When we think of strategies to improve or strengthen our business, ‘inbound’ is a common word that pops to mind. As the word literally translates to ‘coming inward’, it is interesting how businesses adopt this strategy. Let’s take a quick look at what this is and the consequences.
Inbound Marketing is simply to draw customers / clients through content and related peripheries. Any business entity has a team of marketers who strongly believe that content is the key to turn ideas, products and stock into sales.
So how does this work or what is the mechanism that ticks the right boxes to give your business a fulfilled result? Inbound Marketing uses a novel, unconventional methodology - a four-point focus to generate a clientele.
- Attract - A business begins with interacting with strangers. Now what kind of strangers do you want for your business? Key here is to use content cleverly to attract the right kind. Blogs, SEO / SEM, social media helps put out the right content to draw attention from potential costumers. Like how bees get attracted to the prettiest flower!
- Convert - Once the bee is on the flower, it does 2 actions – sucks the nectar and takes away the pollen. Here too, once the content is strong enough to get a following, marketers need to start interacting and developing an interaction and simultaneously build a wholesome picture of the products. This is to develop strong leads who eventually will become clients. (Using simple information forms, landing pages, call-to-actions like signing up / registering / call / downloading / attending webinars etc., all these are key tools).
- Close - Well, now is the time to take the leap and close in your deals with the identified leads. Marketers use tools like CRM (Customer Relation Management), closed-loop reporting, email, marketing automation (this can be customized according to the leads needs!). Now isn’t there some satisfaction while luring in customers with the best of what you have that too packaged to their taste?
- Delight - Inbound Marketing believes in prolonged customer relations. Once a customer always a customer; so, using methods like surveys, social monitoring, smart texts etc., one can always keep the customer interested in the products / services by providing relevant and useful content.
Well that isn’t a tough thing to do, but yes it does require a dedicated team and tons of patience. This is a bit slow when compared to Inbound Sales (yes! Yes! I will soon write about it and also give a comparison of the two) however, the results are staggering. It is a win-win situation – there is absolutely great content created and you have a steady base of users who can be converted to leads and eventually clients.
So, are you ready to use this gen-next method for your business? Let me know your thoughts or if any additions you may want to us make.
