Marketers realised the potential of inbound marketing when its effective ways began to increase the customer base, acting as an innovative way to attract leads. Inbound is a form of marketing which empowers potential customers by creating content that people volunteer to utilise.

Inbound marketing focuses a lot on nurturing leads. The process requires the use of tools ranging from SEO, SMO or in some places even email marketing, this further helps you to gather buyer's persona that can be used in targeted communication. Attaining all this information gives you insight into your consumer needs, and this can be used by marketers to create meaningful content for different buyer’s persona accordingly.

There are various ways to reach out to your target audience, and inbound marketing helps to pull the right audience at the right time when they’re already hunting for the possible solutions. In case you’re focusing on how to promote or boost your content, inbound marketing is the right answer. And quality content has time and again proved to attract people towards the product and the company. 

It is a customer-centric approach which draws people’s attention through the integrated use of content marketing, search engine optimization and social media marketing. Content Marketing is not just limited to blogging but various other creative means of communicating a brand’s various products/services. With the decreasing attention span, videos and images have played a great role in generating traffic as they are interesting and appealing to the viewers. SEO is an organic process of getting traffic from the results on a search engine. The search engine works on the demands of specific keywords, and content marketing fulfils that demand by using those keywords and incorporating them in the content pieces.

Another important pillar of inbound marketing is social media optimisation which has taken its share of hits, but it remains one of the effective strategies for generating new visibility. Social media can generate a steady traffic to your site and build your brand credibility.

How can SMEs and Startups leverage inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is an effective means of marketing which can be implied by agencies, SMEs, and startups for the promotion of any brand, product or an individual. When you’re a startup, it is essential that you reach out to your potential users; you want people to know about you and your products/services. The real struggle for any SME or startup is how they become a part of any discussion. Therefore, inbound marketing is an efficient way of marketing especially for the SMEs and startups as they lack big marketing budgets initially.

Inbound marketing focuses on the long-term relationship between the consumer and business. The main idea is capture leads with high interest and or need, know content consumption journey of your prospect well and sales team/ solutions team should be well informed to be able to give right solution and help both client & his/her own business. Apart from attracting, converting, closing, delight is a very important area to work on - improve customer- business relations, and as a result, it improves brand’s credibility, sales, reach and helps in creating an affinity. Also, inbound gives an easier measure of your marketing performance to determinate the efforts that need to be improved of other business functions that are not performing.

By following the route of inbound marketing, interested people  generate the traffic on the website. They are the actual people who are interested in your content. The retention rate in inbound marketing is more as compared to outbound marketing as only the potential customer makes an effort of filling up a subscription form.

Inbound marketing uses quality content with the help of SEO and SMO to drive traffic to the website. It can be an e-book, guide, tutorial or any content that helps to attract a consumer’s attention and fulfill their requirement.

For such implication of inbound marketing, there are various software available to run it efficiently like Hubspot. Hubspot is a marketing automation software that brings desired results for a company by the medium of inbound marketing. It saves time and reduces costs by acting as a bridge between sales and marketing teams of SMEs and startups. It regulates the workflow; tracks lead scoring and boosts productivity. It follows step by step procedure of the leads and hence enables the sales representative to provide required content. Therefore, it nurtures the relationships of a company with its clients.

Traditional digital marketing started with one-way communication and later evolved to conversation between brand & its customers or followers or fans or even haters, inbound marketing takes the need/ curiosity route.

                                                            Image credits: Hubspot

The biggest task of a performance marketer is to look for potential customers. By publishing useful and accurate content and optimising it according to your buyer persona, the potential customers arrive at your website. Inbound marketing practices on decoding raw information, personalising content for different buyer personas and aligning it accordingly. It is an ROI driven marketing tactic that is poised to grow its trend in the future. It can be incredibly useful for any small business or startup wanting to raise awareness of their brand online.