What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing shuns intrusion when it comes to capturing the user's attention to create a type of marketing focused on being found and consulted directly by the user himself. Inbound Marketing is a term that I'm sure you've heard a million times. I would even go so far as to say up to two million times if you are interested in the field of communication and advertising. But, could you explain exactly what Inbound Marketing means? If we focus on its translation into Spanish, leaving aside anglicisms, Inbound Marketing means attraction marketing, and it is precisely in the word attraction where the essence of this methodology lies. In practice, Inbound Marketing is the attraction of a specific user profile in a non-intrusive way by letting them find us. To do so, we must provide essential information at each stage of the life cycle.
Phases of Inbound Marketing
However, Inbound Marketing goes far beyond attracting. To carry out a complete Inbound Marketing project, it is necessary to interact with those users who have reached our website and delight them so that their experience with us exceeds their expectations. In our video What is Inbound Marketing, we explain very well what it is necessary to do to attract, interact and delight our users.
Principles of the Inbound methodology
The main difference between Inbound Marketing and traditional marketing is the way we have to reach our user and communicate with him. In the marketing world, it is often said that content is king . However, we like to say that the user is king, especially when it comes to Inbound Marketing projects.
The user is king because it is he who decides what content he wants to consume and when he wants to consume it.
In order to carry out its mission, Inbound Marketing bases its work on a series of principles:
Education
Forget about selling and focus on educating. It is true that in more advanced stages of the buying and selling process you can use more commercial messages to try to close a deal, but to get a potential customer to come to you, you first have to invest resources in educating them. By this, we mean:
- Make you aware of your problems and needs.
- To provide you with solutions to your specific problems.
- Present you with different alternatives to achieve your goals.
- Offer credibility and trust.
Focus on making your potential client see what he needs and what he can get thanks to your services and he will be the one who will be in charge of reaching you.
Segmentation
Putting all your potential customers in the same bag is a very common mistake in Inbound Marketing project management when you have little experience. In order to be able to offer each user an optimal response, you must first establish different Buyer Personas, i.e. you have to segment your contacts.
Surely your industry is very broad and you can't reach all potential customers at once. Start by looking for those profiles that are easiest for you to reach or that bring the most benefits to your company. In order to identify these customer profiles, here is a real estate Buyer Persona template that you can use as an example.
Customization
Now that you have identified your different customer profiles, focus on creating content tailored to them. Keep in mind that each Buyer Persona may be looking for different types of information depending on whether they are in a more advanced or earlier stage of their buying process, so be sure to create content for all of these stages. The more tailored that content is to their needs, the more likely it is that your users will empathize and interact with it.
Automation
Using the right marketing tools, you can set up process automations that allow you to automatically nurture leads and move them through the buying process. The range of automation tools is very wide. Some of the most complete and with which in Urbaniza we are more familiar are: HubSpot, Mailchimp and Clientify, although it would be necessary to analyze the situation of each company and its needs in order to establish the most appropriate in each case.
Business digitalization
In order to implement an Inbound Marketing project, it is first necessary to carry out a digitalization process. The company must have the necessary resources and tools at the disposal of potential customers in order to reach its target audience in a non-intrusive manner. If you think your business is not yet adequately digitized or you think you still have a long way to go, enter our express digitization section and learn how to take your business online to launch a complete Inbound Marketing project.
