Inbound marketing is a strategy that uses different forms of pull marketing, like content marketing, blogs, events, search engine optimization(SEO), social media marketing, and many more. Inbound marketing trusts on brains rather than budget as it consists of entirely organic leads. To create brand awareness and attract new prospects, inbound marketing is a great way nowadays. Marketers who focus on providing high-quality content to their website may notice growth in business and high user engagement in the website.

In simple terms, the idea of inbound marketing is to provide value first and convert customers later. This works better than outbound marketing.

To make the inbound marketing work in a more effective way, a marketer needs to focus on a few key stages.

Purpose Of Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing helps to get organic leads to an organization or a marketer. Marketers do not need to go out and search for potential customers. Through inbound marketing, the time and money spent over a marketing campaign have been reduced and the audience engagement to every organization has been increased. This marketing strategy also develops the trust of potential customers. Nowadays buyers or customers conduct online research before selecting a brand. If marketers can present their brand or their organizations as an authoritative source in the industry, users might be more interested to select the brand.

Inbound Marketing Vs. Outbound Marketing

There are few differences between inbound and outbound marketing. The main difference is approaching customers, They also produce different results. In outbound marketing, marketers need to reach out to the customers in an energetic way to make them interested in the products or offerings through door-to-door sales, or cold-call people, etc.

On the other hand, inbound marketing focuses on bringing customers to the company. There are so many digital marketing methods like content marketing, email marketing, or social media marketing which we have already mentioned at the beginning of the blog. These processes help the organization a lot to get their desired customers. Once the brand awareness and the long-term trust are established, people will be more interested to buy the products or take the services.

This picture by CloudVandana will help to remember the differences between inbound and outbound marketing in a simple manner.

Stages Of Inbound Marketing

Attract

Attract is the first stage of Inbound Marketing. This stage involves finding and attracting target audiences. Marketers need to do research on how they want their websites to be discovered by the customers. Inserting lots of relevant keywords or hashtags in the blog post can help a website to get a good user reach The higher will be the reach of a website, the higher chance will be there for a good ranking. By using social media, a company can reach the social media feed of the target audiences.

Convert

The main focus of any marketing is converting. If the marketers can convert the new users or new audiences into customers, then only the marketing campaign becomes successful. There are few techniques through which marketers can convert the viewers into customers. Techniques include-

Sign-up forms
Call to action button(CTAs)
Incentivizing signing up for the newsletter.

A proper understanding of the stages of inbound marketing can help marketers to improve the website content and increase audience engagement faster. The stages of inbound marketing are- Attract, Convert, Delight, and Engage.

Close

Sometimes, converting a user into a customer is not so easy by offering a sign-up form or a CTA button hoping they will convert into customers and join the community. An effective way to enter into the closing stage is automation. For example, an automated email can reengage the customers to proceed with the purchase they abandoned in a cart. Thus, automation can help in some percentage to close a business deal.

Delight

The last stage of inbound marketing strategy is the delight phase, where marketers or an organization can reward customers for buying products or taking the services. Rewards include actions like sending you a message, sending a personalized email, follow-up emails, offering discounts, and more. Surveys and feedback can be received at this stage.