It’s 2021. Marketing has changed. Our entire world has changed. Consumers are smarter, busier, and challenged like never before. That means they live and function in an ocean of increasingly growing choices and advertisement noise.
Instead of contributing to that noise, which confuses and loses customers, why not appeal to and delight customers where they are, instead of where you want them to be?
Enter inbound marketing. In this blog, you’ll learn the key differences between traditional, bloated marketing tactics and inbound, and why inbound is the smarter solution that boosts leads and converts faster.
Inbound isn’t about you. It’s about your customers! It’s not about your products or services or the latest gimmick. Inbound is all about becoming a resource for your customers and providing solutions to their problems. With this methodology, you’re bringing the right people in, and meeting them where they are, not where you want them to be.
Think about the buyer’s journey. This is a process every consumer goes through. Let’s break it down:
Inbound marketing experts understand and embrace this journey and leverage it to appeal to customers at each stage. Instead of pushing awareness stage content to a consumer in the decision stage, appeal to the decision-making process itself in your advertising or offer. That’s one of the many ways inbound saves you time, money, and brainpower!
Here’s a brief strategy example. Let’s assume your current strategy appeals to consumers in the awareness stage in the buyer’s journey. Your target consumer, or buyer persona, discovers they have a problem. They begin trying to understand their problem by searching for common questions and explanations online. After all, most problems can be solved with existing products and services available at the tap of a button.
This is where inbound marketing strategy comes in.
Your website must address your buyer persona’s problem. Create content that shows you understand their pain, and offer a clear path from where they are now, to the successful future they'll experience when they choose your product or service. Think of inbound marketing as a helpful, proactive guide. Instead of yanking your buyer persona along a predetermined path, guide them toward success.
For your audience, success is a solved problem. For your business, success is solving your customer’s problem, not more leads or more deals closed. More leads and more closed deals are the results of successfully solving your customers’ problems! That distinction is key: when you keep your customer’s problem at the forefront of your marketing strategy, every step of the sales journey becomes clearer under one primary controlling idea.
Here are a few pieces of content you can leverage with inbound marketing to attract customers and solve their problem:
Outbound marketing is the traditional, outdated marketing tactics everyone is familiar with. While inbound marketing pulls your audience in, outbound marketing pushes information out. You’ve heard of “spray n’ pray” marketing? What about the “shotgun approach” or a newsletter “blast"? That’s outbound. Yes, there is a strategy behind traditional marketing. But it’s far more unreliable and offers significantly less control over a prospect’s buying journey than inbound marketing.
Outbound marketing used to be the dominant marketing approach. What happened? Why is outbound marketing no longer the tried and true approach to a business’s marketing needs?
Well, there are two main reasons to cover:
Today’s consumers are inundated with advertisements, emails, and calls to action. It can be overwhelming and frustrating. That’s why consumers do everything they can to avoid ads, such as ad-blocking software, filters, and paid subscription services that remove ads entirely from traditional broadcasting. Outbound marketing is a primary culprit of this issue. It solved a business’s need for advertising but failed to ask how the spray n’ pray method affected the target buyer. Crucially, outbound marketing fails to obtain consent. Outbound never considers, “Is this content relevant to your needs?” or “Would you like to hear about our product or service?”
Yesterday’s information gatekeepers are gone. Before, traditional media dominated how the average customer learned new information. Now, information has never been more readily available. Outbound marketing struggles to consider this massive shift in information accessibility. Gathering the required information to make an informed purchase takes less time and requires fewer resources than it once did.
It’s clear inbound marketing is a smarter way to market to your customers. Instead of pushing information out to people committed to tuning you out, pull your audience in and offer a solution to their problem.
But shifting your existing outbound tactics to the more inclusive, holistic inbound methodology is harder than it might seem. Here are three ways you can shift your outbound messaging towards inbound as soon as next week:
Your website is your most important salesperson and most valuable employee. It needs to serve your employees just as well as it serves your customers. Think of it as a hub! If your website struggles to communicate how your business solves the customer’s problem, then what good is it? If your website creates more friction and problems for your team than it solves, what’s the point of a website at all?
The right website starts with a growth-driven, inbound approach. Click here to learn more about how to build a better website for your business.
Storytelling is a powerful tool honed by our species over thousands of years. Don’t stress about what you need to say. Instead, focus on how you can tell a compelling story that speaks to your target audience.
In a nutshell, this is the StoryBrand methodology.
We know inbound marketing can be a lot to handle on your own. It almost sounds too good to be true. Yes, inbound is complex. But that’s what we’re for. Sauce Agency is a HubSpot Gold Certified Agency Partner. That means we understand inbound marketing inside and out and we know how to leverage inbound software solutions to address your current marketing issues, implement data-driven changes, measure results, and improve as we go.
We’re also a Certified StoryBrand Agency. Our Growth Guides understand how to tell a compelling story that sells. We’ll work with you to develop the right story for your website that speaks directly to your audience and positions your business as their guide. That way, they understand that your business can lead them to success. Schedule a call with a certified Growth Guide today to improve your marketing, position your business as an industry leader, and grow smarter.