What is Inbound Marketing?

It is a method for growing an organization by building lasting relations with people and helping them to reach their goals. It is a methodology which attracts customers by creating valuable content that is useful to them and tailored experiences.

It differs from outbound marketing, which interrupts your customers with content that they aren’t particularly looking for but may be interested in. Inbound marketing uses connections with customers to help solve problems that they might have.

There are 3 stages:

1. Attract Stage: Earn people’s attention
Focus on this stage if you are trying to generate more traffic and leads

• Blogging

• SEO

• Social Media

• Paid Search and Display Ads

2. Engage Stage: Opening relationships
Focus on this stage if you are trying to convert more leads or lowering new customer acquisition cost

• Website and email personalization

• Database segmentation

• Marketing automation

• Lead nurturing

• Multichannel communication

3. Delight Stage: Creating buzz around your brand
Focus on this stage if you’re looking to improve customer retention and referrals

• Social Mentions

• Reviews

• Word-of-mouth

• Customer loyalty program

• User-generated content

Next we should create a buyer persona for your customers.

What is a Buyer Persona?

It is a fictional generalized representation of your ideal customer

Helps you understand your customers and prospects better, allows you to personalize marketing messages for your various audience segments. It should combine both demographic insights and buying insights for a better picture of how your company can get more business.

Note: Create as few buyer personas as possible
Tip: Use HubSpot’s make my persona tool

Now, consider the buyer’s journey.

The Buyer’s Journey:

Awareness stage > Consideration stage > Decision stage

Awareness:
A customer experiences a problem & seeks to better understand it

• Speak to your buyer’s symptoms and problems

• Help your buyers understand their experiences

• Examples: blog posts, infographics, how-to-videos

Consideration:
A customer identifies the problem and is committed to understanding the solutions

• Inform buyers about possible solutions

• Help buyers evaluate the pros and cons of each solution

• Examples: comparison guides, live webinars, assessments

Decision:
A customer identifies the correct solution and decides on the best vendor to provide that solution

• Highlight the value of your solution

• Convince prospects to choose you

• Examples: free trial, demo, consultation

Next we talk about how to create the right content for your brand.

How to make content that drives action?

• Compelling CTAs (actionable & design that stands out)

• Best to direct CTAs back to website

• Make CTAs easy to achieve

• Shorten URLs

• Collect emails, gather valuable information for a personalized experience

Next, set a goal for your content distribution.

How to set a content distribution goal?

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Relevant

• Time-bound

Meet your customers where they are at.

Know where they consume content.

Ask yourself: Where do your customers consume content?

1. Identify your buyer persona

   • They often include demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, challenges and goals.

2. Conduct online research

3. Collect feedback

   • Conduct surveys, interviews or social media polls

4. Tap into audience insight tools

   • Example: Socialbakers

5. Review your analytics

   • Where are your audience coming from?  

And finally, tracking.

Fundamentals of Behavioral Marketing and Customer Segmentation

1.     Define the interactions you want to track

2.     Implement tracking

3.     Analyse and report how people are behaving on your website

4.     Use this information to segment your contacts

a.     Explicit segmentation – based on clear characteristics provided by your contacts or conversions (eg. They filled up a form to say they have a dog to get a discount on petfood)

b.     Implicit segmentations – implied characteristics (eg. They browse pet food)

5.     Use your segmentation to nurture

Softwares that help marketers execute:

• SEO: SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs and Google Search Console

• Content marketing: Wordpress, Buzzsomo, Hotjar and Canva

• Social Media marketing: Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social

• Advertising: Adroll, Rollworks, 6Sense and Adstream

• Automation: Drip, Marketo, Omnisend

• Reporting: Google Analytics, Hubspot, Databox

• Collaboration/Project Management Tools: Slack, Trello, Asana, Airtable

Summary of learnings from Hubspot Academy.