Inbound marketing is a methodology used to get your customers to find your business. How is this done? Through trusted content that your audience finds valuable. Blogs, videos, fact sheets, social media, and other forms of content provide your business with a platform and make your business a subject matter expert in its respective field. Inbound marketing is about creating and maintaining relationships with an audience full of prospects for your business, and it is a strategy that compounds in value over time.

Through inbound marketing, your business is responsible for leading your prospects through the buyer’s journey to successfully meet their needs. For example, when a potential client is looking for a sanitation company, especially now during COVID times, they’re going to have a lot of unanswered questions, and who better to quell their concerns than a leading sanitation company that provides blogs, social media, and video content to guide them through their purchasing decision.

Your business is the expert in its field and inbound marketing leverages and capitalizes on this authority and expertise. This guidance builds relationships and keeps your business top of mind whenever a prospect is ready to commit to purchasing. Having this relationship keeps the conversation going, and today’s tech platforms make it easier to engage in these relationships. The best part about inbound marketing is that you don’t need to have these conversations with individuals, but rather at scale to a targeted audience.

Creating content that provides value and builds trust for your audience allows them to understand how your business operates to fulfill their needs. There are various mediums through which your customers can find you. So does this mean you need to start creating content for every social media platform? No. You need strategy and proper tactics behind any effective campaign and clearly defined goals to drive this strategy.

When your audience sees you as a credible thought leader in your industry, you become a valuable resource that they will come back to and recommend to others.

Understanding Your Audience and Their Needs

The first step in implementing an inbound marketing strategy is to understand who you’re trying to build a relationship with. Understanding your audience will guide the content development process so that your business creates relevant, timely, and valuable content. Why are customers asking questions? Identify the missing gaps of information and provide that information through your content. Your prospects will have different levels of understanding their problems and possible solutions, so it’s important to keep in mind that content has to be created for the varying degrees of knowledge of your industry.

Where does your audience live and interact in the digital world? Placement is key to an effective inbounding campaign. As stated earlier, content creation isn’t arbitrary, and it doesn’t aim at every moving target. It could be more beneficial to focus solely on LinkedIn rather than FaceBook, and knowing where your audience lives is a key factor in an effective inbound marketing strategy.

A great way to understand your buyers is to create various buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. These personas have values, goals, needs, and wants, and understanding these personas will help you align your messaging with these criteria. These personas are created through market research and are further refined using data received from the analytics of your content. Analytics is a great resource to understand what kind of content your audience finds valuable, and this information should be used to redefine your content strategy.

What problems is your audience facing? Your personas should include specific pain points they have, and your content should address these issues. Let your visitors know you understand their problems, and let them know your business has the knowledge and expertise to help them. Maybe the problems that they’re having are a symptom of a larger issue, and in that case, your content should be educating them on the proper way to deal with those pain points.

Effective Inbound marketing really comes down to one quality: caring. Like in any relationship, both parties need to feel the other cares about their needs, wants, and values. Building a relationship allows your prospects to disclose valuable insight. Ask them how you can improve the business. When they trust and respect your authority in your industry, they won’t hesitate to tell you when you’ve misstepped. By knowing your audience and aligning your messaging to their needs, you will be able to build a lasting relationship with them.

Quality over Quantity

According to the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer, competence is only 24 percent of a company’s measurable trust capital. “In comparison, integrity, purpose and dependability drive 76 percent, making it very clear that more than competence, ethics-related dimensions drive the lion’s share of company trust capital.”

This means that today’s consumers are more critical and more aware of a company’s business processes, making it harder to build trust with whom you’re trying to reach. It means that your prospects can see through traditional advertising methods that “sell” first rather than offer value. Customers want transparency. They want to know if the content you create can be trusted, and for this reason, it isn’t enough to create content for the sake of creating content. When your prospects see the value you give, you start building trust, and quality content is valuable content.

If you look up any large organization, you’ll find that most of them have a blog dedicated to topics relevant to their industry. Their social media platforms provide targeted value and their audience recognizes them as a beacon of trusted information. At this point you’ve researched your audience, you understand their pain points, and are now ready to create quality content for every step in the buyer’s journey. Build relationships and learn more about your audience. This feedback should influence the day-to-day tasks of your company and will propel your inbound marketing strategy.