What is Inbound Marketing and Why is it Important?

You check your inbox and see another unwanted offer selling business services, or you open the mailbox at home and see another advertisement for landscaping. You delete the email and throw out the paper, right? Everyone is tired of looking at ads — in fact, there has been a 90% global growth in ad-blocking since the start of 2015.

Instead, what if we could let our leads inform and qualify themselves?

As savvy business people, we thoroughly research a new product. We spend hours pouring over pricing, feature sets, warranties, and other deliverables so we know what we are getting for our business — your leads treat your product the same way.

Put yourself into the mindset of your lead: does your content answer questions about your product or service, or does it simply go for the sale? 

A new wave of marketing tactics has taken over how businesses reach customers and it has proven to increase ROI for companies across the board.

Spend less on time sensitive, low conversion, and high production services like direct mail and cold-calling — instead, try inbound marketing.

What is Inbound Marketing?

It’s how we satisfy a lead’s craving for answers.

Inbound Marketing is simply the use of content to help define your customer’s problem, outline your solution, and allow the customer to make the decision to convert.

Inbound Marketing realizes the value of interaction between a brand and its customers, and brings that interaction to the forefront. Inbound is marketing at the customer’s pace, customer’s interest, and customer’s benefit. Inbound is a friendly, knowledgeable employee — always available at the customer’s behest.

A Brief History

The term inbound marketing was first coined by Brian Halligan of Hubspot in 2005 but did not gain traction as a concept until the end of 2008. At that point, businesses began to see the value of content marketing and its positive impact on lead generation and client retention.

Since then, Hubspot commoditised the concept of Inbound Marketing and created one of the first full service inbound marketing solutions for businesses.

Customers are less receptive to being sold than ever and that leads us to what sets inbound apart.

Inbound is unobtrusive

Looking back at the introduction, has that ever happened to you? A flashing ad is something we immediately dismiss, or even better block using software. Inbound works because it provides content that does not interfere with the lead’s workflow. There is no mouseover ad or big bold button to click, just a simple piece of content that educates.

Inbound is content driven

Content drives a brand’s ability to leverage SEO, blog content, formal site content, and social media strategy — all critical to answering important questions for consumers. A pipeline of new content allows you to attract users to your website, educate your users, and provide information for your users to share.

[Action Items] To ingrain content generation into your team’s workflow:

• Build an initial content offering
• Keep a regular schedule of content generation
• Reward content creation

Inbound is people centric

It’s not all about your brand, it’s about offering solutions.

Inbound at its best presents information through different channels, in different ways, depending on where your buyer personas are in their respective journeys. Offering the right answer at the right time allows your buyers to encounter information they find valuable.

Depending on your buyer personas your valuable content piece could be as simple as a motivational cat poster, or as complex as 2000 words on the virtue of Open-Source Software in an enterprise market.

The key here is your content should depend on which questions a potential customer asks in relation to your product — not only answering questions about your product, but also more general questions about a problem for which your product may be the solution.

Answering these questions through your content brings them into your site and ultimately drives them to conversion or your ongoing nurture strategy.

Inbound is a partnership

How? While Inbound Marketing is driven by your content, you must also rely on user feedback to refine and evolve your marketing materials and messaging over time.

You can’t validate content until you make sure you’re answering the right questions through the right channels.

Do as much research as you can into your buyer personas before developing your initial content offering. However, publishing that first piece (or set of pieces) is only the beginning.

Once your content is out in the world, you can see how consumers respond, if at all. Ask questions of your own through surveys, or have a conversation with new customers as to how they found you — was that content piece valuable to them, was it in the right place, did they find it at the right time?

This partnership of asking questions and offering answers or solutions marks one of the biggest differences from Outbound in how consumers interact with and perceive brands.

Inbound is sustainable

Unlike outbound marketing where you need to continue to use funds in order to keep up your marketing, once you spend money for Inbound, it will continue to provide value beyond its initial publishing. Think about it: every time one of your sales team makes a cold call they may not even be talking to a receptive customer. By allowing customers to pre-qualify themselves, your close rates increase, your customer is happier with the services rendered, and the overhead associated with closing the sale is better utilized.

Is Inbound Marketing only for large brands?

Absolutely not.

Inbound Marketing is a great choice for every business in the marketplace, regardless of size or industry — given people seek information on these topics when a need arises. Unsurprisingly, that happens a lot across all industries — think 2 trillion searches per year.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Take a plumber, for instance — could a plumber benefit from Inbound Marketing?

If you were to look for a plumber, would you open the Yellow Pages? Probably not. Today, you would go online, search for a plumber and complete most of your evaluation through sites like Angie’s List, Yelp and the company’s website.

As the plumber, you’d use Inbound Marketing to ensure your website answered the right questions — questions about your hours, rates, services areas and reputation — ensure Angie’s List or Yelp displayed up to date information and ensure your social media pages were full of kind words from happy clients.

You could also develop content on your site to demonstrate your plumbing expertise. Not only would it help you catch search traffic for basic plumbing questions, but it would prove to visitors you’re the right plumber for the job.

All of this creates a connection and interaction with your potential client much stronger than an Outbound ad placed in the newspaper or piece of direct mail.

Key Terms

We should cover a number of key terms you should know for the purposes of Inbound Marketing. If you’d like a more exhaustive list, Hubspot has a great resource.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — the art and science of increasing a webpage’s perceived value by a search engine algorithm. This is often achieved through improving page copy, metadata, and domain authority.

Call-to-Action (CTA) — a request that drives a user to act. This can be asking a visitor to subscribe to an email, a button to download content or a simple phone number on a page with a “Call Now” message.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) — the number of clicks on your content divided by the number of impressions your content received. Often displayed as a percentage, this can indicate Headline or Subject-line performance.

Top of the Funnel (TOFU) — a phase of the of the buyer’s journey where they are searching for information about a problem. Buyers should be given informational pieces to educate them about their problem and transition them to the middle of the funnel.

Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) — here, buyers are more engaged with your brand. Provide case studies or service one-sheets. Educate them about how you can help and drive them to your solution by demonstrating your knowledge.

Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) — a point in which leads are really close to closing. They have identified the problem, vetted solutions, and are ready to make a decision. Offer a demo, or any other personal touch points that allow the lead to directly engage with your product.

Content Management System (CMS) — a system that manages your content, usually allowing users to modify pages and site copy without coding knowledge. Notable CMS platforms are Drupal, WordPress, Backdrop, Adobe Experience Manager, Weebly, Wix, and Expression Engine.

Cost Per Lead (CPL) — the cost associated with getting a single lead into the top of the funnel. This may be difficult to define if you are not tracking the amount of money spent on content generation and other tasks related to getting top of the funnel traffic. You can calculate this by dividing the number of leads by the amount spent to generate the content.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) — the cost to convert your lead to a customer. This includes all cost for items through the funnel and other overhead.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) — a process of managing customer interactions, and data throughout your customer lifecycle. There are many CRM software options that can manage this process for you, some of them are even open-source and free!

Gated Offer — a piece of content that is held back or “gated” behind a form to gather a lead’s email and name. This is one of the primary methods of lead generation in Inbound Marketing. Create a great piece of content and in exchange you get information about your potential customer.

Evergreen — referring to a piece of content that will not lose timeliness in the short term. This piece, for instance, is an evergreen piece. The goal is to provide timeless, valuable information to users at the top of the funnel.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) — metrics used to determine the success of a campaign. CTR, CTA, and other factors are considered KPI’s.

Long-tail Keyword — This refers to search keywords that are more specific than a standard search. For example, let’s compare the search terms “Inbound Marketing” with Best Inbound Marketing firm in Manhattan Beach. The latter is long tail, and better shows the searchers intent, likely placing them further along in the funnel.

Getting Started with Inbound Marketing

Let’s discuss another real-world example of how a small business could benefit from Inbound Marketing.

In order to keep it simple, we can use an ice cream shop. There are two goods an ice cream shop sells: customer service and, of course, ice cream.

The ice cream shop could send out direct mail (DM) with coupons, or spend time buying ads in a local circular, but our ice cream shop has a special method of producing ice cream that is healthier and more satisfying than our competitors — we need to ensure our message gets in front of customers who not only appreacite those qualities, but actively seek them out.

Where should we go to promote our ice cream? Customers will likely turn to Google to search for "ice cream shop," but they could also search for the long-tail keyword: "healthy and tasty dessert options." Our shop has a great opportunity to capitalize on both of these searches — and in this case, we could attract search traffic from people who may not even know they're looking for ice cream. We can instantly expand our target customers. How do we do that?

Content

Whether you are selling widgets or complex medical devices, content is the basis for all of Inbound Marketing — many refer to it as “The King”.

Building out valuable content for information seekers is the first step in launching your Inbound strategy. You want to move leads down the funnel by helping them identify the problem, providing information to demonstrate your expertise in a specific area and offering a solution.

As the expert inbound team for our ice cream shop, we need to start by picking what types of content we want to generate. This will drive leads to build a relationship with your company, and ultimately buy into your product. There are many types of content you can choose from:

Blog Posts

The most basic building blocks of a content strategy come in the form of blog posts. They’re relatively easy to produce — depending on your content depth and length — and provide great opportunities to capture long-tail search queries. Blog posts themselves come in a number of different forms, e.g. long-form posts (more than 3000 words), short posts (500 or fewer words) and listicles (Buzzfeed-esque).

On your blog you can produce a combination of informational and culture pieces to both educate visitors and show personality.

Since we have expertise in understanding what makes good ice cream (and healthy ice cream), we should write about it. We could produce a long-form post describing the benefits of lactose-free ice cream or coconut milk ice cream and speak to those people looking for "healthy dessert options." Or, we could put together a short informal piece listing our favorite ice cream flavors to attract a more general audience. 

Case Studies

Case studies are a great way to demonstrate expertise with a specific solution. You can tell a story, define problems, and present how your company solved those issues for a client.

In the case of our ice cream shop, we have a process to make ice cream that is better than our competitors, let’s show our potential customers how we used that process to increase their happiness. Another great case study could cover how the ice cream shop is able to cater a large corporate event without any loss in quality during transport, set up and serving.

Gated Offers

You may decide some of your longer-form pieces are so valuable, they're worth requesting an exchange of information. Commonly, white papers, infographics, e-books and robust guides are placed behind content gates. These gates are an effective trade for information: the lead provides at least an email address, and you provide a piece of content. This helps to understand who is downloading your offers as well as increase your email subscription list and audience.

Something valuable to our customers may be a “How to make Ice Cream at Home” e-book. We have our experts take our ice cream making process and adapt for smaller quantities so our customers can make their own ice cream at home. We can provide a fun, well-illustrated guide so every time they think they want to make or eat ice cream, they think of us!

Video Content

YouTube is the second largest search engine. Many don’t think of it as a way for consumers to find answers, but it’s definitely used in that way. Produce videos to educate consumers, give personality to your brand, and explain your solution in greater detail. Often, consumers are much more willing to watch a 3-minute video than they are to read a 3000-word blog post.

It's never been easier to create a good-quality video — you have camera options all over your home and office. If you need to film something on a budget, pull out your Android/Windows/iPhone and shoot a 5-minute introduction to your company?

Build content that informs your customers, even while your team is off the clock.

It is important to showcase something unique to set yourself apart from competitors vying for the same attention. For the ice cream shop, we could showcase the slow churn of the cream in our machines as our experts talk about how they create every flavor, or take the time to communicate how our unique process make a healthier, creamier ice cream.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If blog posts are the building block of content strategy, SEO is the keystone. We’ve hammered home where consumers are going to search for answers. It’s your job to implement proper SEO techniques to make sure your content shows up in the results. If Google, Bing, or Yahoo can’t find your content, nobody will.

There are many plugins for most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) that can tell you how your piece ranks for specific search terms, and how your site is seen by a search engine’s site crawling bot — a mini Terminator who only sees code (probably).

One of your goals should be to make sure bots are able to quickly and efficiently crawl your website: they will make or break your ability to show up higher on the Search Engine Results Page.

Cut back to our ice cream shop — we need to make sure that our site is indexed by the major search engines. Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have tools that allow us to submit sites for their bots to crawl (Bing and Yahoo use the same tool).

Once we submit our site, the bots will be told to crawl our content and then they report back to their respective search engines. In this case we need to take care to clean up any errors on the site from broken links and redirects so we don’t prevent the bots from finding all our precious content.

Once they find all the content we wrote about ice cream, they are going to check the content to see if it is useful to searchers. As inbound marketers, we need to ensure our title and body copy all speak to the topic we want to cover, and that our content provides value.

Social Media

We’re social creatures, and with the emergence of social networks we’ve gained the ability to learn how others feel about a brand before diving in. Provide an arena for happy customers to give you glowing remarks. After all, nearly half of online shoppers say social media influences their purchase decisions.

Instagram, for example, lends itself to capturing bold visuals and organizing content through hashtags — perfect for displaying decadent ice cream and enticing customers.

We can also run contests through social media to boost customer engagement, or offer coupons for checking-in at our store. It is all about how you want to interact with your customers.

Community Building

If you have the means to take social marketing to the next level and build a robust community around your business, it is well worth your while. Take HubSpot for example — they built a platform where inbound marketers can interact, share ideas and learn from each other.

Not only do the community members fuel your content generation, but they become evangelists for your business — spinning the social flywheel even faster.

Ice cream customers are passionate about ice cream and love sharing their experience with others. In or der to capitalize on that, we could build a community by making our experience interactive.

For instance, we could develop a voting system for our ice cream toppings so our users can rate topping combinations to be featured at our location. Hopefully, these interactions result in exponential growth as our customers bring in friends to vote for their favorite combinations.

Putting the Pieces Together

At the end of the day, our ice cream shop now has:

• Long-form blog posts demonstrating our ice cream expertise
• Short-form blog posts to attract general ice cream lovers
• Case studies detailing how our process sets us ahead of competitors
• An e-book so customers can learn how to make ice cream at home and look to us for advice
• Entertaining video content showcasing our unique process
• A well-optimized and crawlable website for search engines
• Beautiful visuals driving social media engagement
• An interactive experience around which we can build a community

All told, that’s a pretty fantastic Inbound Marketing campaign.

We did it!

Inbound is Extremely Valuable, but Outbound has a place

We love Inbound Marketing and the marketing world has shifted in its direction over the past two years; but there is still a place for Outbound Marketing. Follow-up calls, well-targeted digital display, TV and radio ads can all help you convert customers and get your name out there — increasing your odds for success. However, the key is keeping a balance and ensuring all of your Inbound and Outbound components work together.

If you choose to place an ad to grab impressions for the sake of brand awareness, make sure you have plenty of content on your website to answer questions for interested customers..

Whether you’re using Inbound or Outbound strategies, it’s important you keep tabs on your investments and returns. At the end of the day, your content must generate more revenue than you spend creating it — simple ROI.

Coupling your outbound initiatives with a solid inbound strategy sets your inbound marketing to magnify your outbound success. If you are looking at disrupting your lead’s workflow with something like a paid ad, land the user on a well curated piece of content rather than your homepage. Hopefully, they find something useful they want to share with their cohort.

Does that mean if you don’t have a flooded sales pipeline in the next 30 days that you were unsuccessful? No. Inbound in not a quick fix for all your pipeline woes. However, if after a while you aren’t happy with results, it’s likely time you consider making your campaign more Performant.

We took a brief look at inbound through the lens of our ice cream shop — that should be an indicator of the ways inbound is useful to even the small business owner. Whether it is selling ice cream or services, communicating your unique value proposition to your leads is important.

Facet has worked with clients to drive Inbound Marketing success through website redesign, repositioning, and content oversight — culminating in a 600% increase in viable sales leads. That success is driven by our understanding of our client’s market and business goals.