Top 6 Benefits of Inbound Marketing

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbounding marketing is a methodology of attracting and engaging potential customers using personalized content and experiences to establish lasting relationships. With inbound, you focus on providing value to the customers hoping the positive experience will encourage them to interact further with your brand, allowing you to convert them.  

The strategy leverages customer retention techniques: attract, engage, and delight.

• Attract – Involves drawing people using valuable content and experiences that encourage them to engage with your brand. This requires implementing an SEO strategy when creating and publishing content (blogs, social media content, case studies, etc.) 
• Engage – Involves personalizing customer experience by addressing their pain points and offering a solution, so they desire to build a long-term relationship with you.
• Delight – Involves connecting with the customers after conversion by providing support to help them get the most out of their purchase. For example, you can request customer feedback through surveys and reviews or encourage them to ask questions. 

Unlike outbound marketing, where you cast your net wide, in inbound marketing, you attract and engage with your ideal audience allowing you to capture more qualified leads. Notable differences between inbound and outbound marketing include goals, cost, messaging, interaction, and content types.  

Why Should You Use Inbound Marketing?

Using inbound marketing has numerous benefits over traditional outbound marketing. Some notable benefits of inbound marketing include:

1. Cost-Effective

Inbound marketing is a smart strategy for raising awareness and generating leads at a fraction of what you would spend on outbound strategies. For example, research has shown that you can spend 61% less on inbound lead generation than outbound. This is because, with the latter, you spread the net to a wider audience hoping to catch a few qualified leads, while the former involves personalizing the marketing to attract and engage people looking for your solution. 

2. Long-Term 

With inbound marketing, it's never a one-off interaction like, say, a billboard or TV ad. Instead, you cultivate a long-lasting relationship, allowing you to keep engaging with the customer long after they have converted. Moreover, once you win your audience's trust and build your reputation through your blog content, social media posts, webinars, etc., you can continue attracting more prospects with lesser effort. 

3. Increases Visibility

Besides being a cost-effective marketing strategy, inbound has enabled even small businesses to boost their brand awareness and attract more leads. 

4. Generates Quality Leads

Inbound marketing strategies like SEO and content marketing boost your chances of being found by prospects searching for solutions to their problems. When you publish optimized and quality content that gets discovered and satisfies the visitors' search intent, you position yourself to attract quality traffic to your site. Since the leads may not necessarily be ready to convert, inbound marketing enables you to build relationships with them and move them through the funnel to conversion. 

5. Builds Brand Authority and Credibility

Inbound marketing has multiple assets (blogs, webinars, videos, infographics, etc.) you can use to get your brand in front of potential customers and build your brand authority. Generally, content marketing is an integral inbound strategy and is pretty popular. According to research, 70% of marketers leverage content marketing as part of their overall strategy and are actively investing in it. Besides, research shows that 70% of people prefer learning about a company by reading an article instead of an advert. Surveys have also found that more than 80% of consumers feel positive about a company after reading custom content.

6. Powers Optimization

When customers interact with your brand through content, you gain valuable insights into their preferences and needs, allowing you to optimize your marketing strategy, improve products/services, etc. 

What Should You Look for to Utilize Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing helps you create awareness, capture quality leads, nurture trust, build credibility, and establish lasting customer relationships to improve profitability and boost growth. Any business can leverage inbound marketing to achieve the mentioned milestones. But generally, here are two tell-tale signs that you need to step up your inbound marketing strategies.

• Poor SEO – If your brand is not appearing on the first page for relevant keyword searches, no matter how good your services or products are, you might never be able to win leads through organic traffic. According to research, 90% of pages do not receive organic traffic, and even if you manage to secure a spot on the second page, less than 1% of searchers on Google click on second-page results. If you're performing poorly on search, you should develop a solid SEO optimization strategy to boost your ranking.
• Low conversion rates – Most marketers admit that inbound is their source of the highest quality leads. If you're attracting low-quality leads translating to low conversion rates, you need to optimize your inbound marketing strategy. 

In most cases, when your conversion rates are low, your marketing ROI is also likely to be below par. By utilizing inbound, you can boost your ROI, as research shows at least a 14% close rate on SEO leads.

Conclusion

Inbound marketing is a cost-effective strategy every business should leverage to achieve its marketing goals. With a fraction of your traditional marketing budget, you can use inbound to increase your visibility, generate quality leads, and build your brand authority and credibility. 

One way to implement an inbound strategy is to invest in HubSpot to benefit from the platform's powerful marketing tools. But if navigating the comprehensive HubSpot tools and resources sounds overwhelming, you do not have to do it yourself. For instance, you can rely on the help of a HubSpot administrator like The Insight Studio to implement your ideas on the platform. To learn more, kindly check out our TIS ultimate guide and connect today!