Intro to inbound marketing
Practical insights and tools to get you started on your inbound marketing journey.
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Everything you need to create a lead-generating, nurturing marketing strategy for your business.
WHAT IS INBOUND MARKETING?
Learn how to generate leads by attracting, engaging and delighting your contacts.
Part 1
WHAT IS OUTBOUND MARKETING?
Outbound marketing is the way people used to market. In days gone by, customers were less informed. After all, there were no Google reviews or social media. Businesses didn't have to compete so hard for attention as there were fewer marketing channels - remember when there were just five TV channels! Outbound marketing works by shouting about what you do, your awards, USP, etc. To be blunt about it, no one really cares, but it's not personal! Consumers now have so many options available to get the information they need - if you're not giving it to them someone else will.
WHAT IS INBOUND MARKETING?
Inbound marketing helps solve your customers' problems by offering them content that adds value (usually for free). It's a philosophy that recognises that not everyone is ready to buy when they first come onto your website. It also recognises that different people will have different needs at different times. As such, inbound marketing seeks to create (and curate) one-to-one relationships that build trust in your business/brand over time. It starts by developing an understanding of who you're trying to connect with. The key to inbound is empathy with your various customers. This allows you to create content that helps solve prospects' challenges, adds value, and positions you as a trusted partner for when they are ready to buy.
If you're new to inbound marketing there are three important principles to remember. Attract. Engage. Delight.
Let's break it down.
You need to be able to ATTRACT visitors to your website. There are may ways to attract visitors, such as PPC ads, social media, SEO and word of mouth. Before you do this, you need to understand what type of visitors you want (preferably the type that turn into customers!). You will start building trust by adding value and providing useful content.
As you build trust, your visitors will start to ENGAGE with more of your content. You will be able to help answer more of their questions and get a deeper understanding of their needs. Hopefully, at some point their needs will result in them paying for your product or service, and voilà you've got a customer!
You then want to DELIGHT your customers with great service so they tell others about you. Which brings us back to attract...
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The Hero's Journey
Another key concept in inbound marketing is the Hero's Journey. Joseph Campbell's concept of the hero’s journey was developed after a lifetime spent studying world mythology. In essence, the hero embarks on a quest that involves numerous trials and challenges. They overcome these difficulties and return home triumphant and transformed. Along the journey they have some help, usually in the form of a wizard or sage (think Gandalf). This advisor helps the hero on their adventure by offering insights and advice, which in turn help the hero grow and fulfil their potential (think Frodo Baggins).
With inbound marketing, the role of the marketing sage falls on your shoulders. Each prospect and customer is on a journey to achieve a set of goals. They may not be aware of where the journey will take them, but your role is to be there as a guide. Why? As a marketer, it's your job to act as this constant guide to educate the heroes. This helps builds trust, and long-term growth for both you and your prospect or customer.
Part 2
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Let's define the five basic elements of Inbound Marketing...
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Contacts. The focus of your marketing efforts.
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Buyer persona. A semi-fictional persona who represents your ideal customer.
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Buyer journey. The research process someone goes on to become a customer.
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Content. Enables you to speak one-to-one to your prospects.
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Goals. What do you want to achieve?
WANT TO INBOUND STRATEGY?
CONTACTS: THE FOCUS OF YOUR INBOUND MARKETING EFFORTS
A contact can be anyone that your organisation interacts with. This means that a contact could be a customer, a prospect, a website visitor, a supplier, an employee - you get the idea. Your job is to provide value to each of these contacts in order to help grow your business. However, they all want different things. This means that you need to be organised.
Your contacts are not a list of names and addresses. They are the people you are building a trust-based relationship with. As such inbound marketing always puts the customer at the centre of everything.
Using segments
As contacts move through the buyer's journey (more on that later), you want to try and capture additional information about them. This helps you to target your content to the right contacts.
Imagine you're responsible for marketing at a subscription-based tea/coffee business. You've got a new coffee blend from the highlands of Papua New Guinea about to come out and you want to build some interest. If you could see all of your contacts face-to-face, you could ask them if they were tea or coffee drinkers (or both).
If they said they only drank herbal tea then you probably wouldn't tell then about your new coffee blend. However, through the process of asking the question you've gathered some interesting customer insights.
Treat your contact database as a place where you store answers to the questions you ask. This will allow you to segment your contacts and send them information that is relevant and useful.
Organising contacts
Using a contact database or a customer relationship management (CRM) tool is an effective way to manage all this information. In an ideal scenario, all business functions (e.g. sales, marketing, customer service, etc.) will be able to access the contact database.
A centralised CRM will help create greater alignment and accountability within the business as it becomes a single source of the truth.
With more data comes a greater ability to target your marketing to the right contacts, with the right message at the right time. This in turn increases the odds of being able to convert contacts to prospects, and prospects to customers.
Contact Audit
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BUYER PERSONAS: A SEMI-FICTIONAL REPRESENTATION OF YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER
The primary reason for thinking about a buyer persona is that you need to understand who it is that you are trying to reach. You might have one or two buyer personas or 10+, depending on your business.
Don't be fooled by vanity metrics; a load of visits to your website from the people who are not target customers (i.e. they not going to buy from you) is pointless.
You need to have a deep understanding of who your ideal customer(s) is/are. Once you know this, you can target your content to reach and resonate with them. This will help drive the right web traffic, resulting in more leads and more customers.
Creating a buyer persona
Step 1: Do your Homework
Start brainstorming ideas about who your ideal customer is. Here are some questions to think about: What can you count? (Quantitative Data) Dig into customer sales records - who are the profitable customers? Are there differences in customer spending patterns? Think about retention and churn rates - how long is a customer a customer? What does it cost to acquire the customer? Is it worth it? How would you measure it? (note - using a tool like HubSpot can help this) How much time do you spend on customer service or call outs? Customers by region/product/service
What can you guess/feel? (Qualitative Data)
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Customer anecdotes or war stories
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Demographics
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Education
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Career path/previous jobs
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Family status
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Where they hang out online (Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc.)
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Behaviours - Are they impulse shoppers or considered purchasers?
Step 2: Understand the Goals and Challenges of your ideal customer
What goals is the buyer persona trying to achieve? Is it work-related such as a sales target, cost reduction, quality improvement, etc.? Is it a personal goal such as getting fit, reading more, or learning to knit? What is motivating them to achieve the goal? Is there an incentive (greater sales = bigger bonus)? Does it help their career? Is it educational? Are they looking to acquire more knowledge? How much do they already know? How much do they want to know? How much do personal goals and professional goals overlap? This is especially significant if your buyer persona owns their own business
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What challenges is the buyer persona trying to overcome?
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Have they got budget constraints?
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Do they have to achieve a target with limited resources?
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Are they under time pressure?
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Do they have to convince others of the merit of a particular course of action? Where do they sit in the decision-making process?
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Can they clearly articulate their challenge or is it complex?
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Step 3: How do we help solve the goals and overcome the challenges
What is our value proposition? How do we help the buyer persona? What do we bring to the party? What role are we playing? Advisor, coach, mentor, problem-solver, facilitator, etc. What benefits do our products/service provide to the buyer persona? What makes these valuable? How do our benefits help the buyer persona achieve their goals/overcome challenges? Why are we different compared to other potential solutions/companies the buyer persona could use?
Step 4: Get the messaging right
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What are the common objections raised?
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Why wouldn't they buy your service/product?
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Why do you lose prospects? (Price/Quality/Delivery)
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Are objections factual (e.g. you're too expensive) or emotional (e.g. I don't like your product)? What are your marketing messages? How do we describe our product/service to the buyer persona?
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Do we focus on cost? Quality? Technical features? Time saving? What channels does your persona exist on? Think about where they work/rest/play. A persona may respond differently to the same product when scrolling through Instagram in the evening, compared to a LinkedIn post during work hours (or vice versa) - it depends on you target persona!
Use our buyer persona canvas
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BUYER JOURNEY: THE RESEARCH PROCESS TO BECOMING A CUSTOMER
Whether you realise it or not, you've almost certainly been on a buyer's journey.
This is the active research process you go through before you make a purchase. Think about the last time you bought a car, TV, laptop, takeaway - you get the idea! You had a need, you were made aware of some solutions, considered their various pros and cons, and then made a decision.
Each interaction your business has with one of its buyer personas should be designed to suit where they are in the buyer's journey. This allows you to create the right content for where your buyer persona is on their journey from awareness to purchase.
How do you go through the three steps in the buyer's Journey?
Awareness
You might have a problem or opportunity that you're not quite sure what to do with. You start to do research to get a better understanding of the situation, and define it. Example: I'm in the market for a new car. I'm going to go for a fully electric vehicle.
Consideration
Now you've defined your problem or opportunity, you can start to consider options. You start to do research and analyse the various ways you can solve the problem/opportunity. Example: I need to look at all EV makes available in the UK, charging locations, etc.
Decision
You've now decided on a given approach. You start a process of compiling lists of options. You then go through a few rounds of refining the list until you reach a decision to purchase. Example: I like the Model X, i-Pace, and e-tron. I think I'll go with the i-Pace.
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CONTENT: TALKING TO YOUR PROSPECTS
If you want to stand any chance of attracting, engaging, and delighting people, you need great content. Let's be honest. Not many people who come across your website really care about your company's latest award/new hire/charity walk. They have an issue that needs to be solved and they are looking for things that help them. It's likely that you'll already have some content hanging about. The first question to ask is, "does it add value?". Does your website offer them the tools they need? Have you got guides, templates, testimonials, blogs, videos available to help the heroes?
Great content should engage, educate, and entertain your website visitors!
Creating content
Before you start creating content it's good to take stock of what marketing material you already have.
Do a content audit to map out what marketing materials you're already producing. Here's a few things to think about: Can we re-purpose existing content into another format? Is our content time sensitive (like a newsletter?) or evergreen? What types of content are your competitors creating? When your audit is finished you should have a good idea of what state your marketing content is in. You'll know what you've got but most importantly, what content you need to create. If you are stretched for time and/or resources, think about how you can leverage your content (see inbound insight).
Leveraging content and expertise
- Find an expert on a particular topic (there will be at least a few of these in any business).
- Interview them about a topic your buyer persona will be interested in. Video the interview.
- Edit the video into 2-3 minute clips. Transcribe the video clips and turn into blogs.
- Create 2-3 social media posts to promote the blog/video.
- From a one hour interview, you can get ten 2-3 minute clips, ten blogs, 20-30 social posts.
Getting the context right
If you've got a deep understanding of your buyer persona, you'll be able to better position your content in the right context. Your content needs to be tailored to your buyer persona. However, it also needs to be appropriate for where your prospect is in the Buyer's Journey.
AWARENESS
- Reports
- Ebooks
- Whitepapers
- Editorial content
- PPC
- Educational content
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Referral
CONSIDERATION
- Expert guides
- Video
- Podcasts
- Infographics
- Forums
- Webinars
DECISION
- Demos
- Live trials
- Competitor comparisons
- ROI Calculators
- Testimonials
- Awards
How do you go through the three steps in the buyer's Journey?
Awareness
You might have a problem or opportunity that you're not quite sure what to do with. You start to do research to get a better understanding of the situation, and define it. Example: I'm in the market for a new car. I'm going to go for a fully electric vehicle.
Consideration
Now you've defined your problem or opportunity, you can start to consider options. You start to do research and analyse the various ways you can solve the problem/opportunity. Example: I need to look at all EV makes available in the UK, charging locations, etc.
Decision
You've now decided on a given approach. You start a process of compiling lists of options. You then go through a few rounds of refining the list until you reach a decision to purchase. Example: I like the Model X, i-Pace, and e-tron. I think I'll go with the i-Pace.
CREATE YOUR BUYER PERSONA
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GOALS: WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE?
Goal setting is a key part of the inbound marketing fundamentals. If you don't know what you want to achieve, then it's not that likely you'll achieve anything of significance. Setting goals provides focus and clarity of purpose for when you create your content.
As most goals will have a sales component (after all, getting paying customers is the name of the game), they help to align sales and marketing efforts. They also help the marketing team align their efforts with the overall business strategy.
Using SMART goals gives you a framework for checking that your efforts will be measurable and directed correctly. They also act as a great way to check the sanity of your goals. You want them to be sufficiently stretched but rooted in reality. That being said, if you aim for the stars, you might hit the ceiling.
SMART GOALS
SPECIFIC - Make sure that there is a clearly defined objective.
MEASURABLE - Know what metrics you'll use to evaluate whether the goal is achieved.
ACHIEVABLE - can the goal be achieved within the constraints of your situation
RELAVENT - Does it make sense to pursue this goal?
TIME-BOUND - Make sure the goal has a clearly defined end point.
Example SMART Goal: Increase online sales by £500k per year (double from £1m to £2m in two years).
Measuring goals
First and foremost, don't get hung up on vanity metrics. Ten thousand likes on an Instagram post might make you feel good, but does it result in leads and customers? If not, you might want to re-think what you're putting your efforts into. The old sayings, such as "50% of my marketing works, I'm just not sure which 50%" are pretty much consigned to the history books. With so many analytical tools available, there's hardly any excuses for not knowing what is or isn't working with your marketing efforts. Data-led decision making is the future!
- Start with the end in mind - know what you are aiming at and work backwards from that point.
- Define what success looks like.
- Have systems in place to track the results.
- Plan slow, fail fast. Diarise your data reviews.
- Use our template below!
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SUPERCHARGE YOUR INBOUND MARKETING