Inbound Marketing

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