Inbound marketing is made up of four stages that represent each phase of the customer's purchasing cycle. The purpose of segmenting this process into different stages is to be able to create and share valuable content specifically focused on each phase of inbound marketing , in order to connect and accompany the customer on their path to the sale. Let's find out what the four stages of inbound marketing are and what they are about:
Attraction: This is the first phase of the inbound marketing methodology. how overseas chinese contribute to business in the usa It is focused on implementing techniques and actions that manage to capture the attention of the brand's ideal client or buyer persona , with the purpose of attracting visits to the brand's website from the different digital channels it has. In short, this stage focuses on getting the target audience to discover the brand. Some techniques used in this phase are organic positioning or SEO, social media, social media advertising campaigns, and content marketing.
Conversion: When a person belonging to our target audience discovers the brand, explores the digital channels and consumes content from the website, we can say that said person is a visitor. In this second stage of inbound marketing, the objective is to get that visitor to become a lead , that is, a contact or prospect who has shown interest in the brand and has provided information to a database by downloading content such as ebooks, webinars, templates, among others.
This advancement in the stages of inbound marketing will allow the company to segment and personalize the information and content it sends to the prospect much more, in order to convert them into a client. Some tools implemented in this phase are calls to action , forms to capture data, landing pages, websites and remarketing.
Closing: At this stage, efforts are focused on achieving the sale, which is why it is essential to strengthen the support to the prospect throughout the purchase cycle until he is ready to make the conversion. This phase is supported and complemented by a series of tools that help make decisions regarding the content that will be provided to the prospects, among which two stand out:
Lead scoring: the objective of this tool is to score the actions that the prospect performs on the website, in order to identify whether he or she is ready to complete the purchase or requires content that reinforces the decision-making process.
Lead nurturing: the purpose of this technique is to identify the specific content that the potential client requires in order to nourish and complement the information they have about the brand's products, leading to an increase in interest and conversion.
Other tools that are implemented in this phase are CRM Customer Relationship Management, workflows or automation flows and Email marketing.
Loyalty: the inbound marketing process does not end with the sale. For this methodology, loyalty is the real closure, focusing on maintaining the customer-brand relationship with consumers, through actions focused on satisfaction and dissemination of valuable information and benefits about products and services. Some techniques used in this stage are social networks, email marketing, workflows, lead scoring and lead nurturing.
You can also learn about Affiliate Marketing here
How to run an inbound marketing campaign?
Now that you know what inbound marketing is , what its benefits and stages are, it's time for you to delve deeper into the practice and learn how to run an inbound marketing campaign .
Create and define the brand's buyer persona: the first thing you need to know is what a buyer persona is; this concept refers to a brand's ideal customer. It is different from the target audience in that the buyer persona is a specific and very complete profile of the type of customer a brand wants to reach, while the target audience focuses on a general group of customers.
Creating a buyer persona allows the brand to give a more realistic shape to the type of client it is looking for. To define the buyer persona, personal and professional aspects such as name, age, sex, location, tastes, weaknesses, pains, hobbies, profession, occupation, aspirations, desires, concerns, among others, must be taken into account.
Define the objectives: in this step you will define the bases of your inbound marketing strategy, the recommendation is to define objectives with the SMART approach :
(S) Specific: define clearly and exactly what you want to achieve.
(M) Measurable: the progress of the strategy can be measured, that is, how to know that what was proposed was achieved.
(A) Achievable: Set attainable and achievable goals.
(R) Relevant: level of importance for the company
(T) Time: set a deadline for achieving the objectives
Study and analyze the buyer persona's purchasing process: knowing the buyer journey or customer purchasing cycle will be crucial to the success of an inbound marketing campaign, which is why it is important to know each part of the process (discovery, consideration, decision and action) to know how the customer behaves at each stage and what their needs are.
Establish the purchasing process for the real customer: after defining your buyer persona and what their purchasing cycle could be, you will be ready to define and design the purchasing process for your real customers. At this point, you should plan and deploy the techniques and tools that you will implement in each phase of inbound marketing (attraction, conversion, closing and loyalty). At this point, it is important to always keep in mind the needs of the ideal customer in order to establish techniques that respond to them.
Define the content strategy: this is the phase where the techniques proposed in the purchasing process are materialized. To define a successful content strategy, it is very important, as we have highlighted throughout this article, that the content and products always focus on the customer, their needs and tastes.
At this point you should evaluate content formats, themes to define and topics to develop, you should also take into account the digital channels in which the content will be shared, the language, the tone of the messages and the information. Remember that each stage of inbound marketing requires specific content.
The key to making a content strategy work within inbound marketing is to generate the right content, at the right time.
Establish actions to attract organic SEO traffic: having valuable, varied and segmented content is very important, but even more important is that said content can be found when searching on the web. To do this, it is important that the inbound marketing campaign considers and implements SEO optimization, both for the brand's website in general, and for the content published on it.
Establish actions such as lists of keywords that allow you to work on the SEO positioning of the brand in search engines. You can also support the generation of traffic through social networks and collaborations between brands or influencers in the same sector.
Implement planned campaigns: While organic positioning work is very valuable, it is also true that its results are not immediate, which can cause delays in reflecting the achievement of the stated objectives. Therefore, it is recommended that within the inbound marketing strategy, valuable and high-quality content and topics be defined that are intended to be part of planned campaigns, both on social networks and in search engines.
Automate marketing actions: This is an automatic process that you can program through tools such as HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, among others. These platforms will help in the automatic sending of personalized content to users who have previously shown interest and shared their information through database forms. Techniques such as lead scoring and lead nurturing are very helpful here.
Real-time analysis and reporting: Finally, this last point refers to establishing management indicators that allow the analysis and evaluation of the effectiveness of the inbound marketing campaign, providing the possibility of optimizing it, modifying or eliminating those aspects that are not working, and enhancing those actions that are yielding results.
Recommended KPIs to evaluate include organic visits, leads or registrations, visit-to-lead conversion rate, number of potential customers, and lead-to-potential customer conversion rate.
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