Inbound Marketing, a winning concept.
If we had to summarize the way of working that we have defined over the years, this matches with the definition of INBOUND MARKETING , brilliant quote by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah ( founders of hubspot.com ). We have adopted these concepts into our vision, and we have summarized it in these few lines.
The concept that Ht&t proposes at conferences and seminars is based on:
Inbound Marketing Concept #1: Attract – Attract
To make the business successful, the first step is to attract the potential customer. Otherwise how can you talk about a brand without thinking about an audience?
Imagine a new shop, in a hidden lane…how can it sell goods if nobody gets into? And how can people enter to the shop if they don’t know anything about it? And how can the shopowner make himself known?
He will have to put up a sign, maybe a sign in the main street indicating how to arrive to his shop, maybe a person who delivers leaflets on the corner. In the online world we do exactly the same.
On the web we do exactly the same. We create a presentation layout, we analyze and implement the SEO to allow the Client to be found on search engines. We create Search and Display Adv campaigns,, we position our Clients on Social networks to make themselves known, we create blogs, in brief, we intrigue the user.
Inbound Marketing Concept #2: Convert- Convert
Obviously the shoppwner’s target is to sell products, our goal is to convert. online visits.
Converting means making a user carry out an action we want:: subscription to a newsletter, download of an ebook, registration for an online competition, make a purchase. Hence the secret is transform an interaction into a conversion.. As the shopowner in city center will give a gadget to the first 100 customers, we will also offer discount coupons. We never forget the goal, we offer relevant call-to-actions by inviting the user to finally convert, we do that with exhaustive landing pages that make it clear to the user that he has “arrived” in the right place. We don’t like to think that our users, after having searched for “city bicycles”, end up in a page of professional racing bicycles or motorcycles, feeling themselves confused.
Inbound Marketing Concept #3: Close – Closing, reach the goal
An allegedly negative word is diverted, gaining a positive meaning : closing a conversion means making the user doing what we want and, at the same time, making the user satisfied. This is the narrow line that achieves the conversion step , giving to it a sense of real concretenes.
This space of action includes attention and care .
Inbound Marketing Concept #4: Delight – promote
Have you ever seen a shopowner who after selling his product to a customer, kicks her/him out of the shop with rudeness? We don’t do that, because each customer is a great resource for the shopowner,, because his satisfaction represents the best advertising vehicle: word of mouth. We do the same: we say thank you, we delight and invite the customer to come back to visit us. But not only that, we don’t forget her/him: once profiled, the user will always be in our thoughts, with actions such as DEM,, integrated call-to-action and ad hoc promotions. Let’s make the customer feel loved and appreciated.
Do you remember the 4Ps of Marketing ? We have to say that the 4Ps of Inbound Marketing are not the same. But they can help us to define these concepts more precisely: Person , Purpose , Promotion and Period
Inbound marketing in a nutshell:
Market with a magnet, not a sledgehammer.