The Inbound Marketing strategy

Inbound marketing is a content creation strategy to attract visitors to your website and blog. The objective: convert these visitors into potential contacts and then conclude customer contracts thanks to different techniques such as blogging, lead nurturing, good engagement on social networks or marketing automation.

Outbound marketing is a strategy of reaching out to a prospect through the use of non-targeted and relatively intrusive advertising. It is a more “traditional” strategy as opposed to inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is characterized as interruptive marketing. We can illustrate it for example: when you watch a video on Youtube, if it is long enough, you will be interrupted by an ad, which you have neither requested nor chosen. It’s the same thing when you watch a TV program and in many other cases. Outbound marketing requires money or time to reach your audience. It is a very competitive strategy depending on the industry. It is a strategy that tends to lose a bit of speed, unlike inbound marketing, which is gaining momentum and is increasingly appealing to companies, especially with the ubiquity of digital.

The differences are therefore also visible at the level of the approach, the way of conveying information or customer relations. Indeed, outbound marketing, a more traditional method, takes place in such a way that the sales representative solicits prospects to offer them his products or services. In inbound marketing, the client solicits the sales representative himself, which implies that he has a little knowledge of the company and its services and that he is interested in knowing more. The sales representative will therefore save precious time and his first mission will no longer be to create a contact but to process an incoming request.

These two strategies are therefore very different, both in their way of doing things and in the way they obtain new customers. This makes them complementary strategies since they can work together.

The media to be favored in an inbound marketing strategy are globally the website in particular thanks to its natural referencing, the blog, landing pages, white papers and social networks.

A good SEO is one of the important pillars of the inbound marketing strategy. Indeed, it is what will allow you to optimize your content and your positioning on search engines, using relevant keywords and thus increase the number of visitors on your platforms. All the stake of inbound marketing resides therefore in the creation of a relevant content and an optimization of its natural referencing, in order to generate traffic on its various channels which are: your website, your blog or your social networks. Thanks to these techniques, you will be able to attract inbound leads and generate qualified contacts. This is one of the reasons why the SEO audit is an important step. It allows you to define the keys of improvement for your SEO and implicitly, for your success.

For the creation of content, the preferred media are your website, your blog or your social networks. The blog is useful for writing relevant articles on the latest trends in your industry or for explaining topics about your services or products. The idea is to generate content by humanizing the relationship between you and your customers or prospects. It is the same logic for the website. Concerning social networks, the idea is to attract a larger audience. Indeed, you will be able to attract both prospects who already know you or strangers who could potentially become prospects. Social networks represent interesting channels to develop the customer portfolio of a company, but also to be able to work on its brand image.

Knowing perfectly who your “buyer personas” are is key to targeting the right prospects and getting qualified leads. Indeed, by taking into account your current customers and the potential customers you want to reach, you can determine your “typical customers”. This will also allow you to position yourself in terms of your marketing messages and strategies regarding the content of your site, your blog or your social networks.

It is important to note that it is rare to convert a potential lead from the very first exchanges. Generally, visitors who have spent time on your site and/or blog and have contacted you because they are interested will not decide right away, except in the case of an express request for a well-defined project. Otherwise, the ideal is to target them again later on with marketing messages and in this case, you have 70% more chances to convert this lead into a customer (Source: l’ADN Business). In this case, it is a question of “retargeting” campaigns.  

Before implementing such a strategy, it is important to define the context and analyze the need for it. An inventory of your market, company and targets must be drawn up. Afterwards, it will be important to set ambitious objectives.

Inbound marketing is a strategy for the future and it is bound to evolve as the digital world evolves. The use of such strategies combined with the use of SEO techniques are key practices to amplify the visibility of your company, don’t hesitate anymore.