The stages of the inbound marketing methodology are a set of actions that serve to help your users advance through the purchasing process until they become customers and promoters of your brand.
In this article, we will explain in greater detail how you can implement this methodology in your company following its 3 stages: attract, interact and delight.
Attract
This stage involves identifying the profile of your ideal buyer in order to capture their attention with useful and relevant content. This means transforming Internet users who possess the characteristics of your buyer personas into visitors to your website, using:
Web articles
Web articles are great for attracting prospects to your website, as they tend to appear in search engines organically and rank high on the results if SEO and content marketing techniques are used.
Learn some key tips that will help you achieve this:
Do some research beforehand on the keywords your buyers personas might use to find content on search engines. Take into account the stages of the buyer journey (awareness, consideration, and decision) to create content based on them.
Make sure that the content of your articles contains at least 6 times the selected keyword. You must use it in the title of the article, in the first paragraph, in subtitles, in the description of your images and of course throughout the text. This way, Google can show your articles to those people who perform searches related to your company's content.
Establish a tone and writing style in the form of an inverted pyramid to highlight the most important things at the beginning of the article. Also, avoid using complex words that can confuse the reader and make your text as readable as possible.
You may be interested in reading: Checklist to diagnose your website's SEO.
Social media posts
Social networks are high-reach communication channels due to the number of users who interact with them daily.
According to We Are Social’s “Digital 2019: Global Internet Use Accelerates” study, there were 3.48 billion social media users in 2019. This represents a global growth of 288 million users (9%) compared to last year.
In this sense, one way to attract potential customers to your purchasing process is by using these platforms to drive traffic to your website and your articles. See how you can take advantage of this channel:
Create a social media strategy to attract new prospects. Consider conducting an analysis of your company's competition, its competitive advantages, and its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Also, conduct a social media audit to understand the performance of your current strategies and make decisions based on your results.
Create a social media plan to establish the key actions your marketing team will take to execute the strategy.
Plan your posts using content grids or calendars that specify the date, time of publication, and the texts to be used in both descriptions and images. Don't forget to add value and educate your audience with your posts.
Use social media scheduling tools. This way, you can automate the posting of your images, stories, videos, and links on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Advertisements
Contrary to popular belief, advertising is not invasive if used to share valuable and interesting content to strategically targeted users.
This technique can be used in search engines (in the case of Google you can use Google Ads) and in social networks (in the case of Facebook and Instagram, you can use the ad manager available for business profiles).
Advertising can be an important way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads for your conversion funnel. Of course, you need to have a budget to invest in such advertising and a trained team that knows how to carry out the campaigns and monitor them.
If you want to learn how to run an advertising campaign on social networks, we invite you to read: How to create ads in Facebook Business Manager?
Interact
The engagement stage is when your website users complete a desired action, such as downloading a lead magnet, chatting with a bot, signing up for your platform, requesting a demo of your products, etc.
This is where you need to gather key information about your users in order to interact with them in a personalized way. This information can include personal data and behaviors or actions they perform on your website, such as:
Subscribe to your blog.
Enter the shopping cart.
Play a specific video.
Download a content offer.
It is during the interaction stage, where your users become leads and enter your conversion or sales process.
By doing so, they are ready to be educated through automated lead nurturing campaigns and gradually directed towards purchasing your products and/or services.
Learn about the elements involved in the interaction stage:
Calls to action
In order for a user to perform any type of action on your website and thus interact with your company, they must click on a button labeled “call to action.” This button must stand out clearly on your website, include a verb and preferably a keyword.
This way, your users will know what action they will execute when they click on the indicated call to action. Here is an example:
“Download template to create buyer persona step by step.”
As you can see, the word “download” is the action that the user will perform immediately after clicking the button on the screen and “create buyer persona” is the keyword that you want to position throughout the entire web article.
Other common calls to action are: log in, register, request a demo, and subscribe to the blog.
Landing pages
In inbound marketing, landing pages are web pages that serve to generate interaction with a user and motivate them to take action.
These pages are implemented at precise moments within your conversion funnel, since through a landing page a user can go from being a user to being a lead or stop being a lead to become a customer.
Landing pages should include:
A text that specifies the action the user is going to perform or what is being offered in exchange for their action.
An audiovisual resource.
A contact form.
Un call to action.
Contact forms
Contact forms are data collection tools through which your users provide you with their personal data in exchange for something, such as:
A subscription to your blog.
A content offering.
A registration for a webinar or online course.
Contact forms can be present not only on landing pages, but also in pop-ups, lead generation ads, and email templates.
Content Offers
Content offers, also known as lead magnets, are free documents or audiovisual files. To access them, your users must provide their contact information in exchange, such as: name, surname, email, phone number, address, among others.
These documents can be ebooks, webinars, podcasts, templates, guides and whitepapers. They are usually placed within web articles and are related to the main keyword. For example:
Web article: “What is a buyer persona and how to create one in your company?”
Content Offer: Step-by-step buyer persona creation template.
In this sense, just as you should create web articles for each stage of the buyer's journey, you should do the same with your content offers. It is also important that you learn to adapt your content to their different formats and styles.
Marketing automation
Marketing automation is the use of software or technological solutions to automate tasks in each of the stages of the inbound marketing methodology.
Particularly at this stage, automated marketing campaigns allow you to always be in contact with your prospects and customers by sending them, via email, more content of interest (lead nurturing) and transactional messages to verify registrations and follow up on orders and purchases.
Email marketing
Email marketing, also known as mailing, is the act of sending commercial emails to a segmented contact base.
It is a way to interact with qualified leads for purchase, offering them personalized information about your products and services.
This technique is implemented through email marketing or marketing automation software, which helps you schedule email sequences at a given time.
Taking into account the elements mentioned above, an interaction process in the inbound marketing methodology can be carried out as follows:
Web article
Social media post
Advertisement
Call to action
Landing page
Contact form
Content offering
Email marketing.
Finally, marketing automation plays a key role in streamlining actions within this process.
Chatbots
Another way to interact with your prospects and customers within the inbound marketing methodology is through chatbots.
These are software programs, better known as bots, that are programmed to establish personalized and real-time conversations with humans, following a series of previously established questions and answers as a pattern.
These types of tools can be installed on your website and in instant messaging apps such taiwan cp number as Messenger, Telegram and WhatsApp.
They are ideal for offering fast and efficient customer service and always being available to your users 24/7, especially in case your marketing and sales team is unable to respond to messages.
Delight
Delighting is the last stage of the inbound marketing methodology. However, the new vision of the inbound marketing methodology in the form of FlyWheel proposes that the action of delighting must be present in all stages and both the marketing and sales and customer service teams must carry out this action.
To do this, it is important to design strategies to meet the needs of your customers and share personalized content that can relate to their challenges and issues.
Keep in mind that after converting a lead into a customer, you cannot lose contact. On the contrary, you must continue interacting with them through automated loyalty campaigns and thus transform them into promoters of your brand.
The goal is for them to be so satisfied with their purchase and the attention they received throughout the entire purchasing process that they want to tell their friends and colleagues about their experience.
It all comes down to getting your products and services recommended by word of mouth and having your own customers attract more buyers to your business, saving your marketing and sales team time and resources.
We show you the tools you can use to delight your customers at any time.
CRM
Customer relationship management systems are technological solutions in which you can store and organize information about your prospects and customers based on:
Personal, demographic and employment data.