Inbound marketing refers to building meaningful and lasting relationships with your prospects by offering them valuable information they are seeking for their needs. It incorporates an effective content strategy to attract the right people and engage with them by addressing their pain points and goals. Inbound marketing enables you to turn your prospects into consumers and subsequently your clients. The momentum generated by setting up effective inbound marketing strategies gives the organization leverage over traditional methods of marketing and stays on the competitive edge.
How does Inbound Marketing work?
A buyer’s journey consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. It starts with the prospect recognizing a problem and seeking information about it. They explore various solutions and alternatives, carefully evaluating each option before deciding on the best choice.
Inbound marketing is divided into four different stages:
Attract: Using content, SEO, social media, and influencer marketing to bring visitors to your website
Convert: Address the pain points of the prospects and turn your visitors into leads by offering valuable information in exchange for their contact info. Make use of lead magnets and dedicated landing pages to capture qualified leads.
Close: Use lead magnets and bring them towards making a purchase using emails, social media, and helpful information. Use existing customer testimonials, and benefits-to-features, and demonstrate social selling to close the conversion cycle.
Delight: Keep your existing customers engaged with excellent post-sale customer service experience. It is important to pull the customers for an enhanced customer lifetime value and in turn brand loyalty.
Read also: 5 Key Tactics to Include in your inbound marketing strategy
3 brands that have leveraged inbound marketing
HubSpot
HubSpot revolutionized the way businesses approached leads and sales. Its approach with a customer-centric strategy focuses on attracting and engaging customers by providing valuable information and creating personalized experiences, thus fueling the overall inbound strategy. As compared to the traditional approach, inbound marketing helped them to attract qualified prospects and convert them to sales-qualified leads.
It leveraged:
Contacts Database: It is important to have a solid contact database to have employ inbound marketing strategy effectively. By creating valuable information buckets and offering as lead magnets i.e. templates, resources, downloadable guides, case studies, etc. from which customers can utilize information, HubSpot leverages all these effectively in attracting visitors and engaging them.
Buyer Personas: The company identified various buyer personas to understand their needs, challenges, behaviors to create targeted resources. This involved listing key topics with a strong SEO-focused approach to address their pain points and serve the resources accordingly. Additionally, buyer journey has to be taken into account to address every stage a buyer goes through before closing on some product or service. Right from awareness to the decision stage, every stage has different motives that can be addressed with content-rich resources.
Content: Content is the king. A king should be rich and wealthy to take care of his population, and so should the content. A robust strategy paired with efficient distribution strategies can be a game changer. Different types of formats like guides, e-books, whitepapers, templates, cheat sheets, blogs, email sequences, etc. published by HubSpot have been proven informative in various scenarios.
HubSpot’s inbound marketing strategies used precise targeting, personalized information for the buyers, automation, and lead nurturing to enhance the chances of successful conversions.
SEPHORA
Sephora’s brand positioning and inbound marketing strategies have been able to capture a significant market share. Sephora places a strong emphasis on community building, informative tutorials and guides, and promotes the idea of self-expression and empowerment through beauty. They are heavily built around the beauty and wellness community and encourage user-generated content that builds credibility and trust, enhancing its inbound approach.
What worked for Sephora:
Community engagement: Sephora’s rewards and loyalty programs are a great way to incentivize customers. It offers points for purchases, exclusive offers for members, referral discounts, etc. which boosts the brand trust and loyalty. These incentives encourage repeat purchases and also bring in new customers through referrals and recommendations. Customers feel valued and appreciated by various exclusive offers during birthdays, loyalty program benefits, special benefits during festive sales, etc.
Content: Sephora has exclusive offerings like tutorials, styling, celebrity influencer wardrobe collections, pre-launch products, product recommendations, etc. giving members an enhanced shopping experience and encouraging engagement with the brand. The company also uses blogs, guides, influencer partnerships, and quality user-generated content to drive organic traffic to the website. They use a variety of platforms, including Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram, to connect with their audience.
Email marketing: Sephora’s content strategy is filled with different content creation formats one of which is email marketing. Sephora segments its email list based on factors such as purchase history, browsing behavior, demographics, and preferences which allows for personalized messaging. It also uses automated emails to remind customers about items left in their shopping carts. These reminders often include a small discount to encourage them to complete their purchase. And, for customers who haven’t shopped in a while, it sends special emails with offers and updates on new products to bring them back to the site.
Sephora’s inbound strategy has enabled it to reach a diverse customer base and establish itself as a leading player in the beauty and wellness market. It has successfully engaged its customers with strong brand positioning messages, effective inbound marketing techniques, and a robust loyalty program. These initiatives drove sales and created a community around beauty, empowering customers to express themselves and explore new products.
Zendesk
Zendesk started as a small bootstrapped startup and quickly grew into a leader in customer service software in just 13 years. They used SaaS inbound marketing which played a big role in their success. Today, Zendesk has an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $1.03 billion and serves over 150,000 paid users.
Let’s look into what worked for Zendesk:
Content: Using topic clusters and pillar pages, Zendesk effectively organizes its content to improve its SEO strategy. Pillar pages serve as comprehensive guides on key subjects, linking to related articles that delve deeper into specific aspects. This structure helps search engines understand the context of their text and makes it easier for users to find relevant information.
Zendesk’s help page has narrowed down topics relevant to common issues, which in turn increased time on the page, got top Google rankings, and got organic search results for high-ranked keywords. It follows a hub-and-spoke model where one article on a core topic is supported by adjacent articles on sub-topics. This generated quality backlinks and enhanced the content quality, thus boosting its visibility online.
Customer stories: Customer stories are the best way to showcase real-life successes to potential customers and understand the impact of the solutions in their situations. Zendesk has value-driven customer stories featuring big giants who back the software and demonstrate how it helped them obtain effective results. Zendesk collects data from its exclusive customer group for networking and events and digs deep into how effectively the solutions brought about the change in the processes. Again as we saw a good thrust to the overall inbound strategy.
PPC ads: Zendesk’s higher ranking for keywords is backed by a strong organic strategy and paid ads. For every keyword, they have separate landing pages that talk about different aspects of the solutions offered. It’s effective to match search intent with ad wording to increase visitor conversion. Benefit-driven comments (such as “increase customer satisfaction”) and calls-to-action (such as “switch to the industry leader”) are more effective when competing on generic product terms and competition keywords.
Zendesk attracts potential customers by creating valuable content, leveraging customer stories, and employing effective SEO strategies. Their focus on providing exceptional customer experiences not only enhances brand loyalty but also drives growth.
Inbound marketing initiatives exemplify how significant business growth can be transformed with the right blend of content, SEO, and lead nurturing, among other inbound activities.
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