Inbound Marketing: definition and challenges
Regular publishing of content has become an essential element of any marketing and sales strategy. In their purchasing decisions,90% of shoppers are attentive to the contents published by businesses.
This change in shopping habits requires that companies implement an Inbound Marketing Strategy: 92% of businesses identified an increase in traffic and the rate of leads generated after the implementation of their strategy.
Discover exactly what's behind an Inbound Marketing Strategy and the main challenges involved in setting it up.
Inbound Marketing Strategy: definition
From Outbound Marketing to Inbound Marketing
Outbound marketing covers all the methods involved in making contact with prospects and persuading them to buy a product and/or service: cold calls, advertising, emails, website pop ups… With the development of new technologies, these methods are no longer enough to catch the attention of shoppers. Bombarded with advertising on the web (pop-ups, auto play ads, push notifications…), users can quickly become irritated by the “intrusive” nature of these methods: 86% say that they ignore ads and 44% of them never open commercial emails.
To find information before making a purchase, 70% of shoppers now prefer to read company articles rather than traditional advertising, resulting in the development of a new approach: Inbound Marketing.
The development of Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing includes all the methods used to draw prospects naturally towards a company's products and/or services: SEO optimization, use of social networks, blogging strategies… Less intrusive and better adapted to today's consumer expectations, Inbound Marketing strategies get better results: a good Inbound Marketing strategy increases lead generation by 72%.
Inbound Marketing and content strategy: the challenges
For a successful Inbound Marketing Strategy, it has become mandatory to implement an effective content strategy generating 3 times more leads than paying for advertising on search engines. To implement such a strategy, a company must understand the needs of shoppers and provide the right content, in the right place and at the right time.
Publish relevant content
When shoppers go looking for information before buying, they expect to have access to content providing concrete solutions to their problem. 84% of shoppers expect companies to provide them with the content they're looking for.
This means that businesses must provide shoppers with relevant content adapted to each different phase of the shopping process (acknowledgment of their need, search for information, product assessment…). Marketing teams (33%) see this effort of adaptation as their biggest challenge.
Diversify contents
Shoppers want to read lots of different content before buying: 71% of shoppers read blog articles and40% read 3 to 5 different contents before contacting a salesperson and/or vendor.
Businesses are therefore diversifying their contents. Among the 5most effective types of content: whitepapers (82%), webinars (78%), case studies (73%), e-books (67%), infographics (66%)...
Target the right keywords
When they want information on a product and/or service, shoppers look for this information on search engines before buying: this is how 93% of online shopping experiences begin.
For businesses this requires targeting and integrating the right keywords in each of their contents. This is essential to ensure that shoppers access information that is relevant to their search engine queries.
Adaptation of contents, production of a wide range of formats (infographics, whitepapers, customer case studies, blog articles...), targeting the right keywords... To achieve this requires daily competitive watch. In 2019, 32% of companies said that “the analysis of competitor content” was the most effective method for a successful content strategy.
When you have a lot of competitors producing a large volume of contents, this watch mission can become extremely complex, which is why so many companies are now using Inbound Marketing solutions.