Inbound Marketing Basics - Summary

If you want to know the best way to grow your business online, the answer is inbound marketing. While the primary concept is easy—attract your ideal customers and give them something they consider valuable—there are several steps to learn.

In this series, I gave you a brief overview of each of those steps and provided enough information to get you started.

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Let’s cover each of those steps again:

Inbound Marketing Basics to Grow Your Business
In this article, I introduced the inbound marketing strategy and showed you how it can not only work better than traditional marketing, it can cost far less.

Inbound Marketing Basics: Buyer Personas
Buyer personas help you define exactly who your ideal customers are and how to know the best way to attract them.

Inbound Marketing Basics: Keyword Research
Keywords are the search terms your buyer personas use to find a solution to their most pressing problems. Once you know what their problems are, you can provide a solution that they’ll find invaluable.

Inbound Marketing Basics: Blog Posts
Blog posts are your first phase of interacting with your ideal customers. Your blog posts will provide solutions to problems and educate the user. Your ideal customer finds your blog posts because of the keywords you’ve used.

Inbound Marketing Basics: Landing Pages
A landing page is a stand-alone page that forms the second phase of customer interaction. This is where you provide the next level of problem-solving for your customer, usually in the form of a lead magnet.

Inbound Marketing Basics: Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is what you offer your ideal customer in exchange for giving their email address. It can come in the form of an ebook, an infographic, a checklist, a recorded webinar, or anything else your customer can download. Your lead magnet is an upgraded solution to a particular problem your ideal customer is experiencing.

Inbound Marketing Basics: Email Marketing
Email marketing is your third phase of customer interaction. Your ideal customer has given you permission to send them emails because you have proven you can give them value. Email marketing often leads to a sale.

Inbound Marketing Basics: Driving Traffic
A basic premise of inbound marketing is to attract traffic through keywords and valuable content. However, you can also drive traffic via digital advertising, especially when you are first starting your inbound marketing system.

Use automation to tie together your inbound efforts

While each of these inbound marketing steps can be handled manually, the real magic happens when you use marketing automation software. With automated marketing software, you can set up your entire inbound marketing system to run on autopilot. This not only saves you massive amounts of time, but it also ensures that only the most highly qualified customers will step into your sales pipeline.
At CWS, we use HubSpot for our marketing software. We use it internally for our own inbound marketing system and we also use it for our clients, setting them up with their own automated marketing system. If you’re curious if HubSpot makes sense for you, read our article called HubSpot vs. WordPress. You’ll receive an overview that will help you better understand marketing automation.

Conclusion

I hope this series on the basics of inbound marketing was helpful. We regularly post in-depth articles on all aspects of inbound marketing, so be sure to sign up below to have them sent directly to your inbox.