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Rather than use standard marketing strategies that aggresively pursue the customer, we're going to talk about inbound marketing and how we can create quality content that pushes our customers towards our product or service.
Traditionally, marketing has consisted of
mostly outbound activities.
0:00
The primary strategy consisted of methods
like,
0:05
buying ads, email lists, and then
aggressively pursuing those leads.
0:08
These activities would take you directly
to your customer.
0:12
For awhile now, these activities are being
replaced in favor of inbound marketing.
0:16
Rather than going out to the customer,
inbound marketing,
0:20
tries to bring the customer to us.
0:24
HubSpot a top notch resource for inbound
marketing puts it well.
0:26
Inbound marketing focuses on creating
quality content
0:30
that pulls people toward your company and
product, where they naturally want to be.
0:34
By aligning the content you publish with
your customer's interests, you naturally
0:39
attract inbound traffic that you can then
convert, close and delight over time.
0:44
The goal of inbound marketing is to take
them through the following phases.
0:50
Attract strangers to our website,
0:54
convert these visitors into leads, close
the leads and
0:57
make them customers, and finally, delight
them into being promoters for our service.
1:01
In this stage of the business, we are
going to focus on attracting and
1:07
converting people so that we can get them
into our sales funnel.
1:10
Inbound marketing focuses on creating and
sharing content with as much people as
1:15
possible, in an attempt to attract
customers who fit our customer archetypes.
1:20
The content created, is crafted to appeal
to our ideal customer archetypes,
1:25
in the hope that we attract more qualified
prospects, who convert to leads, and
1:30
bring in more business.
1:34
The goal of inbound marketing, is to
attract customers to our website.
1:37
We don't want to just attract any and
every person on the web however.
1:41
We want to invest our efforts into
bringing in the right traffic to our site.
1:45
What does right traffic mean?
1:49
It means people who have a higher chance
of successfully going through our funnel.
1:51
These people are those who are interested
in our product or service, and over time
1:56
are easier to convert from visitors to
leads and eventually to paying customers.
2:01
Acquisition strategies through inbound
marketing can be
2:06
broken down into the following activities,
2:09
content marketing through activities like
blogging or podcasting.
2:12
Blogging is one of the easiest ways to
bring visitors to your website.
2:16
Produce educational content that targets
the kinds of information that your
2:20
ideal customers are looking for and you
can build a constant flow of traffic.
2:24
Now I mean easy, in that it's fairly easy
to start a blog and
2:29
write, publishing good content
consistently is definitely not easy.
2:32
And you have to keep in mind that you're
playing the long game.
2:36
You won't see results immediately.
2:39
Social media, similar to blogging, the
goal with social media is to
2:42
share great content that provides valuable
information to your customers.
2:46
In addition, social media lets you engage
with your customer base, and
2:50
be a bit more personable.
2:54
You can interact, guide and
2:56
delight your customers in various ways
through social media.
2:58
Search engine optimization.
3:02
For customers to find you,
3:04
you have to start where they start, by
using a search engine.
3:06
Invest in search engine optimization, so
that when customers search for
3:09
the right keywords, your website and
3:13
content is optimized so that you show up
at the top as well.
3:15
The audience for these activities are the
customer archetypes we developed in our
3:19
discovery stage.
3:24
Once we have these customers on our site,
3:25
the next step of our inbound marketing
process should be
3:28
to convert these customers to leads by
gathering their contact information.
3:30
This contact information will enable you
to engage them and
3:35
convert them into paying customers.
3:39
Activation tools consist of calls to
action.
3:42
Since our goal is to get our customer's
contact information,
3:46
we need to encourage our customers to do
so through a call to action.
3:49
This call to action does not have to be a
traditional sign-up form.
3:53
In exchange for this information, we can
give our customers something in return,
3:57
like valuable content in the form of
e-books, downloadable assets, and so
4:02
on depending on what is useful for your
target audience.
4:06
Next up are our landing pages.
4:10
When a user clicks a call to action,
4:12
they end up on a landing page where they
submit information that we can use.
4:14
We need to optimize these landing pages to
convert our visitors to leads.
4:19
We do that by using forms.
4:24
To make it super easy for our customers to
give us their information,
4:26
we need to optimize our forms to make the
conversion process as smooth as possible.
4:30
So that's the big picture on an inbound
marketing strategy.
4:35
Let's look at each part in more detail.
4:39
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