What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing are a group of online techniques that makes it easier for your target to find you, become interested in your business and trust you in the purchasing process.

What you’re looking for with Inbound Marketing is to establish trustworthy relationships between a brand and its potential clients or customers.

That’s a perfect way to be closer to your customers.

When the time you have something new to offer comes you’ll have gained their trust and they’ll be more willing to buy. They won’t see you as just a simple seller.

Inbound Marketing is different from old-school marketing because those techniques are not intrusive nor aggressive. Inbound Marketing wants to attract your target in a more natural way. They are not only buyers to you. You want them to fall in love with your brand.

Is Inbound Marketing just a trend?

Not at all. Inbound Marketing should not only be perceived as a set of digital marketing techniques or as a new trend.

Inbound Marketing is a paradigm shift, a new way of understanding the relationship between brands and consumers.

The time when brands seek new clients in an aggressive and way-too-obvious way is over.

Thanks to Inbound Marketing it will be the clients who will find brands and will decide whether they want to establish a relationship with them or not, according to their own interests.

The 4 phases of Inbound Marketing

In any strategy based on Inbound Marketing we must take into account the four consumer stages: This way you'll be able to decide what to offer at any moment, depending on their needs.

Attraction

The first stage consists on the potential customer or client finding the brand. It is not about being intrusive, but to let them see that the company has something to offer that is of interest to the target. The goal is to draw attention naturally. The tools you have to do so are:

• Creating Value Content
  
• Social media
  
• SEO
  

Conversion

This is the stage in which we look for a way to directly contact with the potential customer. This is called to generate leads. What we are looking for in this stage is to get contact data from potential customers through the offering of some kind of free content that may be interesting for them: an ebook, a webinar, a course, a tutorial… The tools we have to convert visitors to leads are:

• Landing pages
  
• Forms
  
• Call to Actions
  
• And, to sum it up, websites that aim to convert
  

Sale

This is the stage in which a lead is converted into a customer. What you have to do at this stage is to help the future client decide. You have to create content that helps them see that your offer is better than anyone else's. The tools to accomplish that are:

• Testimonials
  
• Case studies
  
• Videos
  
• Emails
  

Customer loyalty

Once the customer has already purchased, you might want them to be a consumer motivator of your brand. In order to do so you have to care for the relationship you’ve created with your consumer. Make them feel special. Let them feel like you’re there for them –and be there for them, indeed! The tools you have to accomplish it are:

• Personalised Emails
  
• After-sales service
  
• Tutorials and practical tips
  
• Exclusive Webinars
  

To sum it up: What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is a set of consumer-oriented marketing techniques.

It is a way of working that respects the customer life cycle and seeks to create bonds with them beyond the purely commercial relationship.

Inbound Marketing makes people gain interest and fall in love with brands.