While outbound marketing (or outgoing marketing) is based on intrusion and mass messaging, inbound marketing (or incoming marketing) “is a digital marketing strategy aimed at getting the customer to come to you, rather than going out to find them.” An approach that perfectly matches new ways of working, placing digital at the heart of today’s business.
Also read: Inbound marketing embodies the renewal of B2B marketing
Inbound marketing: a customer-focused approach
Focused on the customer, inbound marketing aims to turn your targets into customers through a well-defined process:
- attract internet users who match the desired profiles through content that is both educational and informative,
- convert your visitors into leads by inviting them to access your premium content in exchange for a few personal details,
- close the sale by turning these leads into customers using lead nurturing, marketing automation (targeted email) and lead scoring (indicating the maturity level of your prospects in the conversion funnel).
In practice, the content created for your website, social networks, blog, or even white papers, catalogs, brochures, etc. indirectly promotes your company by increasing your visibility and lead generation (prospects).
Also read: B2B lead generation: is content the weak link?
The customer as a brand ambassador
This non-intrusive approach helps you build a genuine personalized relationship with your customers. Beyond simply converting a prospect into a customer, inbound marketing deepens these connections through “seduction” activities such as invitations to an event, or privileged access to specific content, for example. All these actions are designed to highlight the customer’s unique character for your company.
These techniques make it possible to gently turn the customer into a brand ambassador: satisfaction is no longer a post-sales service—it’s built patiently from the very beginning of the interactions, through listening, understanding needs, the tone, and naturally, high value-added content.
Crisis management made easier thanks to your community
With digital, the information and comments exchanged online are both countless, unpredictable, and impossible to control: a bad buzz can therefore happen at any time! Thanks to inbound marketing, you can rely on your community of customer ambassadors, who will know how to understand you, listen to you, and above all defend you actively.
If inbound marketing is essential today in a company’s digital strategy, it should not prevent the company from anticipating events. For example, you’ll need to prepare your responses to the 10 main positive and the 10 other negative topics you may encounter online. Today, virality is such that you absolutely must prevent the bad buzz from gaining momentum by adopting the right attitude immediately: transparency, factual information, and targeted targeting of interventions toward ambassadors.
If inbound marketing is at the heart of all marketing strategies, it’s because beyond its results, it requires less financial investment than traditional marketing operations: the customer is more than ever ROI (Return On Investment).
