What Is Inbound Marketing?

It's marketing with a magnet, not a sledgehammer — marketing based on content that attracts and nurtures prospects, not spam that interrupts them. There are three stages: Get Found, Convert and Analyze.

Get Found

Create content, optimize your webpages, get involved in social media and attract quality visitors to your website.

Convert

Generate leads, track them on your site, qualify them with automated emails, give you sales team more information.

Analyze

Analyze your marketing efforts so you can make smarter decisions and report real marketing ROI.

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Part I: Introduction to Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is marketing that's useful. It means acquiring customers by attracting and nurturing prospects with exceptional content, data and customer service, not interrupting them with spam. It means pulling prospects in with a magnet, not beating them over the head with a sledgehammer.

Inbound marketing tactics tend to be cheaper than traditional marketing tactics. Companies that focus on inbound tactics have a 62% lower cost-per-lead than companies that focus on outbound tactics.

How does inbound marketing work?

Think of your sales and marketing process as a funnel. Fresh prospects come in at the top of the funnel, happy customers go out the bottom. As a marketer, your goal is to maximize both the number of people you attract at the top of your funnel as website visitors and the number that come out the bottom as customers. Inbound marketers use three types of tactics to do this:

Get Found — Tactics like blogging and search engine optimization that aim to attract quality prospects to your website.
Convert — Tactics like landing pages and lead nurturing that aim to convert website visitors to leads and long-term customers.
Analyze — Tactics that aim to improve the efficiency of the entire process — to get more of the right people in the top and out the bottom.

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Part II: Get Found Tactics

Get Found tactics help you attract visitors to your website (prospects to the top of your funnel). They're the most important inbound marketing tactics because they're like a building's foundation: You can't build anything without them. If you don’t have any website visitors, you can't generate leads. Back to top

Here are some of the most important Get Found tactics:

Blogging — Inbound marketing starts with blogging. A blog is the single best way to attract new visitors to your website. Companies that blog get 55% more leads than those who don't. In order to get found by prospective customers, you need to have content that attracts them. Your blog is the home of this magnetic content.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — Your customers begin their buying process online, usually at a search engine. So you need to make sure you're listed prominently when they search. To get there, you need to carefully, analytically pick keywords, optimize your pages, create content and build links.

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Social Media — When people go online today they're interacting with friends, asking questions, answering questions, sharing content and discussing an infinite range of topics. As a marketer, you want your content to be a central part of the discussion in your industry. If your content is a part of that conversion, it can help you pull people back to your site and to the top of your marketing and sales funnel.

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Content Marketing — Content marketing is another Get Found tactic. Like blogging, it means publishing content that will attract people to your website. Unlike blogging, Content Marketing is not restricted to a specific channel — it's the general idea of using content to attract people to your site. It can also include videos, whitepapers, webinars, and other content. Back to top

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Part III: Convert Tactics

Convert tactics help you take the visitors you attracted to your site with blogging, social media, and search engine optimization and convert them into into paying customers. You can generate a lot of activity on your website without convert tactics, but you won't generate any revenue. Back to top

Here are some of the most important convert tactics:

Calls to Action — How do you begin to engage website visitors and engage them in a sales process? You encourage them to take actions — maybe download a whitepaper, maybe signup for a webinar.

Calls to action are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action, eg "Download a Whitepaper", or "Attend a Webinar". If you don't have enough calls to action or your calls to action aren't enticing enough, you won't generate any leads.

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Landing Pages — When a website visitor clicks on a call to action they should be sent to a landing page. The landing page is where the offer in the call to action is fulfilled, and where the prospect submits information that your sales team can use to begin a conversation.

For example, if you offer a whitepaper download in your call to action, the landing page is the page where visitors submit the information required to download the whitepaper. When website visitors fill out forms on landing pages, they typically become leads.

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Email Marketing — What do you do if a visitor clicks on your call to action, fills out a landing page, downloads your whitepaper, but still isn’t ready to become a customer?

You need to nurture a longer-term relationship with that lead. Email marketing is one way to do this. A series of emails focused on useful, relevant content can build trust with a prospect and get them ready to buy.

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Lead Nurturing — Lead nurturing refers to email marketing structured in a series of emails containing sequential content. Lead nurturing emails (campaigns) are often triggered by specific landing pages. Because of their specific triggers and sequence, lead nurturing campaigns can be more relevant, and thus more likely to engage prospects.

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Marketing Automation — Marketing Automation refers to email marketing and lead nurturing where the email sequence and content is based on data the recipient has allowed you to collect.

For example, if a visitor downloaded a whitepaper, you might want to send them a series of related emails, but if they follow you on Twitter and visited specific pages on your website, you might want to change the messaging. Back to top

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Part IV: Analyze Tactics

Analysis is the critical third category of inbound marketing tactics. Once you start attracting people to your site with blogging, social media and SEO, once you start converting those new website visitors into leads and customers, you need to begin analyzing your sales and marketing funnel and figure out ways to make it more efficient. Back to top

Key Metrics — Most inbound marketers use the sales and marketing funnel to frame their analysis. They look at the following funnel metrics:

Website Visitors — A measure of the top of your sales and marketing funnel; these are people who found your site. They need to be converted to leads and then customers.
Leads — A measure of the middle of your funnel. These are people who visited your site and did something (usually filled out a form) to identify themselves. Once website visitors identify themselves and become leads, you can begin the conversation needed to turn them into customers.
Customers — The bottom of your funnel — the goal!
Conversion Rates — A conversion rate is the percentage of people who move from one stage of your funnel to the next. If 2% of your website visitors become leads, your visitor-to-lead conversion rate is 2%.
Benchmarks — Benchmarks are data from peers for any metric you track. For example, conversion rate benchmarks allow you to see how your own conversion rates compare to those of similar companies.
Content Performance — Each type of content you produce should be tracked independently. You want to see how well each type of content is attracting people to your website, and how frequently specific pieces and types of content are used in the process of converting leads to customers.

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Method of Analysis — Inbound marketing analysis should begin with a series of questions designed to pinpoint the place where you have the most leverage as a marketer — the place where you have the greatest opportunity to make changes that could result in increased sales. Here’s the series of questions you want to start with:

How do your website visitor numbers compare to your peers? (Use your benchmarks to determine this.) If you’re behind your competitors, you know you need to improve the top of the funnel (get more traffic); if you’re ahead of your competition, move to the next question.
Are you getting as many leads as your competitors? How does your visitor-to-lead conversion rate compare? If you’re below your benchmarks for leads and visitor-to-lead conversion, you should dive into your middle-of-the-funnel Convert process, and figure out how to improve your results.
Are you happy with your lead volume, but not your sales numbers? In that case, examine your sales process (the bottom of your funnel). What can you do to improve your lead nurturing and sales techniques to make more of your leads convert?

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Goal Setting — Inbound marketing analysis allows businesses to set and track specific marketing goals. Once you’ve identified your key metrics and done your inbound marketing analysis, there are several simple steps you can take to set concrete business goals:

Set Your Sales and Lead Goals — What are your goals for the next quarter? The next year?
What is the marketing program needed to achieve those goals? — Given current conversion rates, how many leads do you need to hit your sales goals?
How many website visitors do you need to get? — What are the things you need to do to get that website traffic? Or what are the things you need to do to improve you conversion rates? Back to top

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