What is inbound marketing? What you need to know

Inbound Marketing is still quite new and unfamiliar to many people. But it is an ideal, highly rated trend that many people trust when building a marketing strategy. Learning what Inbound Marketing is, along with related knowledge about Inbound Marketing helps us understand it fully and apply it effectively and accurately. Read on with Mona Media in the article below.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is a strategy that draws customers to your business on their own through useful content and valuable experiences, which generates leads and drives conversion. Unlike Outbound, which “goes looking” for customers, Inbound makes customers find the brand themselves, contributing to sustainable growth.

Today, Inbound Marketing uses many forms of marketing, the most typical being blogs, events or SEO, Content Marketing, or social media. Every activity aims at the same end goal: building awareness and understanding of the brand, which makes it easier for each business to attract potential customers.

As many as 90% of businesses choose SEO as their form of Marketing online to grow Traffic, build brand awareness and convert revenue sustainably. With this approach, a business spends no money on advertising yet can reach more than 80% of the world's internet users through Google.

What is Outbound Marketing?

Outbound Marketing is a marketing strategy in which a business actively reaches out and “pushes” its message to potential customers rather than waiting for them to come. When running Outbound Marketing, advertisers use traditional channels such as TV, newspapers, magazines and other media to reach and attract potential customers. With the growth of the internet, though, Outbound Marketing has become more widespread through email marketing, social media ads and website ads.

What is the difference between Inbound and Outbound Marketing?

How each approaches customers

Inbound Marketing focuses on getting customers to learn about the business through engaging content. Outbound Marketing, in contrast, actively appears in front of customers even when they haven't searched for information about the brand's products or services. Outbound Marketing also covers many traditional forms of advertising, such as ads on TV, in newspapers and magazines, and direct outreach to customers by phone calls or email marketing. Inbound Marketing generally uses online tools such as SEO, blogs, social media and email to create engaging content for potential customers more naturally, and helps you increase interaction and convert conversion rate customers.

Example: Ads that appear in the middle of a TV show or film. This can annoy viewers, who have to take in information they aren't interested in. Worse, viewers switch channels or turn off the TV whenever ads come on.

How the content is delivered

Outbound marketing puts about 80% of its information directly on the product and only 20% on useful content. Inbound marketing does the opposite: it builds useful content on many topics in your industry, to look after and nurture potential customers.

In other words, besides the basic product information (10 – 20% of all content website), inbound marketing adds related content that covers more ground. This content is not tied directly to your sales goals, yet it helps you reach and nurture potential customers.

Example: Say your business sells air fryers. With inbound marketing, you could publish a series of related articles like these to win more attention from readers:

• Pros and cons of using an air fryer
• What to look for when buying an air fryer
• How to clean an air fryer…

Purpose

Inbound and outbound marketing share the same goal: driving business activity and bringing in customers.

Outbound Marketing uses every method to push as much information as possible at users to get their attention and turn them into leads. The weakness is that it does not target the people who actually want the product, and advertising campaigns cost a lot.

Example: A company buys a list of about 100 phone numbers from a third party for an outbound campaign. Calling each person to pitch the product is very hard, because there is no way to know who actually needs it. The outbound effort goes to waste, and the company can only hope that at least one person on the list is interested.

A website, on the other hand, is Inbound Marketing focuses on providing useful information to attract people who already need the product or service. This saves you advertising costs while still bringing in good leads and sales.

SEO is an inbound marketing method that reaches customers effectively without costing much. SEO finds potential customers through a list of keywords. Compared with Google Ads, you do not pay for every click on an ad. Many clients switched to SEO after 5-6 months of Google Ads to save money.

→ See more: SEO or Google Ads: which advertising method works best?

There was a period when Hùng only focused on doing good work for existing clients and waited for them to refer new ones. After a while it became clear that this was not enough for the company to grow steadily. Watch the video to see the 7 ways MONA has used to find clients more reliably.

Benefits of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is well regarded because it helps a business look more attractive, credible and respected. Customers do not feel they are being sold to; they take in information about your business, products or services naturally. People trust inbound marketing for the benefits it brings:

Keeps costs under control

Inbound marketing is known as an online marketing strategy that draws in a large audience at a reasonable cost, and more businesses trust it every year. It links your marketing activities through channels and tools that carry information well, such as video, your website and social media.

By combining content creation, search engine optimization of your website, advertising and more, inbound marketing widens your reach and attracts people interested in your product. Using several channels together also lets you spend each campaign budget better. And do not forget to invest in skilled, professional people so your campaigns get the best results.

Reaches customers effectively

Outbound marketing reaches customers in a scattered, uncontrolled way and wastes resources. Inbound marketing solves this. By focusing on a specific group of potential customers, your advertising attracts users better and avoids waste.

Inbound marketing is flexible and does not force information on anyone. Customers choose for themselves whether to read what you publish. This changes how people experience advertising and sets a new direction for content marketing: ads that do not irritate or put people off, and that reach customers naturally, effectively and with focus.

SEO and inbound marketing together can bring a project results beyond what you expected.

Lasting results

By nature, inbound marketing does not deliver results right away; it delivers them gradually and for a long time. When people find quality content that fits their real needs and interests, they are more likely to take action.

Combined well with other marketing tools, inbound marketing brings strong, lasting results and clear benefits to your business.

→ See more: What is a marketing funnel? How to build a marketing funnel for your business

The 4 core stages of an Inbound Marketing strategy

Stage 1 (Attract): attract customers

To make your Inbound Marketing campaign a success, the first step is to become “visible” to potential customers on online channels like Google and social media. To attract customers from the first look, take these steps:

• Build a buyer persona: A buyer persona is more than a label for your target customer. It is a process of understanding your customers' insights in depth. With a clear picture of who they are, you understand their needs, wants and concerns better. To build an accurate persona, study your target audience closely to define their characteristics, personality and buying habits, then create highly personalized shopping experiences.
• Map the customer journey (customer journey): An important step that shows how to move customers along and improve your chances of success. Study how customers buy, from first contact with the product to completing the purchase. Then identify the barriers that stop customers from moving to the next step and help them get past those barriers by improving the buying experience, making the product or service more appealing, and using more effective marketing tactics.

Once you have your customer persona and understand customer behavior, look for the right touchpoints for that “first meeting” with customers. Consider these main activities:

Blogging: start with useful content

Build a blog on your website to put useful information in front of potential customers:

• 71% of B2B buyers look for information on a company's website while making a decision.
• B2B brands that focus on growing their blog content usually have a ROI 13 times higher.
• 84% of customers expect practical, useful content that helps them solve their problems (Meaningful Brands).

SEO: put useful content on the first page of Google

Do SEO for your website so search engines bring people to it naturally, which also builds credibility:

• 93% of online experiences start with a search
• Organic search accounts for 51% of website traffic
• 57% of businesses B2B say SEO generates more leads than any other marketing channel (Junto)
• SEO is 5.66 times more effective than SEM and other advertising (New Media Campaigns)
• 61% of marketers rate SEO as their top priority when running inbound marketing (HubSpot)

Mona Media ranks #1 for the Vietnamese keyword “thiết kế website” (website design)

If you are interested in SEO services take a look at Mona Media. We are proud to be a leading agency in in website SEO. MONA has delivered 300+ projects successfully for clients. Call HOTLINE 1900 636 648 for SEO strategy consulting that fits them for free, 24/7.

Social media: spread that useful content

Build content about your business on social networks to reach a large number of potential customers:

• Facebook gives the highest ROI, but only 18% of brands use Facebook groups well (HubSpot)
• LinkedIn has 61 million users in management roles, 40 million of whom influence or make decisions in their companies. 44% of LinkedIn users visit every day! (Sourcecon)

Stage 2 (Convert): reach customers

To get potential customers to leave their contact details, plant a seed of curiosity about the benefits of your product or service. For proactive prospects, this may be the moment to close the sale. For more passive customers, offer useful solutions and information in exchange for their contact details. For example: documents, reports, guides, webinar sign-ups, webinar or a free demo trial.

To succeed at this stage, pay attention to these key factors:

• Optimize your sales landing page: This helps you reach potential customers, widen your audience and raise the rate at which visitors become customers. With a good layout and compelling copy, you catch visitors' interest and lead them to the sales page, then encourage them to buy. So make sure your site has UX/UI design that is smooth, friendly, easy to use and easy to fill in.
• Optimize your call to action (CTA): focus on the design, the wording and the value you offer. A weak CTA wastes all the effort that came before it. Also make sure you offer benefits that suit your target customer at each stage. A CTA for a 30% discount (a closing offer) shown to someone who is still researching will not work. So keep testing your CTAs and refining them until they work. For example:
  • Put a CTA on your landing page so customers can learn more about your products and services.
  • Put a CTA that offers free documents, event sign-ups and so on to reach new customers.
  • Put a CTA to leave contact details on your social channels.
  • Put a CTA for customers to register directly on your website, for people who really want to buy.

• Optimize your sign-up form: After visiting the landing page, customers reach the sign-up form. To optimize it, keep it short but focused on the key information, and state the benefits they get for signing up. Do not stop at name, email and phone number; add questions that sort people by persona or show where they are in the customer journey.

Collecting customer details is one of the most important steps. It helps a lot in later stages, such as customer care, maintaining relationships and turning leads into loyal customers.

Stage 3 (Close): look after customers

By the end of stage 2, you have built a list of quality leads, but to turn them into real buyers, you need to build trust with customers through free trials where they can check product quality, and equip yourself with the following tools to close the sale at the right moment:

Customer relationship management (CRM) software

CRM can be seen as a data management and customer care system. A CRM works like this:

• It connects marketing, sales and customer care so customers get a smooth experience from one shared data system. The CRM gathers all the information and behavior of each customer being advised.
• It evaluates the chance that a lead will convert, based on their online behavior. When customers interact with an article, email or ad, you can tell who is more likely to buy and focus on serving them more professionally to improve the chance of conversion.

Marketing automation

The Marketing Automation saves time and effort in managing customers by sending emails automatically and nurturing leads at each stage. It also improves your marketing strategy by automating processes from email to Remarketing, based on analytics from the CRM about personas, customer journeys and how customers interact.

4 main types of marketing automation scenarios in the Close stage:

• Contact based: focuses on customer details (age, occupation, marital status, etc.), notes from the sales team (interests, needs, finances, etc.) and interaction behavior stored in the CRM.
• Company based: focuses on the characteristics of the company where the lead works (location, size, industry, etc.)
• Deal based: predicts scenarios in the buying process and the conversion funnel.
• Ticket based: focuses on product data, priority groups and production dates to work out what customers need and to understand problems that come up with the product.

Stage 4 (Delight): bring customers back

Using lead information from stage 2, you can identify where each customer is in the buying process and run inbound marketing more effectively. From there you build closing, nurturing and care strategies based on how customers convert along the way.

Closing strategy

To close sales from the contact details on sign-up forms or social channels, you need to:

• Pass the details to the sales team so they can contact customers and advise on products and services directly.
• Use a CRM so staff can track and manage each customer's stage.
• Group leads into: (1) those who have become customers, (2) those who have a need but have not bought, (3) those who cannot convert into customers yet.
• Launch attractive promotions to raise the chance of closing orders and push leads near the end of the sales funnel to convert.

Nurturing strategy

The group that needs long-term nurturing includes customers whose details you have collected but who did not buy during the closing stage. It also includes people who signed up for free documents or webinars. To nurture this group, use several channels, such as:

• CTA Smart CTAs: Smart CTAs help inbound marketers get customers' attention and raise conversion rates by sending messages and offers that fit the buyer's profile and their exact stage in the buying process.
• Marketing automation: To save effort, use email marketing automation software, where customers sign up and receive documents automatically. You can also install auto-reply tools such as chatbots or tawk.to on your website, which cut response times and make it easier for customers to reach your products.
• Email Marketing: You can plan emails to customers who did not convert at the closing stage, and to people who subscribed for updates, to nurture them and build trust little by little. Besides making sure the email content is good and fits the audience, write subject lines and previews that make people want to open, to raise open and click rates.
• Social media: use several social platforms to spend more time with customers and make them feel close to your products and services. Besides popular networks like Facebook and Twitter, inbound marketers can use others such as Instagram and Pinterest to introduce products to new audiences.

Customer care strategy

In an inbound marketing strategy, customer care is essential. Once leads have become customers, the goal is not only to help them use your product but also to build a long-term relationship. What customers say and feel will influence the buying decisions of the people after them. Ways to look after customers include:

• Offer free shipping, a warranty and a return policy to build customer trust.
• Offer deals and discounts on special occasions: Tet, holidays, birthdays and so on.
• Support customers 24/7
• Create useful content so customers can easily learn more about the product
• Plan marketing and advertising to win new customers and keep existing ones.

With these approaches to customer care, you can build a long-term relationship with customers and raise their satisfaction with your products and services.

How to build a successful Inbound Marketing campaign

To run an effective inbound marketing campaign, follow every step and requirement. This is how you get quality campaigns, and quality campaigns are what produce the best marketing results.

Define the campaign audience

Defining the target audience is the most basic and most important step in marketing strategy. Your strategy and plans must fit the audience you have defined. A target audience profile should cover basics such as:

• Demographics: includes age, gender, occupation, income and so on.
• Psychographics: includes interests, feelings, attitudes, values and so on.
• Behavior: includes habits, lifestyle, buying decisions and so on.
• Economic, cultural and social traits: includes income, education, lifestyle, local culture and so on.
• Awareness of the company and product: includes information about the company, the product and marketing strategies used before.

Set benchmarks and goals

Once you know where your business stands today, you can set goals that are more accurate and realistic. So before launching a campaign, review your current website traffic, your leads and the customers generated by similar campaigns in the past. This information becomes the baseline for the goals of the campaign you are building.

When setting goals for an inbound marketing campaign, the basics are raising brand awareness and growing sales. A method you can use is the SMART COALS:

• Specific: framework. Specific: what exactly do you want to do?
• Measurable: Measurable: choose a specific number so you can measure what you want.
• Achievable: Achievable: check whether the plan or goal is really feasible.
• Realistic: Relevant: does what you are doing fit the real situation?
• Timebound: Time-bound: how long do you have to complete the campaign?

Setting benchmarks and goals gives you a clear overall picture of the campaign. From there you can evaluate it and make changes where needed to match the market and your business as they really are.

Choose keywords and optimize for search

At this step, choose the search keywords that will make your inbound marketing campaign accurate and effective. These are the keywords you give priority in titles and throughout your content. Do not just stuff keywords; keep your terminology consistent and use keywords in a way that reads naturally.

Build lead magnets and landing pages

Once the basics of the campaign are settled, you need content that attracts potential customers, and a landing page. The main purpose is to turn visitors into real customers, the ones most likely to buy.

Landing page for website design service from Mona Media

Make sure the main elements of the landing page, such as the headline and meta tags, are in place. They should include the keywords you chose to optimize for.

Choose the right marketing channels

Promote by email

You can introduce products, services or a CTA to a large number of potential customers on your list with email marketing. Also add social sharing buttons, and connect URL to your reports so you can track the metrics easily.

Write related blog posts

In an inbound campaign, useful content published on your blog directly affects your CTA and also leads customers to the landing page. Complete, engaging content for potential customers, and knowledge shared on topics related to your product or service, is another way to attract them.

Mona Media SEO knowledge blog

Share content on social media

Plan to post about your offers on social networks throughout the campaign. Make sure you post regularly on each network and mix content types (images, video, text and so on) so customers get a richer experience, which raises the conversion rate.

Nurture your leads

Once lead magnets and landing pages bring in a large number of leads, the inbound campaign is not over. To get leads to convert, attach a nurturing campaign, or a follow-up email tied directly to the offer. Each email should point the lead to the next step they should take in their decision process.

Track and measure results

After an inbound marketing campaign is built and launched, it is very important to compare real performance with the goals you set at the start. Track and measure results regularly and continuously. This shows whether the campaign is running well, accurate and delivering strong results, and whether you should adjust anything along the way to improve them.

→ See more: Marketing performance metrics every business should know

Combining Inbound and Outbound Marketing in a business

Businesses need to think carefully before choosing inbound, outbound or both together to get the best results. These strategies can be combined into a Marketing complete campaign, with fast growth and maximum economic return.

Use inbound email to support outbound activities

When customers respond to your outbound marketing, use inbound email to build the relationship. Set up email lists for events or display ads to engage customers and give them details about the event. If customers respond well and engage, send more useful content such as ebooks, blog lists and articles that analyze the problems they face, and introduce your business's solutions to boost engagement.

Use account-based marketing when developing content marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that focuses on the most promising groups of potential customers and adjusts the message to fit each group's specific needs. Content topics are also designed to meet the different needs and problems at each stage of each group's buying journey. This way, a brand can win over potential customers and push them to convert faster.

Combine SEO with remarketing ads

SEO increases your traffic. However, some visitors do not buy on their first visit. Remarketing ads remind people who have visited your website and push them to buy. You can run remarketing ads on different platforms such as social networks and mobile apps. Use CTAs that remind and spark curiosity, such as “the item in your cart is now 20% off” or “we have added new features that fit your business needs”.

Combine website SEO with ads

Ad formats such as outdoor banners, Google Display and Facebook Ads raise brand awareness but struggle to reach the right customers. To get qualified leads, combine advertising with website SEO, which is the most accurate and lasting way to reach potential customers.

SEO puts your website among the first results on Google, so it quickly reaches the right customers. When people have already seen your brand, SEO makes it easier to win their click. Engaging, valuable content keeps them on the page and leads to conversions on your website.

Combining inbound and outbound marketing makes your marketing campaign more complete, builds a strong brand and attracts many high-quality potential customers.

Some tools to support an Inbound Marketing campaign

To build a good inbound marketing campaign that brings in the number of leads you want, many requirements and standards must be met. Among them, the tools below are essential.

HubSpot: marketing automation

HubSpot helps you create and promote quality content, collect information on potential customers, automate inbound marketing campaigns and measure their results. HubSpot's lead funnel tool helps you nurture leads until they are ready to buy your product or service.

HubSpot CRM: customer relationship management

HubSpot CRM is an important customer relationship management tool for businesses. With its strong features, it helps you manage customer interactions easily and accurately. You can log interactions, track the sales process and manage customer information to build your sales strategy and reach customers more precisely.

GatherContent: content management

GatherContent helps you manage and organize content marketing better. Analyzing and reviewing content leads to better campaigns. A repeatable process supports long-term, sustainable campaigns. The tool improves collaboration and coordination between team members for more efficient content management.

Unbounce – Landing Pages

The landing page is one of the “key pieces” in turning users into potential customers. Use Unbounce to build and optimize landing pages faster and more effectively. Unbounce offers many optimized landing page templates that make advertising easier. This raises your site's conversion rate and attracts customers effectively. Unbounce also tracks landing page performance in more detail, so you can improve it to fit customer needs.

Beacon: design

Not every business has the people and time to produce professional eGuide content. Beacon is a smart, well-rated choice because it helps you design eGuides with a range of images, attractive fonts and ready-made layouts in just a few simple steps. This produces higher-quality, more professional content that attracts more potential customers.

Wistia – Video Marketing

Video marketing is growing faster than almost anything else right now. Wistia is an essential tool for it, offering good video hosting, useful features and analytics built for inbound marketing, so you can optimize your strategy. Wistia gives statistics on how your audience engages with your videos, plus tools to test your content, helping you measure how well your marketing campaign performs.

HubSpot Sales: email productivity

Using email to nurture leads, schedule meetings or send product demos in advance can take a lot of time. HubSpot Sales solves this by personalizing emails quickly, showing when customers open emails and attachments, and scheduling meetings with one click. HubSpot Sales also brings direct email marketing into the CRM so you can manage customers more effectively.

UberConference: interviews and meetings

Talking directly with customers is an important part of inbound marketing. UberConference is a convenient way to connect with customers anywhere, with smart, advanced meeting management tools. It lets you talk and engage with customers quickly and easily by phone or video call.

Ahrefs: search engine analysis

Organic search is a key part of inbound marketing, and it is more than a short-term tactic; it is a long-term way to build your brand. With its focus on keywords and backlinks, Ahrefs gives you a full picture of your website and your competitors, and helps you shape your strategy from that information.

Google Analytics: website analysis

Using Google Analytics (GA) to track website performance is one of the most effective ways to analyze and improve your marketing campaigns. With Google Analytics, you can easily learn about the customers visiting your website, then choose the best ways to increase engagement and sales.

In this article, Mona Media we have covered everything about Inbound Marketing including what it is, how it works and the basic steps needed to build an inbound marketing strategy. With a few suitable support tools, you can run a successful inbound campaign, attract more potential customers, and advertise as effectively as you need to.