Digital devices and channels have transformed rural marketing. In addition to curbing costs, digital technologies make marketing campaigns flexible, scalable, and measurable. At the same time, they boost marketing campaign performance by facilitating data-driven decision-making. Inbound marketing methodology, unlike outbound marketing methodology, enables brands to increase ROI by leveraging top digital marketing channels.
Companies and startups enhance brand visibility, strengthen brand positions, generate relevant leads, and drive sales conversion by implementing various inbound marketing strategies. They make inbound marketing strategies effective by following 5 principles – standardize, contextualize, optimize, personalize, and empathize (SCOPE). Likewise, they boost digital marketing performances by considering 4 stages or phases of inbound marketing – attract, convert, close, and delight.
We can understand how brands leverage and integrate top digital marketing channels by discussing 9 real-time inbound marketing examples.
Search engine optimization (SEO) helps brands get higher ROI in the long run by improving their websites’ visibility on leading search engines like Google and Bing. Brands increase website traffic and generate leads by implementing on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategies. On-page SEO tactics boost a web page’s search engine visibility by optimizing its source code and content. Off-page SEO tactics increase a web page’s credibility and authority by generating links and managing its online reputation. Technical SEO tactics focus on making search engines crawl and index web pages by mitigating technical issues like broken links and page speed.
Content is the oil that drives inbound marketing campaigns. The guiding principles of inbound marketing emphasize the delivery of standardized, contextual, optimized, personalized, and empathic content to potential buyers. Brands these days attract, engage, and retain customers by running content marketing campaigns. The inbound marketing strategy makes them create, distribute, and promote a variety of content – blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, videos, audio, and infographics. While strategizing content marketing, strategists focus on delivering multi-format content using the right channel according to the prospect’s current position in the buying journey.
Social media marketing is one of the visible examples of inbound marketing. Brands connect and interact with customers and prospects using popular social networking platforms. They create brand awareness, foster customer loyalty, increase website traffic, and drive sales by running social media marketing campaigns. Strategists boost social media marketing campaigns by focusing on key factors like the ideal customer, the right social network, relevant content, content calendar, and social media metrics. Brands these days build and foster customer relationships by strengthening their presence on multiple social networks.
Email marketing is another visible inbound marketing example. Brands use emails as an effective communication channel with existing and potential customers. In addition to promoting their products or services, email marketing campaigns help brands incentivize customer loyalty. Strategists boost email marketing performance using a variety of automation tools.
For instance, email capture tools help them grow email lists by capturing website visitors’ email addresses. Likewise, popular email marketing tools help them curb the time and resources required to craft, review, test, optimize, and send emails to customers. These tools send personalized emails to customers at the right time based on real-time information collected from various sources.
Several studies highlight that companies that publish and update blogs regularly generate more leads than competitors. Companies and startups these days create brand awareness and enhance brand reputation by publishing fresh blogs regularly. Likewise, they provide up-to-date information to website visitors by updating existing blogs periodically. Brands use blogging as an inbound marketing tool to establish authority, beat competitors, generate leads, and drive sales. At the same time, blogs help them boost the performance of SEO and content marketing campaigns
New-generation consumers spend most of their digital media time on online videos. Brands engage and influence consumers by running video marketing campaigns. While strategizing this inbound marketing campaign, they focus on creating, optimizing, and publishing a variety of videos – educational videos, explainer videos, testimonial videos, product demo videos, and commercials. Also, they make the content go viral by publishing video series. The short videos keep the target audience engaged and convey the desired messages. However, brands these days publish both long and short videos. Also, they publish videos regularly on social networking and video-sharing platforms.
As highlighted by several studies, modern customers trust user-generated content (UGC) more than brand-generated content. Brands leverage the trends by promoting products or services through satisfied customers. Their inbound marketing strategy focuses on converting satisfied customers into brand promoters or advocates. They encourage and incentivize such customers to endorse products/services on social networks and online forums by sharing the positive experience. These brand promotors further help brands acquire new customers through referrals and personal recommendations.
The massive popularity of social media led to the rise of influencers. Thousands of social media users access posts and receive notifications regularly by following the social media profiles of influencers. Brands promote their products or services by collaborating with popular social media influencers. The collaboration helps them increase brand awareness and gain customer trust without escalating costs. However, influencers receive payment from brands in various forms – affiliate commission and content sponsorship. While strategizing influencer marketing campaigns, brands evaluate established influencers using multimedia criteria like follower growth, follower demographics, content format, platform, and niche.
Paid advertising is popular with brands as an affiliate marketing strategy to promote products or services. As the name indicates, these affiliate marketing tactics make companies run paid ads on search engines, social media, and websites. Paid ads enable brands to reach a large number of potential customers in a short amount of time. Also, brands can boost sales by tailoring ads according to the demographic characteristics of the target audience. The customization options provided by search engines and social networks help brands increase the ROI of paid advertising by targeting relevant target audiences according to predefined marketing goals and budgets.
Inbound marketing methodology allows brands to drive customer acquisition and sales conversions using various digital marketing channels. Businesses integrate customer communication and experiences across channels by implementing robust inbound marketing tools. Hence, emerging digital marketing channels will continue to create new inbound marketing examples or use cases in the long run.
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