Inbound Marketing
What is Inbound Marketing? According to Hubspot- “Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention. Sharing is caring and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.”
Today Digital ecosystem has developed into a huge platform. Digital facilitates mass dissemination of information in real time, much faster and quicker. Digital is no longer only disruptive and one way traffic from publisher to receiver. Digital has become inclusive where the power has shifted to the consumer, making it possible for one to one conversation. Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies: uses 2 Critical Inputs for one to one conversation.
We can infer from above that people are attracted to you and would like to receive personalized messages from you. So what are the 2 most critical inputs here? Right- it is Content and Database.
Content: Inbound Marketing
Content is the king but it has to be relevant. Different people have different reasons for the content to be relevant to them. STP- Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning is very important here.
According to Smart Insights:
How to use STP? Through segmentation, you can identify niches with specific needs, mature markets to find new customers, deliver more focused and effective marketing messages.
The needs of each segment are the same, so marketing messages should be designed for each segment to emphasize relevant benefits and features required rather than one size fits all for all customer types. This approach is more efficient, delivering the right mix to the same group of people, rather than a scattergun approach.
You can segment your existing markets based on nearly any variable, as long as it’s effective as the examples below show: Well-known ways to segment your audience include:
- Demographics- Breakdown by any combination: age, gender, income, education, ethnicity, marital status, education, household (or business), size, length of residence, type of residence or even profession/Occupation.
- Psychographics- This refers to ‘personality and emotions’ based on behavior, linked to purchase choices, including attitudes, lifestyle, hobbies, risk aversion, personality and leadership traits. Magazines read and TV. While demographics explain ‘who’ your buyer is, psychographics inform you ‘why’ your customer buys.
After Segmentation, based on a certain set of variables you go ahead and Target that segment to market to. According to Wikipedia– “A target market is a group of customers a business has decided to aim its marketing efforts and ultimately its merchandise towards”.
According to Wikipedia– Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the mind of the customer and how it is distinguished from products from competitors. In order to position products or brands, companies may emphasize the distinguishing features of their brand (what it is, what it does and how, etc.) or they may try to create a suitable image (inexpensive or premium, utilitarian or luxurious, entry-level or high-end, etc.) through the marketing mix.
Fine-tune content to appeal to different people. Target and position of your message design to appeal to the segment you are addressing.
Launches of new models of mobile phones, car, TVs etc. or fashion labels etc. keep on happening throughout the year. These companies would normally conduct an event and launch the product. High involvement of celebrities, publicity and media as content, would attract high attention and retention. Bold, brave and fresh ideas used in the event will have tremendous free WOM- word of mouth publicity. Therefore, content is a critical input for any effective inbound marketing strategy. Without relevant content we cannot attract people to press CTA- call to action button. CTA pressed by people gives us their permission for further marketing to them in future.
Database: Inbound Marketing
Using traditional media you create an event and invite celebrities, spend huge money for publicity and PR- public relations to get media coverage and REACH. Only 200 guests can attend the event in a particular geography. You have a database of only 200 people to market to in future. Is the amount and money spent worth it?
Now, see the power of digital media or Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies.
Create huge buzz in the digital mediums available and give a reason for people to register by:
- Register and get all expenses paid trip to watch the event live.
- Register to watch live on any device from anywhere and win discount coupons. (For example- Facebook Live, Live on Twitter, YouTube or participating websites).
Last year many auto companies used Flock to Unlock on Twitter and Facebook Live. People, who could not attend the Auto Expo in New Delhi, could watch it from anywhere, on any device. Recently, I personally telecast live on Facebook for my friends to watch from my mobile. Vin Diesel and Deepika Padukone came for their promotion event of their film XXX Return of Xander Cage at the most happening Phoenix mall, Lower Parel in Mumbai.
Digital mediums increase the capacity of people who can watch (more than 200 above) the event from any geography, any device. I may get 10,000 registrations from people who have the intent to watch the event. We get what? A DATABASE of 10,000 prospects as compared to 200 earlier, at a much lower cost, to market to. The beauty of this database is it is qualified leads. People who have voluntarily registered and are interested in your content, products and services. By their choice they have given you permission to market to them in future.
Only 2% will convert. Well that is Inbound Marketing. Well, Market to the rest of 98% from a creditable database. Optimize and keep re-funneling them to achieve great conversion results from just that one event. Acquire, analyze and nurture the 2nd critical input of Inbound Marketing- Database.
There is much more to Inbound Marketing than discussed above. But these 2 critical inputs are essential for Effective Inbound Marketing Strategies.
Image credits: Smart Insights
