What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.
Sign up for a free inbound marketing course
What Is the Inbound Methodology?
The Inbound Methodology in Marketing
What Is the Inbound Methodology?
The inbound methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.
Why? Because when your customers succeed, you succeed.
The inbound methodology can be applied in three ways:
Attract: drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
Engage: presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals so they are more likely to buy from you.
Delight: providing help and support to empower your customers to find success with their purchase.
When customers find success and share that success with others, it attracts new prospects to your organization, creating a self-sustaining loop. This is how your organization builds momentum, and this is why the inbound methodology serves as a strong foundation for your flywheel.
The flywheel is a business model adopted by HubSpot to illustrate the momentum your organization can gain by prioritizing and delivering exceptional customer experience.
You can spin and build momentum in your flywheel by investing in strategies that acquire and retain customers — forces for your flywheel.
On the other hand, anything that slows your flywheel is friction. Often the biggest sources of friction for your customers come in the handoffs between teams, so alignment and communication between teams are key to keeping your flywheel spinning.
When your flywheel is based on the inbound methodology, your marketing, sales, and service functions can add force and eliminate friction throughout the attract, engage, and delight phases. All organizational functions are also responsible for removing friction from your flywheel.
For example, in the attract phase, marketing will likely play the biggest role by doing things like blogging, event marketing, and running paid ads, but your sales team can also add force by engaging in social selling, and your customer service team can add force by making it easier for current customers to make referrals.
Once you attain enough customers and engage and delight them, they can keep your flywheel spinning by promoting your organization and bringing new customers to you. Over time, your flywheel allows you to grow without continually investing in customer acquisition.
Let’s unpack some more inbound marketing strategies.
Inbound Marketing Strategies
These strategies will help you effectively market to your target audience the inbound way. Below, you’ll see there are specific strategies for each inbound method of attracting, engaging, and delighting consumers to keep your flywheel spinning and help your business grow better.
Attracting StrategiesInbound marketing strategies that attract your target audience and buyer personas are tied to content creation and development.
To reach your audience, start by creating and publishing content — such as blog articles, content offers, and social media — that provide value. Examples include guides on how to use your products, information about how your solution can solve their challenges, customer testimonials, and details about promotions or discounts.
To attract your audience members on a deeper level through inbound marketing, optimize all of this content with an SEO strategy. An SEO strategy will require you to target specific keywords and phrases related to your products or services, the challenges you solve for customers, and the ways you help target audience members.