ReDrew Innovations

Once a year we all get happy birthday emails from about 50 different brands that we didn’t even know existed. Not all of them can be Starbucks but what they’re trying to do is create personalized relationships with their audience to foster a long-term consumer relationship through the practice of inbound marketing. 

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is the practice of attracting consumers by creating valuable content personalized to their needs and wants. This practice is centered around valuing consumers and providing them with the tools they need to reach their goals at any stage of their journey. Opposed to Outbound interrupting your audience with content they don’t want.

Utilizing inbound marketing can be done in 3 steps according to HubSpot, the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform. This 3 step Flywheel includes tactics to attract a consumer, engage a consumer, and delight a consumer. 

• Attract: drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they want to engage.
• Engage: Present insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals, so they are more likely to buy from you. 
• Delight: providing help and support to empower your consumers to find success with their purchases. 

Why Is It Effective?

This practice is so successful because when consumers find success themselves. They share it with others, attracting new potential consumers. Building this momentum creates a self-sustaining loop.

• Attract: The key is to earn people’s attention, not force it. This can be done through blogging, SEO, Social publishing, paid search ads, and display advertising. This will reach your target buyers on the channel they’re using to look for solutions to their problems, ways to achieve their goals, or browse new products or services of interest.
• Engage: Focus on opening relationships, not just closing deals. This can be done through websites and email personalization, database segmentation, marketing automation, lead nurturing, and multichannel communication. Companies can also make use of AB testing to gauge how their consumers prefer to interact.
• Delight: Companies help, support, and empower consumers to reach their goals. Focus on creating buzz around your brand. This can be done using social mentions, reviews, word-of-mouth marketing, consumer loyalty programs, and user-generated content.

How Does “Getting To Know Your Consumer” Help In Developing A Inbound Strategy?

The bottom line is you can’t attract, engage or delight your consumers if you don’t know understand your consumers. 

For example, in 2008 when Apple launched their iPhone 3G in Japan, their sales were unexpectedly low. This is because Apple didn’t know who their consumers were. Had Apple done research into their consumer they would have realized that one of the most important features to a Japanese individual was not even made an option on the iPhone 3G. Even outside of cultural barriers, companies still tank product launches because they don’t invest enough energy in understanding their consumer’s interests. 

So how do we get to know our consumers? (gif) 

Through buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal consumer. This can include background, goals, challenges, interests, needs, incentives and where they get their information. However, it’s also important to write a story about your persona as well. In order to humanize them, helping your team better communicate with a specific persona. 

Tailoring your buyer persona to your brand personality will allow companies to personalize their marketing for different segments of their audience. This can help companies to customize their lead nurturing email to each different buyer persona. 

Now let’s look at some companies that utilize inbound marketing practices. Let me tell yeah, you’re in for a treat.

Companies Using Inbound Marketing Well?

“Dog food”. With those two simple words entered into your search engine, you will find that Chewy is the first company to appear in an organic search. With a platform that similarly resembles Amazon, Chewy is the King of the attract phase. With product descriptions of one hundred words or more, videos, and reviews, Chewy is a great representation of how to utilize SEO to get a consumer to find your company through organic search.

In the Engage phase of inbound marketing, companies need to make it easier for consumers to shop. This can be done through personalization and the king of personalization is none other than Netflix themselves. With your hours of data, Netflix observes your habits and behaviors to tailor-make recommendations that fit your interests. This is how Netflix gets its audience to consume hours of its product in one sitting.

During the Delight phase a company helps, support, and empowers a consumer to reach their goals. Online fashion business ASOS does this by tailoring their social media platforms to fit where their consumers reach them. ASOS found that their Twitter platform is where their consumers were reaching out to address problems they might be having with their clothes or the brand. With this in mind via their Twitter bio, ASOS explicitly tell consumers how they can receive consumer care.

No matter which industry your company occupies, inbound marketing is sure to elevate your company to the next level b empathizing with the people you’re creating for.