inbound marketing is to earn the attention of customers by making your startup or company easy to be found. You want to draw customers to your website or blog by consistently creating interesting content. Inbound marketing is about using marketing channels and tools to bring potential users or customers to you, rather than fighting for their attention.

As the name says, inbound marketing is opposed as outbound marketing. Outbound marketing consists in pushing the product in front of potential customers (For instance, with ads). Inbound marketing is the opposite and the goal is to pull potential customers toward your product.

In other words, inbound marketing has an effect of pulling the customers toward your product or service whereas with outbound marketing, you are pushing your product toward them. Inbound marketing is the strategy of connecting with potential customers by sharing content they find useful.

Instead of interrupting your audience with advertising or other outbound marketing strategies, an inbound methodology will bring potential customers through content they find by themselves. Having an inbound marketing strategy will prevent your startup to fail and will help you build a successful startup.

Now that you know the basics of inbound marketing, I am going to give you the 4 fundamental pillars to transform your audience into satisfied customers. Making your product or service being discovered, used and purchased is the whole point of setting up a good inbound marketing strategy. Today, I am going to give you the complete inbound marketing definition. This is a process in 4 phases: Attract – Conversion – Closing – Delight.

I believe that having an inbound marketing strategy well thought through should be implemented as early as possible in your entrepreneur journey. This is the “lean startup style”. If you are building a startup from scratch, start think about inbound marketing now. If your business is more advanced, start yesterday.

An integrated inbound marketing process will help you attract, engage and delight customers by creating quality content in ways that outbound marketing simply can’t. Inbound and outbound marketing, as the names state, are opposed but are complementary. Inbound marketing is the most effective way of getting a constant flow of leads and customers without spending on advertising whereas traditional outbound marketing seeks out potential clients by directly outreaching to them

At Growth Hackers, we’ve seen how a well-executed inbound marketing strategy consistently turns content into a steady flow of qualified leads, proving that attracting customers through value always outperforms pushing messages with ads. Some marketers will tell you there are 5 stages in the inbound methodology.

This 4-phase framework is not an exact science but I believe it is very complete. For the curious ones and impatient ones, I write at the end of the article the reason why I don’t include the 5th step in this inbound marketing definition.

1. Attract

The 1st step of inbound marketing is to attract visitors and increase brand awareness. And, when I say visitors, I mean qualified and relevant visitors. This is the awareness phase or also called discovery phase.
How to attract relevant traffic as part of your inbound marketing strategy?

You should always think in terms of targets. Your target is based on segmentation: social demographic criteria such as gender, age, location, native language, education, income, profession, habits are important to define. By knowing your target, you will be able to define what kind of content to address, to whom, when and through which channels you want to promote it. The best way to know your target is to create users/buyers’ personas.

The buyer persona is actually a kind of avatar, a caricature, a stereotype, a fictional character of your perfect customer. Here is what a buyer persona should have:

Storytelling has always existed in content marketing but has evolved. Nowadays, on of the best ways to tell your story is through a blog.

Inbound marketing often starts by creating a blog. Blogging is a great way to attract new visitors to your site. In order to be found by the right prospects, it is imperative to create content that speaks. Inbound marketing strategies are nothing without content. Answering questions your potential buyers (Target) might ask themselves is a great way to start.

On the long run, you will be able to grow your startup revenue with a blog. There are so many content marketing tactics you can use to make your startup blog a success. Don’t just create content for the sake of it: create valuable content for your audience. Creating quality content is essential. Always focus on quality vs quantity.
In addition to your blog, you can also create landing pages to attract visitors.

 

Search engines are a never-ending source of traffic, leads, users and sales. SEO should form part of your inbound marketing strategy. Search Engine Optimization is important for a company’s online success. It will help you rank higher in search engines, which means more traffic and potential customers seeing your website. SEO should be part of any marketing strategy because it can’t work if there isn’t enough exposure!

A well-executed SEO strategy includes: keyword research; creating high quality content with spelling errors checked; using meta tags that include site information such as keywords so they show up on pages when people do searches – all this helps bring new visitors back again right where YOU want them! And remember… user experience trumps everything else every single time.

The prospect (Your target) will, in most cases, use a search engine to find the answer to the questions that arise. You must, therefore, make sure to be well visible when they seek for this information. For this, you need to identify the right keywords, optimize your pages, make your blog easy to navigate, make your website fast, create content, create internal links with these keywords and have a linkbuilding strategy. If the search engine optimization concept is still vague for you, do not hesitate to reach out to become a SEO expert.

Leverage the power of search engines by focusing on search engine optimization and inbound methodologies to help your website rank higher. Continually improve through keyword research, other techniques such as content marketing or social media promotion with the goal that prospective customers are able navigate easily while getting answers from you about what they need.

The tone should be professional but convincing enough so people will actually take action. At Growth Hackers, we know that attracting the right audience with precise buyer personas, valuable content, and smart SEO is the first step to transforming website traffic into measurable growth.

An inbound marketing strategy that works well is the result of relevant content. Social media will allow you to share this content, interact with your audience and talk to your community. You should use several social media strategies to promote your content. To best optimize your publication, you must have a strong presence on specific social media channels. Having a well-defined social media strategy for your startup is crucial. You need to share your content in the right places social media channels. The right ones are the ones where your buyer personas are.

Start creating a Twitter/X strategy to bring traffic, a Facebook strategy to bring leads, an Instagram marketing strategy to build your brand and a LinkedIn strategy if you focus on B2B.

 

Write e-books

Stop writing and speak up! Be friendly, show your face to readers who follow you and to the newcomers, they will be delighted. A webinar or also called an online conference will largely increase your credibility while improving your reputation (When it is relevant, it can be used to make you to advertise your startup or company). You have proven your expertise in writing through your blog, your prospects will find pleasant to hear you and ask questions in real time. This will bring a more personal touch.

 

Have an email marketing strategy / Send a regular newsletter

The goal here is to keep in touch with your audience, prospects and customers by encouraging them to go to your site regularly. It’s also a great way to warm up a few prospects who don’t have the habit and perhaps the time to browse your site repeatedly.

This is key to create a newsletter when implementing an email marketing strategy. It needs to be sent regularly (I recommend once a week or twice a month. Don’t send too many emails to your subscribers. They are important and have been nice enough to share their email address with you: don’t spam them). The email marketing strategy is a key element and should be part of your overall startup marketing strategy. I will talk a bit more about email marketing later on in this post.

This was a quick list of ideas to expand your audience and completing the 1st step of inbound marketing. Growth Hackers knows that leveraging social media, e-books, webinars, and email marketing together transforms your content from just “seen” to actively driving traffic, engagement, and qualified leads for your startup.

Well on, you can always be more creative in finding new types of formats. For instance, you could also create surveys, case studies, create videos or infographics, interview influencers in your niche or your users, create podcasts and more. The implementation of these tools, combined with a rigorous work (and regular), will ensure the transition to level 2 of this rather nice game: the inbound marketing process. I am now going to address the 2nd step: Conversion!

As an inbound marketer, you don’t just want to get visitors. You want to make sure that your traffic is targeted and qualified so you can convert your traffic into leads. In order to convert traffic and generate qualified leads, it’s important that you work on quality content rather than quantity. You need to define a marketing strategy for your startup blog.

With the regular publication of relevant content, you are able to attract new visitors to your blog or website, and at the same time, you begin to earn their trust. It would be stupid to stop there. In this conversion phase, several techniques can be implemented to retrieve valuable information about your prospects. This conversion phase, also called appreciation, interest or consideration phase is most often referred as “Lead Generation”. You can effectively generate leads by the implementation of…

 

CTA or “Call-to-Action”

These CTA (Call-to-Action) “buttons”, visual hooks or clickable links push your readers to take action. They will be located intelligently at strategic places on your blog or on your landing pages attracting the eye of the visitor. They are meant for your audience to take action. Make them as “sexy” as possible in order to attract the interest of prospects. There are so many different formats in use and I am going to give you my top 6 CTAs:

These CTA can seem classics but strongly effective to collect information about your visitors. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel all the time. This is good to test and try new techniques bit it’s also important to use tactics that proved their effectiveness.

Inbound marketing is an essential strategy for lead generation but do not expect to get too much information at once. Don’t fail by annoying the people who were about to deliver their information. Don’t ask them too many questions at first (Just their email address, maybe their name and why not their website; no more than that. You don’t want to give a barrier to your potential subscribers by asking them 10 questions even before getting their email address).

In addition to having attracted new visitors, you’ve created quality content, included CTAs and therefore have collected the necessary information to move you to the next step, the Closing phase! In other words, it’s time for you to unveil your offer and do business.

3. Closing

No inbound marketing strategies can be successful without the closing phase. Customer acquisition is key and you need to have a sales process in place. An inbound marketer should know about sales and/or work with the sales department to make his/her work more effective.

A perilous phase which is also called engagement phase or conclusion step… In short, this will be probably your favorite phase. This can also be called the activation, evaluation, sales, purchase or action phase. This step needs to be very structured because you need to bring your lead accepting your offer naturally.

In fact, once your visitors turned into leads, it is important to properly feed them with content: you need to deliver the right message, at the right time to keep in touch regularly and you need to make them confident to make a decision (In this case, use your product or service).

To be honest, if you follow this inbound marketing definition, you should soon have too many leads – yes, you’ve heard it well, too many leads: that could feel like a dream and you can make it happen too. But having leads is not making sales or closing. Having leads is great but if you don’t convert them into sales, if you don’t close them, this is useless.

4. Delight

For an inbound marketing process to be complete, signing a customer is only the third step. You can go even further with this 4th step: Delight.

During the different stages, we noted that to implement a successful inbound marketing strategy, you need to craft regular, insightful and interesting content that resonates with your readers whether they are visitors, leads or existing customers.
With different formats of content, you managed to show your expertise, capture a qualified audience, convert traffic by generating leads and closing those leads into sales.

A client who already paid for your product or service – is not a client to forget. Instead, you should continue to interact with your clients to make them happy promoters of your business or startup. A very happy customer will share your product or service on social media and tell their contacts about it.

They will become evangelists and promote your product just because they love it. This is called advocacy. This is free promotion and free marketing you have in your hands here. Who doesn’t want a free marketing channel? Delighting an existing customer is easier than getting a new one and can have a huge impact on your business.

Delighting your customers turns them into powerful promoters, and Growth Hackers has seen firsthand how a well-executed delight strategy multiplies brand reach and fuels sustainable growth. In that delight phase, here are some tools or channels that you may find helpful in order to help you delight your customers…

The best and easiest way to learn what your customers like remains to ask them. So, use customer feedback, ask your customers questions, see if they are happy with what you gave them, check if they would like you to offer a new service or a new feature… Getting users’ feedback is part of the growth hacking process and it’s very important to use it. This will allow you to know your customers more, see what they are looking for, what you can improve in order to make your product more user-centric.

This has 3 main benefits:

• This will show your customers that you care about them.
• This will make your customers more faithful and more engaged with your brand – and they may buy again from you later on.
• Knowing more about your customers might lead taking an Up-sell / Cross-sell approach. Indeed, by knowing a need, you might be able to offer your customers a product that they didn’t know existed.

 

A great way to delight your customers is by organizing an event. This will allow you to meet personally with your customers and have a direct contact with them. This will largely increase their trust in you, your product and your business.

If you don’t have the budget for a big fancy event, this is ok, don’t worry about it. An event can be very simple. Not everyone can afford a theater or a concert hall filled with hundreds of bottles of champagne to make an event. If you are an early stage startup, just invite your users to have a coffee with you. I can guarantee you that they will be pleased. If you listen well to them and make great use of their feedback, I can ensure you some of them will become evangelists.

 

Social media is a crucial element of the inbound marketing methodology. More than ever, you need to have a good presence on social media. I still see startups telling me they don’t need social media, just a great product. If you think that, I am sorry to say but you’re wrong. Get on social media now and start interacting with your potential users, your target audience or start promoting your product now!

Social media is not just checking news or watching cats’ videos. On social media, you can listen to the customers’ questions or concerns and answer them. You can like or share their posts, they can share yours to their community, you may offer limited discounts, or you can simply interact with them. And of course, propose relevant content again, again and again!

Social media will help your startup or business to interact with your brand ambassadors who can become evangelists in the future. This approach will enhance your sales force (Through the various accounts your customers have), the image, the visibility, the reputation and the expertise of your company. Establishing a trusted and long-term relationship with your customers will significantly expand your audience.

During the four stages of inbound marketing, content creation never stops. Therefore, you must renew the topics and readjust your content ideas to adapt to new customer expectations.

After closing a deal, conversing individually with your customers is key. The delight phase of the inbound marketing approach will allow you to collect further information. Clients will share with you, their opinions, concerns or needs… not just their email addresses. You need to make the most of it by answering their needs.

Then, if you do it right, they will naturally talk to those around them… whose might become new visitors. If you reach this point of getting new visitors, the inbound marketing loop restarts: you need to convert the attracted traffic into leads again, close into sales and delight them.

Using questionnaires, events, and social media to listen, engage, and delight customers has proven at Growth Hackers to create loyal brand evangelists who naturally fuel sustainable growth and expand reach.

That’s it for today and I believe the information I gave you is pure gold for any inbound marketers! Inbound marketing is essential for any startup or business. Inbound marketing focus on relevant traffic acquisition through content creation but doesn’t stop there. To summarize, inbound marketing is a 4-phase approach where you go from getting qualified traffic through content creation (Attract).

Then, you want to convert this traffic into leads, mostly by getting email addresses from this traffic (Conversion). After that, you need to have a strategy in place where you still create content but with the goal to close leads into sales (Closing).

 

Finally, you need to stay in touch with your customers either to build your brand loyalty, upsell your existing customers or have them become evangelists (Delight). I want to add that A/B testing should be a central element all along the way.

It’s no secret that putting inbound efforts into a project will pay off. But, if you have an effective inbound strategy and outline key themes with content for each one of those points then there should be little or no wasted time on any given campaign because they’re all aligned to what needs to be done to achieve your company’s goals!

It is important to note that the inbound marketing framework has a long-term focus and sales might take weeks or months to make. During that time and after that, you need to keep creating insightful content and be patient. Resilience is the main indicator of your inbound marketing and startup success. To successfully implement an inbound marketing strategy, having a Rockstar inbound marketing team who can execute is important.

For the curious ones: I said at the beginning of the post that many marketers consider there is a 5th step in the inbound marketing process. This 5th step is: Track / Measure Results & Optimize. In my opinion (And you can disagree with me, that’s fine), you need to measure results (In order to optimize) during each step of the inbound marketing process. You need to track results from each phase (Attract | Conversion | Closing | Delight) individually to improve all of them. Measuring and optimizing are decisive but have to be done along the way, not only at the end.

Growth Hackers is probably one of the best inbound marketing agencies, we believe that inbound marketing is a great way to give visibility to your startup, improve your reputation and increase your sales. If you want us to implement an effective inbound marketing strategy for you, just give us a shout and contact GrowthHackers.