Part 1: Inbound Marketing Basics

Proforma Blog Inbound Marketing Basics

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Inbound marketing is one of today’s most effective ways to convert strangers into customers and promoters of your business. Since 2006, inbound marketing has been carving a niche for itself among online promotional campaigns. It is a breath of fresh air after years of mundane outbound methods of buying email lists, buying ads, and praying for leads. Cold calling has been largely replaced by inbound marketing, which focuses more on creating quality promotional content that attracts masses towards the product.

By aligning the content in accordance with the customer’s needs, a company naturally attracts inbound traffic that can be converted, closed, and retained with effective tactics. Let us now see how inbound marketing basics are done!

Attracting
Attract your target market with high quality, relevant content that solves a problem for them. Why is this important? Because you don’t want just any traffic on your website or page, you want the right traffic! The right traffic is based upon reaching qualified targeted prospects who can be converted to happy customers. In order to do this, you will need to be a 100% sure of your buyer’s persona. Once you have created this high quality relevant content be sure to make the right use of social media platforms to promote it. In this way, you are investing more time in formulating effective SEO strategies.

Converting
Once you have attracted the right visitors, then it is the time to convert them into customers. Valuable tools that will help to convert the leads include effective calls to action, forms, engaging landing pages, and thank you pages. Here is how it works. The engaging content sparks interest and the potential customers want to learn more. In order to receive the high quality content like an ebook or a whitepaper, they will be willing to exchange some level of contact information. This may sound like a lot of work; however it is necessary in today’s market. Many companies are opting to enlist the help of an inbound marketing agency like Proforma.

Closing
When you arrive at this step, know that you have done everything right up till now! Now that you have attracted the right visitors, and converted them in to leads, you need to close them as your customers. The effective tools in this regard include Customer Relationship Management (CRM), closed loop reporting, marketing automation and e-mailing relevant content.

Retaining
Retaining customers is also known as delighting and nurturing. By doing so, you move a step ahead from the competition. After all your hard work to this point, you will want to continue the momentum. Conduct surveys to understand your new clients better and continue developing relevant content to keep your customers excited. Meeting and exceeding their needs in this phase may win your clients for life. Don’t forget social monitoring of your target demographic to understand if and how their interests are shifting.

If this article provided relevant information please visit us on January 2, 2016 for Part 2 in our inbound marketing series.

Source: Inbound Marketing Basics

AboutGlenda McCarthy-Gaspar

Glenda McCarthy-Gaspar, 15+ years sales and marketing experience. After serving in various sales and marketing roles for some of Canada’s largest corporations, Glenda followed her entrepreneurial dream and started her own business in 2008. By 2011, Glenda earned her BASI (Bachelor of Advertising Specialty Information) designation. Also in 2011 she made the decision to join Proforma, the largest print, promotional and graphic communications company in North America in hopes of taking business growth to a new level. That decision paid off and has resulted in her winning numerous business awards for excellence and has achieved million dollar sales by 2014. Glenda has recently obtained her Inbound Marketing Certification to help her clients meet the demands of the digital world.

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