What is an inbound marketing strategy? How can you apply it?

What is an inbound marketing strategy? How can you apply it?

“to inspire yourself to do good work for you, find a way to express the organization’s impact on the lives of customers, clients, students, patients – whomever you are trying to serve to make them happy” Harvard business review

Inbound marketing is a business philosophy to help people. It’s a better way to market yourself or your products. This philosophy is based on that people never forget who helped them in the time that they need help. What if that one who helped them is you or your company?
Of course, that will have a positive impact on your sales and your company’s reputation as they will tell their friends and family about you. So, they will become your promoters by word of mouth.

The inbound marketing methodology is a mentality more than a strategy. It’s customer-oriented which means it focuses on the customer and puts him/her in the first place. So, you will need to look at insights, be helpful, have real value to people, audit the customers, and treat every customer like he is unique. 
The inbound methodology has 3 steps:

1. Attract:
   to attract customers with helpful and relevant content that can solve their problems by making it easy for them to find the answers they are looking for. 
2. Engage:
   it starts when the customer takes the desired action like reading a blog or watching a video or even liking a post. And here you start to collect information about them by looking at the insights or having feedback surveys.
3. Delight:
   giving an outstanding experience to your customer so they will be your promoters. 

You won’t be able to apply the inbound methodology without the inbound fundamentals. These fundamentals are the basics you must have in your company before starting the inbound strategy.
They are:

1. inbound principles:
   • Standardize for consistency: you must continue making and sharing content that is helpful to your customers. You can’t stop whatever happens because that will make you lose the customers that are coming for you because you help them.
   • Personalize for impact: people love to feel that they are unique. Sending emails by their names or having specific cards printed for them will make them feel special and happy and that will increase the positive word of mouth about you. 
   • Optimize for clarity: if you want to advise then make it clear to people to understand. If you want from them a specific action, then tell them clearly what they should do. Because if you didn’t, most people don’t get hints so you will lose what you are wishing for. 
2. company’s purpose:
   why do you exist? Of course, every business aims to make a profit but what is the problem you solve? If you don’t know, how can you expect your customer to know? Define the company’s purpose to clear your vision so you can have a specific strategy.
3. Goals:
   set a big goal that all your company’s teams work for the same end. Your goal must follow the SMART method, which is: 
   • Specific:
     write exactly what you want. Don’t just say increasing sales. What is the exact percentage you want 10%? 20%? 
   • Measurable:
     make the goal something that can be measured by numbers or binary. If your goal is to get 10K customers so at the end you can see how many customers, you got. Same as binary goals: if you want to open a new branch in a specific area at the end you could see if you opened it or not.
   • Achievable:
     This is the point in the process when you give yourself a serious reality check. Goals should be realistic — not pedestals from which you inevitably tumble. Ask yourself: is your objective something your team can reasonably accomplish? 
   • Relevant:
     Here’s where you need to think about the big picture. Why are you setting the goal that you’re setting?
   • Time-bound:
     you must end the goal with time. By this month or by the end of the year. It’s not a goal when it doesn’t have a time limit to achieve.
     So the end goal should be to increase sales by 30% by the end of the year. Open a new branch in Dubai this month. 
4. Buyer persona:
   Define who is your ideal customer. What are his/her characters and give him/her a name. you can create your buyer personas depending on your CRM and make all customer-facing teams participate in it to define exactly who you are targeting. 
5. Buyer’s journey:
   what steps does your customer take to purchase a product from you. Every buyer’s journey has 3 stages each stage has a different way to engage with the customer:
   1.  Awareness:
      it begins when the customer realizes he/she has a problem, so they or starts searching about it. Here you can present yourself as an expert in your field by creating blogs or social media posts. 
   2. Consideration:
      when your customer is considering you as someone who will solve his/her problem. you will talk about solutions to this problem. 
   3. Decision:
      Now, you can talk about the product or the service you provide, your customer is ready to buy for you because he/she knows you as the expert and you helped him/her to solve the problem he/she is facing. 

After reading all this you will realize that content is the king and by content, you can start applying the inbound strategy to attract customers and make them trust you and tell their friends and family about you.

 This way instead of having the customer funnel which is advertising to 100 people, visit your website 50 and purchase from you 20. You can have a flywheel. The 20 people who purchase from you will tell their friends about what you did with them to help them so they will attract other customers to purchase from you without spending a penny on ads. It’s just the power of word of mouth. 
The flywheel can run if no one stops it. As long as you make the customer happy, he/she will bring you more customers without any effort from you anymore. 

Remember not all customers will be happy you can’t please everyone who purchases from you. But don’t make it a bad experience for them. Invest in customer service and train them to help the customer until he is pleased. If it’s not from the product he will please with the care, he/she got even if there is a problem with the product. 

If you want to apply the inbound marketing strategy to every team and individual in your company and have it as a culture in all the organization, here in Digializer we can help you set the perfect strategy you need to be customer oriented and have a strong word of mouth. Contact us if you need anything, we are happy to help.