A good inbound strategy relies on meaningful relationships with customers by creating valuable content that nurtures them. It requires you to become the jack of all trades – SEO, content writing, social media, website design, email marketing, etc. Therefore, when creating an inbound strategy for any business, marketers must prioritize what to do, what to avoid, and what will work best to achieve business objectives. Whether you want to revamp an established business’s marketing activities or have launched a new startup firm, we’ll help you create a solid inbound strategy to achieve exponential growth.

 

STEP #1: Define buyer personas

A buyer persona is an ideal customer’s fictional profile. It highlights potential customers’ specific information like their problems, goals, interests, and needs. Understanding who you’ll advertise to, what will make the target audience click, and how they communicate will help craft personalized messaging.

By entirely skipping this step or not being detailed enough, marketers are at risk of wasting their budget on irrelevant tactics, attracting the wrong audience, and creating content nobody reads. When drafting buyer personas, identify and document the following:

  • Their goals and challenges
  • Their responsibilities
  • Their pain points
  • How they learn and discover new things like social media habits, blogs, TV, etc.
  • Any issues they’d have with the brand or its offerings

 

 

STEP #2: Create personalized content matching their stage in the funnel

The goal of a good inbound strategy is to create an experience that begins with awareness and ends with advocacy. Marketers must understand that customers don’t proceed through each stage at the same pace – they can get stuck somewhere or bounce back. That’s why marketers must analyze which stage of the funnel customers are in to personalize their experience accordingly.

Moreover, the services that customers will most likely want at each stage of the purchasing cycle should be identified. Then, these customers should be divided into the following groups according to their buying cycles:

 

  • Awareness – At this point, the potential audience will be learning about the business’s offerings. All outreach must emphasize how the offering will fulfill consumer needs.
  • Consideration – If a customer gets interested in any offer, they’ll compare the product/service with the competitors before purchasing. Provide customer testimonials at this stage and explain how a business’s offering differs from others.
  • Decision – The customer has decided to purchase. They’ll require a simple path or maybe a limited-time discount offer to build a sense of urgency.
  • Choice assessment – In service-based industries, the buyer’s journey doesn’t end after the purchase. So, regularly provide valuable content for customers to make the most out of the offering and prevent losing potential customers to competitors.

 

 

STEP #3: Advertise and analyze

An effective inbound strategy makes use of the right advertising platforms. For instance, when targeting an older generation, Facebook will be an ideal platform. Similarly, LinkedIn is ideal for targeting business professionals. It’s recommended to have 2 or 3 social media campaigns on a maximum of 3 channels rather than 6 or 7 poorly executed campaigns – quality over quantity.

Furthermore, utilize a/b testing by creating 2 different versions of content to determine which one generates more conversions leads, clicks or any other KPI. As you implement and test your inbound strategy, analyze results and measure success. Analyzing results will help you understand which strategies are working and which should be altered or abandoned.

Besides that, it’s also essential to track competitors’ campaigns, social media following, and keyword rankings. It’ll help marketers observe their shortcomings and get a comparative perspective of the situation. You can improve your effort’s quality by conducting a cost-benefit analysis of each of your campaigns and content pieces. Lastly, create a system for periodically measuring each of the key metrics and include it in your inbound strategy.

 

 

STEP #4 Never underestimate the power of brand image!

If you want to outshine your competitors while remaining steadfast in your appeal to your clients, a strong brand image is essential. A brand appearance goes beyond the logo or colors you choose. It consists of your brand’s language, tone, graphics, and general persona. Without a brand image, your business’s offering is a needle in a haystack, making it complicated for the audience to choose you from the masses.

 

Additionally, the brand image creates recognition and hence helps succeed the inbound strategy.

You can probably spot Tiffany’s jewelry, a Coca-Cola can, or an Apple gadget from afar. It may seem simple, but it takes much work to build a brand that the audience can immediately recognize. It will be challenging to create an instantly recognizable brand if you don’t maintain a consistent brand image across each interaction a customer has with your company. Furthermore, a brand image is paramount to creating loyalty and credibility among potential customers. When you consistently maintain a stable brand appearance, be it your product packaging or content’s tone, it contributes to a user’s relationship with your business.

 

People don’t trust unknown brands!

As online fraud has piqued, people judge businesses that don’t have a solid brand image. They consider the brand’s offerings to be insufficient in quality and believe that the purchase entails significant risk. For instance, if you want to attract leads but your website is designed in a complicated manner, page load time is high, and there’re many distractions, your visitors will run straight away. Moreover, a poorly created brand doesn’t have proper product/service features, shipping rates, terms and conditions, etc. on its website and they lose the opportunity to sell. Therefore, no matter how top-notch your offering is, how much you spend on ads, or how persuasive your CTAs are, you’ll get the traffic perhaps, but not conversions. A solid brand image is a key pillar for the success of the inbound strategy.

 

 

STEP #5: Follow the Experts’ advice for guaranteed conversions

The prime aim of every marketer is to convert visitors into loyal customers. Therefore, make the following things your top priority:

CTAs

Craft CTAs that match the buyer’s journey stage. For instance, don’t add a price guide CTA on an awareness/inspirational blog post. Offer something that bridges the gap between the awareness and consideration stages instead.

 

Chatbots and online support

You can establish a new level of communication with your customers by using a conversational marketing strategy. Having a chatbot on a business’s website allows the audience to engage with the brand and the support team at their convenience. According to Statista, in 2025, it is predicted that the chatbot market would be worth approximately $1.25B.

 

Paid campaigns

Paid campaigns bring in short-term, quick boosts of traffic and help marketers test the effectiveness of CTAs, copy, and landing pages. You can use short-tail keywords and a target audience that’s already in the decision stage. There’s significant scope for using paid campaigns as part of the inbound strategy so use these campaigns based on your buyer persona knowledge.

Before you start your paid campaign, it’s crucial to determine what a customer is worth to the business and what you’re willing to spend to win that customer. For instance, if the average order value is £300, you must determine what advertising spend will yield a favorable ROI to justify the allocated budget.

 

Top brands using the right inbound strategy

Patagonia

The apparel brand Patagonia sells outdoor clothing. Their target audience loves snowboarding, skiing, surfing, mountain climbing, and other outdoor sports. The company is well-known for its innovative marketing approaches. Visit their Stories page, where they feature aesthetically amazing shorts that convey unique stories from around the world. It inspires the audience to visit the website and plan their next adventure.

 

Paper Source

When it comes to stationery and anything crafty, Paper Source has got the competitive edge. The brand sells everything from stationery sets, greeting cards, wedding cards, gift wraps, and various gifts. Moreover, they offer free digital downloads such as designs for greeting cards, designs for craft projects, and wallpapers. It may seem unproductive to provide free designs that the audience can print at home instead of buying them from the website. But this strategy works well for Paper Source as it builds them as an industry expert. Their content provides value, boosts their recognition for distinctive designs, and keeps their audience engaged.

 

 

Over to you – it’s your time to shine!

As customer expectations are changing constantly, it has become challenging for marketers to differentiate a business from its competitors. Therefore, your inbound strategy must be customer-focused to ensure customer needs are better met and reinforces your business’s value. A customer-focused strategy guarantees that every aspect of the business and its offerings are aligned with customers’ interests.

Moreover, after the Covid-19 pandemic, since many businesses embraced digitalization, similar products/services are abundant. User experience has emerged as the true differentiator for both B2B and B2C industries. If you want your business to thrive, focus on understanding customer demands and delivering customer satisfaction. Or else your all efforts, time, and investments will go in vain.

Lastly, a successful inbound strategy needs so much planning and tweaking. Shifting your investments to an inbound strategy may seem like a leap of faith, but the results are remarkable in the long run. To amplify your efforts and meet your inbound strategy objectives, ensure to check out our guide. You’ll get more information about inbound strategy on things like the cost factor, strategic tools, and so on.