Traditionally, marketing has consisted of mostly outbound activities.

The primary strategy consisted of methods like,

buying ads, email lists, and then aggressively pursuing those leads.

These activities would take you directly to your customer.

For awhile now, these activities are being replaced in favor of inbound marketing.

Rather than going out to the customer, inbound marketing,

tries to bring the customer to us.

HubSpot a top notch resource for inbound marketing puts it well.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content

that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be.

By aligning the content you publish with your customer's interests, you naturally

attract inbound traffic that you can then convert, close and delight over time.

The goal of inbound marketing is to take them through the following phases.

Attract strangers to our website,

convert these visitors into leads, close the leads and

make them customers, and finally, delight them into being promoters for our service.

In this stage of the business, we are going to focus on attracting and

converting people so that we can get them into our sales funnel.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating and sharing content with as much people as

possible, in an attempt to attract customers who fit our customer archetypes.

The content created, is crafted to appeal to our ideal customer archetypes,

in the hope that we attract more qualified prospects, who convert to leads, and

bring in more business.

The goal of inbound marketing, is to attract customers to our website.

We don't want to just attract any and every person on the web however.

We want to invest our efforts into bringing in the right traffic to our site.

What does right traffic mean?

It means people who have a higher chance of successfully going through our funnel.

These people are those who are interested in our product or service, and over time

are easier to convert from visitors to leads and eventually to paying customers.

Acquisition strategies through inbound marketing can be

broken down into the following activities,

content marketing through activities like blogging or podcasting.

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to bring visitors to your website.

Produce educational content that targets the kinds of information that your

ideal customers are looking for and you can build a constant flow of traffic.

Now I mean easy, in that it's fairly easy to start a blog and

write, publishing good content consistently is definitely not easy.

And you have to keep in mind that you're playing the long game.

You won't see results immediately.

Social media, similar to blogging, the goal with social media is to

share great content that provides valuable information to your customers.

In addition, social media lets you engage with your customer base, and

be a bit more personable.

You can interact, guide and

delight your customers in various ways through social media.

Search engine optimization.

For customers to find you,

you have to start where they start, by using a search engine.

Invest in search engine optimization, so that when customers search for

the right keywords, your website and

content is optimized so that you show up at the top as well.

The audience for these activities are the customer archetypes we developed in our

discovery stage.

Once we have these customers on our site,

the next step of our inbound marketing process should be

to convert these customers to leads by gathering their contact information.

This contact information will enable you to engage them and

convert them into paying customers.

Activation tools consist of calls to action.

Since our goal is to get our customer's contact information,

we need to encourage our customers to do so through a call to action.

This call to action does not have to be a traditional sign-up form.

In exchange for this information, we can give our customers something in return,

like valuable content in the form of e-books, downloadable assets, and so

on depending on what is useful for your target audience.

Next up are our landing pages.

When a user clicks a call to action,

they end up on a landing page where they submit information that we can use.

We need to optimize these landing pages to convert our visitors to leads.

We do that by using forms.

To make it super easy for our customers to give us their information,

we need to optimize our forms to make the conversion process as smooth as possible.

So that's the big picture on an inbound marketing strategy.

Let's look at each part in more detail.