89 Ways Inbound Marketing Creates Customers

What are the 89 ways inbound marketing creates customers?

Have you ever wondered how inbound marketing creates customers? Well, if you answered yes, then you are in the right place.

We are building our list of 89 ways Inbound Marketing creates customers. We hope you find this post useful and informative.

What is Inbound Marketing?

First, a quick word on what we consider inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. Inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.

Inbound marketing is a strategy that utilizes many forms of pull marketing—content marketing, blogs, events, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, paid search, and optin email—to create brand awareness and attract new business. The content provided by inbound marketing is educational, entertaining, and welcomed by consumers.

Does Inbound Marketing Really Work to Create Customers?

Yes, if you are willing to put in the work. Inbound is all about creating content that informs, empowers, and attracts current and potential customers.

Adopting an inbound marketing strategy for your business means meeting your prospects where they are and providing value with educational content.

What is Outbound Marketing?

While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want.

Examples of outbound marketing are cold calls, media buys, and email spam. Additionally, some traditional outbound is tv, radio, print, and direct mail.

Why blogging is an act of marketing. There are 2 games that you play.

The first is the Short Game. We refer to it as hunting. You’re out there chasing after clients, there’s periods of feasting and many times you are starving. The results are unpredictable and you are focused mostly on sales and you are doing things like outbound marketing. You eat what you kill.

The Second Game

The Second Game is more like farming. You build an audience and fans. It’s slow. You have to be patient with methodical work also known as inbound or content marketing. This is where you put in consistent work every single day and reap the benefits of the compound effect. In essence, you eat what you grow.

~ Chris Do

1. Writing valuable content creates customers

Valuable content is content that speaks to a problem your customer is having. It’s where they are. Content that speaks to the problems an audience is experiencing. It is valuable when you provide solutions to these problems. Transforming their lives. Transforming their business.

2. Topical Content

Topical blogs are the least common, but the most powerful. These are ones that have helpful, informative posts that are generally in the arena of the business but are designed to be interesting to anyone who’s looking for more information.

What is Topical Content?

Topical content is timely, relevant content that relates to something current. The obvious advantages to this type of content are that it’s of the moment and usually, highly searchable.

While topical content is great for achieving a temporary spike in traffic, it tends to have a fleeting appeal. And depending on the topic, you’re likely to see the levels of traffic a topical piece generates decrease as time passes and its timeliness diminishes.

Examples of Topical Content – Current Trends

• • Industry news
  • Current events
  • Company news
  • A wrap-up post from a conference you recently attended

3. How Do Promotional Blogs Create Customers?

A promotional blog informs customers about your product or service and its various benefits. Many businesses start blogs with the intention of promoting their products or services.

4. Evergreen Blog

Evergreen content gets its name from evergreen trees — such as pine or fir — that retain their color and needles year-round. By the same token, evergreen content is content that remains continually fresh to readers by staying relevant.

Evergreen content is “timeless and valuable.”

Here are a few examples of what Evergreen Content might look like

• • • Interviews with industry experts
    • How-To Instructions and Tutorials
    • Case Studies
    • CheckLists
    • Comparison   Uber VS Lyft
    • Detail Review
    • Essential Tools
    • Answers to frequently asked questions
    • Before and After

Tap here to view video –  Top 10 Topics Every Blog Must Have – Evergreen Content

5. Social media campaigns (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)

While social media plays a large role in building communities among B2C (Business-to-Consumer) brands. It’s not always considered a necessity in the B2B (Business-to-Business) space.

The fact of the matter is social media marketing aligns perfectly with the inbound methodology. Most importantly, it provides another medium through which to serve content to your prospects and learn more about how to best engage with them.

Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn offer platforms with millions of users for your content. Promoting on these channels provides the opportunity to distribute content beyond your website and drive traffic through non-organic methods.

6. Ebooks. A valuable item to offer in exchange for their email

Why do we create ebooks? Ebooks can help you attract good leads.

The reason is simple: People will give you their contact details willingly when you give them something of value in return. These are the audiences that are interested in your products or services. If your book is well written, you will educate them and convert them into paying customers.

7. Search Engine Optimization Create Customers

SEO focuses on improving organic traffic from search engines, such as Google or Bing. SEO helps in building your brand’s authority. As your websites rank higher in search engines and become more visible on the internet, it helps increase your brand’s credibility. This should be one of your goals in applying SEO to your website campaign strategies.

Employing a well-implemented SEO strategy will ensure that the customers you’ve targeted elsewhere will find exactly what they’re looking for once they’re on your site. Inbound marketing in SEO means targeting keywords customers are already searching for and optimizing the pages on your site with these terms.

Tap here to learn and watch video On-Page SEO. Make these steps standard requirements for every page and post on your website and your content is well on the way to ranking high in search engines. A great strategy to have. Tap here to read On-Page SEO Checklist 

8. Using Videos create customers

Social media videos, relatable content, and short videos will help increase engagement, conversions, and SEO ranking, optimize keywords and keep viewers coming back for more great content.

Using video is a guaranteed way to help your inbound marketing strategy!

Blogs with video content keep readers more engaged. Tap here to view our videos. If you find any information of value, consider subscribing, hit the thumbs up, or leave a comment.

Our brain has preferences – and seeing images is one of them. We remember pictures easier than we remember the text. So if you hear information or read something on a blog, three days later you’ll likely only remember about 10% of it. If a photo is included, you’ll remember nearly 65%.

9. Inbound Sales

Inbound sales is a sales methodology that prioritizes the needs, challenges, goals and interests of individual buyers. Instead of focusing on closing the sale as soon as possible, inbound salespeople work to meet consumers where they are and then guide — not push — them through the decision-making process.

Having a well-thought-out sales strategy will help you sell inbound and turn leads into customers. The most important part of selling inbound is selling to the right people and providing the right information. Once you have that down pat, you will become much more successful at attracting potential buyers.

Here are five simple techniques for selling inbound.

10. Build Your Sales Process around Your Buyers’ Needs

When implementing techniques for selling inbound, your goal should be your customers’ needs, not your own. Listen to your buyer and support them throughout all steps of the purchasing process. Your salespeople need to go beyond the information that the consumer can get on their own, which should be plentiful since your site will be full of quality content.

Creating content on your blog that answers your potential client’s questions ahead of time is the first step in considering your buyers’ needs. Remember that each buying decision is triggered by a need, so try to identify and address a solution that addresses those needs.

The next steps involve communicating with your customer by confirming their need, reaffirming why your business is the right option, and addressing any concerns they might have. Don’t leave any of your customers’ questions unanswered.

11. Focus on Active Buyers

Outbound marketing relies on cold calling. In this case, salespeople are unaware of which customers are active in a buying journey, and instead, call potential customers at random. This doesn’t work.

Proper techniques for selling inbound involve first targeting active buyers, which means you have to differentiate between active and passive buyers.

The easiest way to spot an active buyer is to pay attention to those who have recently visited your website, filled out a form, or opened a marketing email.

12. Focus on How You Connect with Your Customer

The next step is to connect with your potential buyer. As stated, most of the information your buyers need to learn about your products and services is already online. So when you connect with your buyer, they don’t want a sales pitch, they want a two-way conversation with someone who has the expertise to help them frame their goal or challenge.

To ensure you’re in line with proper techniques for selling inbound when you reach out to your customer, your message should be focused on their buying context. You can start by mentioning the industry they’re in their interests or your common connections.

Then you can offer something that provides information on your products or services, such as a free consultation, an ebook, or a checklist.

13. Talk to Your Customer, Build a Rapport

Once someone expresses interest in your product, you can begin the explore stage. Inbound marketers realize that not only do they not have the level of trust to begin a personalized presentation, but they also may not even be able to help the buyer at this stage.

Building a rapport starts from the moment you connect with your customer. Start with a personalized intro. Then move on to recapping the last conversation you had with them.

This sets a precedent for a personalized buyer experience and allows you to segue into setting an agenda for the following conversation.

The next step is addressing potential challenges that your potential buyer may be facing. If your company is a good fit for their needs, set goals and offer them a plan.

14. Make Suggestions and Close the Deal.

The final step of your inbound sales journey is carrying out techniques for closing the deal. Buyers have already experienced the generic online presentation and sales pitch—it’s an inbound marketer’s job to tailor the presentation to fit the buyers’ needs. Leverage the information that you discovered about your customer from the previous stages and tailor your presentation accordingly. Expand on the messages available about your company online and give your buyer more information on how you can help based on their unique situation.

15. Play The Backlinks Game. A high ROI inbound marketing strategy.

Get backlinks from directories, complimentary companies in your industry to link to content on your website. Not just any backlink. Research the company and the website for a high-quality backlink. Find websites and directories that have a high volume of traffic. While directory backlinks are good for SEO, don’t forget that listings on relevant niche directories are also a chance to get some targeted referral traffic flowing to your site.
The Top 9 Directories to obtain backlinks from are Google My Business, MOZ, Yelp, Angie’s List, Foursquare, SuperPages, Yahoo, YellowPages, Chamber of Commerce. Bonus – Boston Digital Marketing / Digital Marketing Agencies In Boston.

CONCLUSION

We hope you found this information useful. We took considerable time researching and wordsmithing to bring you the ways you can be successful using inbound marketing as your digital marketing strategy. If you have any takeaways, please share this information on Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Youtube, and Instagram.

What are your thoughts?

Please share your questions, expertise, opinions, or tips in the comment section below!