Inbound marketing is about bringing the customers to you. Unlike traditional internet marketing which relies on ads and email campaigns to get awareness of a product out there, inbound marketing does not fight for attention. This is done by content creation and attracting qualified leads. Here is a look at the major themes of inbound marketing in a little more detail:
Content creation and distribution
This is the more important phase. The focus here is to create high quality content that answers your customers questions and solves their problems. This content must then be distributed far and wide.
Lifecycle marketing
Nothing beats a customer who promotes your products to their networks. The entire lifecycle of taking a person, making them a visitor, lead, customer and then promoter takes specific marketing actions and tools.
Personalization
The content needs to address the customer’s needs. The more details and interactions you have with your customers the more you can personalize the messaging.
Multi-channel
Potential customers are everywhere. Inbound marketing is by its very nature multi channel as you will need to be where the customers are. Depending on the nature of your customers and product, it could be blogs, some or all social networks.
Integration
All of the tools that are used in inbound marketing are best when they are tightly integrated. The right tools will help you focus on the most important part of the process: content creation.