What is inbound marketing?

The inbound methodology is the method of growing your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about valuing and empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.

Why? Because when your customers succeed, you succeed.

The inbound methodology can be applied in three ways:

1. Attract: drawing in the right people with valuable content and conversations that set you up as a trusted advisor.
2. Engage: presenting insights and solutions that align with their pain points and goals so they are more likely to buy from you. 
3. Delight: offering help and support to empower your customers to find success with your product. 

When customers find success and share that success with others, it attracts new prospects to your organization, creating a self-sustaining loop. This is how your organization builds momentum, and this is why the inbound methodology serves as a strong foundation for your flywheel.

What is the flywheel?

The flywheel is a business model adopted by HubSpot to illustrate the momentum your organization can gain by focusing on and delivering exceptional customer experience.

You can spin and build momentum in your flywheel by investing in strategies that attract and keep customers — forces for your flywheel.

Anything that slows your flywheel is friction. Often the biggest sources of friction for your customers come in the handoffs between teams, so alignment and communication between teams are key to keeping your flywheel spinning.

When your flywheel is based on the inbound methodology, your marketing, sales, and service functions can add force and cut friction throughout the attract, engage, and delight phases. All organizational functions are also responsible for removing friction from your flywheel.

For example, in the attract phase, marketing will likely play the biggest role by doing things like blogging, event marketing, and running paid ads, but your sales team can also add force by engaging in social selling, and your customer service team can add force by making it easier for current customers to make referrals.

Once you get enough customers and engage and delight them, they can keep your flywheel spinning by promoting your organization and bringing new customers to you. Over time, your flywheel helps you to grow without continually investing in customer acquisition.

Let’s unpack some more inbound marketing strategies.

These strategies will help you effectively market to your target audience the inbound way. Learn more about the specific strategies for each inbound method of attracting, engaging, and delighting consumers to keep your flywheel spinning and help your business grow better.

Attracting Strategies

Inbound marketing strategies that attract your target audience and customer personas are tied to content creation and development.

To reach your audience, start by creating and publishing content — such as blog articles, content offers, and social media — that offers value. Examples include guides on how to use your products, information about how your solution can solve their challenges, customer testimonials, and details about promotions or discounts.

To attract your audience members on a deeper level through inbound marketing, optimize all this content with an SEO strategy. Target specific keywords and phrases related to your products or services, the challenges you solve for customers, and the ways you help customers.

This SEO strategy will allow your content and information to organically appear on the search engine results page (SERP) when people search for this information. These folks are your target audience, and likely the right customers for your business.

Engaging Strategies

When using inbound strategies to engage your audience, make sure you’re communicating and dealing with leads and customers in a way that makes them want to build long-term relationships with you. When using these engagement strategies, inject information about the value your business will give them.

Specific engagement strategies may include how you handle and manage your inbound sales calls. Focus on how customer service representatives handle calls from interested people and prospects. Additionally, be sure you’re always solution selling rather than product selling. This will make sure all deals end in mutually beneficial agreements for customers and your business — meaning, you offer value for your right-fit customers.

Delighting Strategies

Delighting inbound strategies make sure customers are happy, satisfied, and supported long after they buy. These strategies involve your team members becoming advisors and experts who can assist customers at any time.

Incorporating thoughtful, well-timed chatbots and surveys to assist, support, and request feedback is a great way to delight your customers. Bots and surveys should be shared at specific points throughout the customer’s journey to make sure they are relevant and valuable.

For example, chatbots may help current customers set up a new technique or tactic you've started offering that they’d like to take advantage of. Additionally, a satisfaction survey may be sent out six months after customers buy your product or service to get their feedback and review ideas for improvement.

Social media listening is another important strategy when it comes to delighting customers. Social media followers may use one of your profiles to give feedback, ask questions, or share their experience with your products or services. Show that you hear and care by responding to these interactions with information that helps, supports, and encourages followers.

Lastly, the mark of an inbound strategy focused on delighting customers is one that helps and supports customers in any situation, whether or not your business gets any value out of it. Remember, a delighted customer becomes a brand advocate and promoter, so handle all interactions, both big and small, with care.

As an inbound marketer, your goal is to attract new prospects to your company, engage with them at scale, and delight them individually.

You also partner with your sales and services teams to keep the flywheel spinning effectively and help the business grow. It's a big job, but the inbound methodology and Marketing Hub have you covered.

Supporting the inbound methodology is HubSpot's customer platform, which includes all the marketing, sales, customer service, content management, operations, and commerce software you need to keep customer relationships front and center. These tools are powerful alone, but they’re even better when used together, helping you grow and market with the inbound methodology.

By combining the inbound methodology with  HubSpot software, you’ll grow your business and get customers to buy more, stay with you longer, refer their friends, and tell the world they love you.