Simply put, inbound marketing is creating and sharing useful, compelling and fantastic content with potential and established clients. It’s inviting them into your way of thinking and business culture. This way of communication is a full access pass to your expertise, know how, and story. Both established and new customers become part of your company’s journey, sort of a VIP, behind the scenes pass.

Traditional marketing is a one-way conversation — the marketer talking ‘at’ the potential customer. Inbound marketing is an invitation to an ongoing dialogue in which you can communicate with your customers in both a professional and congenial fashion.By publishing the right content in the right place, your output becomes relevant and helpful to your customers, not interruptive. Now that’s marketing people can get involved with. Inbound equals interactive.

Over the past five years, inbound marketing has become the most effective marketing method for doing business online. SEE INFOGRAPHIC BELOW. Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of purchasing ads, buying email lists, and hunting down leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they inherently want to be. They want to become part of your story. Inbound marketing helps you work smarter with your money than traditional outbound marketing. Whether your company is big or small, inbound is 10x more effective for increasing:

• Website Traffic
• Sales
• Lead Generation
• Customer Loyalty

By aligning the content you publish with your customer’s interests and needs, you naturally attract inbound traffic to your website/business where you can then convince, close, and satisfy them over an extended period of time.

Delight Your Customers

The inbound way provides remarkable content to first time visitors, hot leads, or existing customers: Just because someone has already written you a check doesn’t mean you can forget about them! (It costs businesses 6-7x more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. KissMetrics). McKinsey’s research tells us, “70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated”. Companies who embrace inbound marketing continue to engage with, delight, and (hopefully) upsell their current customer base into happy promoters of the organizations and products they love.

Ways to Delight Customers:

Surveys — The best way to figure out what your users want is by asking them. Use feedback and surveys to ensure you’re providing customers with what they’re looking for.

Calls-to-Action — These present different users with offers that change based on buyer persona and lifecycle stage.

Smart Text — Provide your existing customers with remarkable content tailored to their interests and challenges. Help them achieve their own goals, as well as introduce new products and features that might be of interest to them.

Social Monitoring — Keep track of the social conversation. Listen for your customers’ questions, comments, likes, and dislikes — and reach out to them with relevant content.

Content To Delight Customers:

• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Video
• Newsletters
• Infographics
• Images
• eBooks
• VIP Passes
• Exclusive Offers
• User Reviews
• Compelling Announcements (Free shipping, Discounts, Special Offers, Surprises
• Humour
• Putting a fun spin
• Interview satisfied clients

Converse With Your Customers

Make sure you have strong consistent social media presence where you are sharing and delighting your customers with your fantastic content and timely communication and response. This is the perfect outlet to connect and converse with your customers! All these different forms of inbound marketing are an on-going, multi-faceted conversation. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes your company easy to be found, and draws customers into your overall message and business practices. Modern, up to date, effective marketers make their way into the hearts and minds of their customers. In contrast, outbound marketing hits them over the head with obtuse, generic information.

Inbound marketing educates, informs, and eventually convinces customers to interact with, believe in, and spend money on your product or service. Inbound marketing can make your business stand out amongst the grey masses a.k.a. all of your competitors on the internet (that’s a lot). Remember, as stated before, by publishing the right content in the right place at the right time, your marketing becomes relevant and helpful to your customers, not interruptive. Now that’s marketing people can love.

So Are You Delighting People? Ask Yourself These Questions:

• Are you solving peoples’ problems?
• Are you providing recommendations and being helpful?
• Are you enthusiastic, warm, and fun?

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor