What Is Inbound Marketing? (+5 Strategies)

If you want to attract the attention of your customer base and want them to come to your website, Inbound marketing is one of the best methods. The main focus of this marketing is to create quality and interesting content for all platforms where your business has a presence.

You can market this content through paid means or use it to generate traffic for free and organically. This marketing generally includes sales-oriented strategies. However, they also have purposes other than making a profit. Generally, the aim is to help people and provide content that will solve their problems.

We will explain in detail what Inbound marketing is and what it does.

What Is Inbound Marketing? 

Inbound marketing is a set of strategies that you create to make your target audience loyal to your business in accordance with their needs and demands. Businesses focus on creating tailored marketing experiences for their customers by creating valuable and quality content.

The main purpose of this marketing strategy is to ensure customer participation and contribute to the growth of your business. In Inbound marketing, businesses offer quality and valuable content to their customers throughout the purchasing experience.

Customers can become loyal customers by showing interest in the content. Content people connect to your brand by reading content about the challenges they face.

The main goal of Inbound marketing strategy is to create and maintain strong connections with a customer base. You create content that provides value to people and meets their needs. Then people will have positive feelings about your business and share your content. They come to you when they need the products and services you sell.

Businesses consistently create high-quality content to attract and retain visitors. The aim of Inbound marketing is to keep repeat visitors and increase participation.

Why is Inbound Marketing Important? 

If a social media or internet user finds a particular product or service successful, he shares it with others, his own audience or his close circle. This means a potential customer opportunity for your business.

You can create a cycle where you can attract potential customers without dealing with inbound marketing. When people start talking about your products and services, your brand will gain momentum over time and can become a leading name in its industry.

If you want to reach your target audience effectively and establish a strong interaction, you should integrate Inbound marketing into your marketing strategies. When you create very rich and high-quality content on a subject, your content attracts people with real value. In this way, people become more interested in your brand.

You can implement inbound marketing on various channels such as social media, email, and blog posts. You need to create informative, relatable and interesting content for your potential customers.

You can attract potential customers and grow your business by creating quality content with inbound marketing. Over time, you can gain great momentum and achieve strong business growth.

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing 

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy where you attract potential customers to your website by adding value to people by creating quality content. In this marketing strategy, you create content that will add value to both your customers and your business.

Outbound marketing is a strategy to introduce products and services to your potential customers through text messages and e-mails.

In Inbound marketing, your content matches the searches people make on the internet. If you implement it correctly, you will give people the information they need on your website. If your information is satisfactory, your customer base will grow.

If you have adopted an Outbound marketing strategy, you must have an e-mail or SMS list. You aim to reach people with offers, discounts and surprise campaigns. Although this marketing strategy is effective in attracting customers, its success rate remains low.

Therefore, with the Inbound marketing strategy, you can attract potential customers, convert them into customers, satisfy them and increase the marketing success of your brand.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is becoming a popular strategy among businesses day by day. Inbound marketing, which has many advantages, can help you elevate your brand.

Inbound marketing benefits are as follows;

• Visitors who like your content become loyal to your brand. Businesses that solve customer problems and add value to them then become the customers’ choice when needed.
• The return on investment of Inbound marketing is higher than other strategies. When you create quality content, people can access your content even after years. In this way, you can continue to attract customers with Inbound marketing in the future.
• Potential customers who you provide valuable information about your products and services are more likely to purchase products. That’s why Inbound marketing has high conversion potential.
• If you can measure your Inbound marketing success with professional free and paid tools such as Google Analytics. You can easily track traffic to your website, interaction, conversion rate and many metrics that reveal the success of your strategy. You can have the opportunity to improve your strategy based on this data.
• Inbound marketing is cost-effective in the process of creating and distributing valuable content. Since your business has staff who are experienced in this field, you can distribute your content free of charge from organic social media platforms and your website. Invest in Outbound marketing, especially if you are new to e-commerce or have a limited budget.

The 4 Stages of Inbound Marketing 

A successful Instagram marketing strategy consists of 4 stages;

Attract 

First of all, you need to attract your potential customers with the content you create. To attract people, you must create valuable content and engage with them.

People should want to engage with your brand through the valuable content you create. People should see you as a trusted advisor in this field. With Inbound marketing, you attract the right audience to your website. This audience is the most likely to become your potential customer.

To attract and connect with people, you need to share your valuable content on social media as well. At the same time, with SEO strategy, you can help your target audience find you by learning the topics they search for, their questions and problems.

If you want to reach a wider audience, you can produce video content. You can share these contents on YouTube and other social media platforms.

If you want to attract your audience, you must solve their problems and provide them with value. In this way, you can create a constant flow of potential customers to your brand. In order to attract your audience, you have to produce interesting and valuable content that appeals to them.

For this, you should constantly do keyword and topic research and follow your competitors. After determining your topic, do keyword analysis and learn the word groups that people are searching for. You can then attract potential customers to your website by creating interesting and SEO-compatible content on your website that includes popular problems and topics in your industry.

Convert

Once you attract your potential customer base, you need to convert them into customers. At this point, you need to offer them solutions where they have problems. If you offer successful solutions for your products and services, you can turn them into customers.

Offer the content you promise to the audience who visits your website and reads your content and turn them into a potential customer with solution-oriented quality content. You can offer content such as e-books or webinars to your audience in exchange for them providing your contact information. This way, you can both get contact information and provide content that will influence purchasing decisions.

If you want to personalize your audience with e-mail campaigns, you can offer them solutions based on their interests or past interactions. You can also use chatbots to interact with users visiting your website and find instant and real-time solutions to their problems.

Interact with people through your social media accounts. In this way, improve your relationships and build trust in them. You can create a sense of trust in people by participating in conversations about your industry.

Close

After communicating with your potential customers, you offered them quality content. Now it’s time to get them to buy your products and services.

With rich content, you should convince your potential customers that your products and services solve certain problems. If they believe your products are the best choice to solve their problems, they’ll buy.

You can provide social proof by sharing customer testimonials, case studies, and product reviews to persuade them to buy. You can encourage people to buy by announcing limited-time discounts and promotions.

You can remind users who read your content about their interest in your products and services with targeted e-mail campaigns and retargeting ads. At the same time, simplifying and personalizing the purchasing process also affects purchasing decisions. Additionally, if you maximize customer satisfaction, you can create loyal customers.

Delight

One of the important processes to ensure customer satisfaction is after-sales support. If people can reach you after purchasing your products, they will continue to be happy.

Interact with your customers post-purchase, support them and maintain your relationship. In this way, you can increase customer satisfaction. They can also create customers who are loyal to your brand and become your brand advocates.

Maintain fast post-sale response times and offer personalized customer service support. At the same time, retarget your loyal customers by offering them special deals and promotions.

Encourage your customers to leave reviews on social media platforms and share their experiences with your products on social media. You can collect data through surveys and feedback forms to improve customer experience and improve your marketing efforts.

How to Measure Inbound Marketing Performance?

You can see if you are successful by measuring the performance of your inbound marketing strategy. To do this, you first need to track certain metrics.

The metrics you should look for when measuring inbound marketing performance are as follows;

• The first metric you look at is website traffic. You should track traffic sources such as the number of people visiting your website, organic search and social media. You can monitor your traffic with Google Analytics. If website traffic is increasing, you are successful.
• You should also keep track of the bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of users leaving your website after viewing the page. If this metric is high, it may indicate that you are producing irrelevant and quality content.
• Conversion rate is an important metric in Inbound marketing. This metric represents the percentage of people who complete the action you want. Making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter is considered a conversion.
• Also monitor social media engagement in this marketing. Keep track of the likes, shares and comments on your content on social media.
• Customer retention rate is also an important metric. It shows the percentage of customers you retain over a certain period of time. It provides information about your satisfaction process after the purchase.
• Since inbound marketing is based on producing quality content, you should monitor the SEO ranking of your content in search results. You can use SEO tools for this. If the ranking increases, visibility and traffic also increase in parallel.
• The ultimate goal for businesses is to make sales. Therefore, you can measure inbound marketing success by the number of sales and amount of revenue.

The above metrics give you insight into the success of your inbound marketing strategy and allow you to make new adjustments to your marketing campaign.

5 Inbound Marketing Strategies

Inbound marketing is about producing quality content, focusing on SEO, and disseminating your content through various channels. Let’s discuss the points you need to focus on for successful inbound marketing;

Create High-Quality Content

The most important element of inbound marketing is to produce quality content. You can be successful if you produce the highest quality content in your industry. First of all, your content should be informative. It should include all kinds of details on the relevant subject.

Your content should be interesting. People should read your content, even if it is long. The language and expression in your content should be appropriate to the level of your target audience.

Your content should also contain the keywords your customer base is searching for. Text-only content can be boring. Therefore, it would be good to diversify your content.

Produce content in different types and formats such as infographics, videos, visuals and webinars as well as blog posts.

High-quality content will make it much easier for you in inbound marketing. If your content is not quality and interesting, you cannot be successful.

Optimize Your Website for Search Engines 

In inbound marketing, producing quality content alone is not enough. What you need to do is to make your content visible in search engines.

First of all, your content should not be plagiarized. You need to produce completely original content. In this way, your content can be found and indexed by search engine bots.

In order for your content to reach the right target audience in SERPs, you need to optimize your content for search engines. What you need to do for this is to optimize your content for keywords.

You need to determine the terms your target audience searches for in search engines related to the subject of your content. Be sure to include these terms in your content. In this way, you can get in front of your target audience looking for information online.

If you feature your website on SERPs, you can get higher rankings. This primarily ensures that you get a strong source of traffic for your website. Afterwards, your brand will start to stand out and be recognized by more people.

If you want to do keyword research for inbound marketing, you can use the Dopinger Keyword Rank Checker Tool;

• Log in to https://www.dopinger.com/rank-checker/

• On the screen that appears, enter the website you want to perform keyword analysis on and press the “Check” button.

• At the top, you can examine the number of keywords in the SERP rankings according to a certain date range in the table. You can examine the number of keywords specifically for TOP 1-3-10-30-50-100.

• You can track your keyword count specifically for TOP 1-3-10-30-50-100 below.

• At the bottom you can see which keyword you are ranking for. You can also see the link of the page containing this keyword and reach this page by clicking it. You can also see your SERP rank on the first and last date you set. In this section, the analysis tool also shows you the monthly search volume of the keyword. You can also see the popularity of the keyword on the far right of the line.

Keyword Rank Checker provides all keyword data for users to reach you in search engines.

Promote Your Content on Social Media 

If you produce quality content and optimize it for search engines, you can create a strong traffic source. However, you should not forget to take advantage of the power of social media.

You can deliver your content to many more people with social media. While creating your content, also design special versions for social media. You can create visual or video content in accordance with the structure of the social media application.

Share your content on every social media application and determine some strategies to reach people. First, your followers need to engage with your content. If your content gets likes, comments and views, it will reach more people and you can appeal to more users in Explore.

You can use 4-6 relevant hashtags to make the content you share reach more people. This way, you can appear in many users’ Discover feeds and get people to interact with your content.

You can develop strategies that will enable other social media users to share your content. In this way, your content can reach more people in a short time and achieve higher success.

Build Email Lists 

If you want to increase the success of your inbound marketing strategy, you can create advertising campaigns to create email lists. Build a strong email list in a variety of ways.

Email marketing is very important in creating personalized campaigns and communicating directly with your potential customers without any intermediaries.

As people sign up for your e-mail list, you can provide them with information by producing special content. By creating an e-mail newsletter, you can inform them about every content you share. You can introduce new content and blog posts about your products and services to your email list of potential customers.

If you constantly send content information on a certain schedule, you can attract people and make your brand memorable. In particular, you can promote your content that solves certain problems of people and deliver it directly to an audience that will be willing to buy your products.

Email lists make your brand known to large audiences. At the same time, you can promote your content to people who are directly interested in your products and services. Here, you should constantly expand your email list to grow your audience.

Use Marketing Automation 

Marketing automation is systems that allow you to carry out many tasks in your marketing process with automated systems. Collecting data about your customers, reaching them, and disseminating your content can be time-consuming.

Planning your social media posts, preparing and scheduling email posts, and tracking your website traffic can take a lot of time and expertise during the inbound marketing process. Thanks to marketing automation, the system performs many tasks for you within seconds.

You can save time thanks to marketing automation. You can also automate your inbound marketing process.

It can help you add people to your e-mail list, plan e-mail contents and prepare a sharing calendar. At the same time, it can enable you to deliver an e-mail you have prepared to hundreds or even thousands of people with a single click.

You can also benefit from marketing automation to plan your social media posts and create a sharing calendar. Additionally, if you work with the right automation system, you can share your posts on all social media platforms with a single click and manage your interactions from a center.

Automation systems can also assist you in monitoring your website traffic and tracking performance metrics from inbound marketing. At the same time, these systems provide you with suggestions and insights to improve your marketing efforts.