This strategy can bring good results, if well-planned and executed. One of the biggest challenges is actually putting everything into practice. Inbound Marketing is a process.
Inbound marketing is a digital marketing strategy widely used abroad around the worl. It proposes that the customer is attracted to our company. Through specific tools within the purchase journey, this consumer is guided to your product. It sounds easy, but it requires a lot of planning, mastery of management platforms and specialized techniques to make it work.
Management platforms are offered by different companies. However, as we said, it is necessary to have specialized professionals. Dedicated exclusively to the execution of the strategy, in addition to a broad domain of the platforms.
Therefore, it is essential that you pay attention to the questions we pose below before you start using inbound in your company, and this investment, in fact, becomes just another expense or misused capital.
The right way to work
Hiring an automatic management platform can be a good solution and makes many things easier, but it can become completely inefficient and expensive. In fact, this inefficiency is quite common. After all, inbound marketing is full of tools that are always updated. Thus, it is necessary to master these updates and dedicate time to follow up on the applied actions.
Below we will list some points you should pay attention to in order to improve your visibility and attract potential customers.
Talking to the right person – A good inbound job starts with the right definition of the persona, that is, your customer's profile, which audience you sell your product to, what are these people's characteristics, how they behave, and what communication channels they use the most. It is very important to plan your product/service personas and understand what they crave.
What to say – When you know the persona's profile, you need to produce content aimed at them, speaking the same language as the persona and clearly. Content that she is interested in, clarifies something or solves her problem. This content must explore different formats (text, image, sound, video, etc.), and be interesting and educational.
The right time – There is also the subtlety of offering content at the right time that the consumer needs. Inbound marketing is a relationship strategy with people/clients. The aim is to create trust, establish a dialogue, show possibilities and, at the right time, offer the product.
The analogy with a love relationship is used a lot. That is, no one asks a person to marry him on the first date. First, establish a conversation bridge, then a courtship, following the course the marriage proposal is made.
In a similar way, inbound marketing works by offering content at the right time. This entire relationship path, we call the purchase journey. And it has specific phases (knowledge, consideration, solution, and purchase) with specific materials to be used at each moment, from talking about the topic to presenting a product purchase proposal.
Where to talk – Planning should also consider the best channel to disseminate content. If your client is more present on Facebook, the content must be accessible through this platform. If it is more present on Google, it is essential to have ads on Google and be organically well positioned in the search.
Thus, it is important that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is optimized, along with anticipated advertising. The sum of these strategies strengthens the visualization of your brand in the online environment and helps to get more visitors to your website (your company's virtual headquarters).
Where does the recipe go?
We saw above four (04) essential steps for inbound marketing:
Definition of the persona;
Content planning and production;
Delivery of content according to the phase in the purchase journey;
Better ways to deliver content.
It is not at all easy to carry out all this planning and steps without a team of specialized professionals dedicated to this. If a company simply decides to put one or two existing employees on the board to do this it could be a big mistake.
Why? Because these employees will have to learn everything; define personas; plan purchase journeys; produce their own content for personas; advertise them; define resources to be invested; monitor the performance of campaigns; optimize or correct what is not well; and measure the results.
So, do you really think that one or two people within a company already consumed by several tasks will handle it? Is very difficult. And do you know what happens? The steps are not properly followed, the contents are ineffective, deliveries are made randomly and the results do not appear. And this is more common than you might think.