Digital Marketing

All you got to know to set up an effective inbound marketing strategy

By Bastien, on December 8, 2022 - 5 min read

Inbound marketing is a digital strategy that aims to attract customers through quality content and interaction rather than through traditional methods like advertising.

Want to promote your company to prospects (or leads) interested in your services or products? Want to build long-term relationships with your customers in an efficient and cost-effective way? Establishing a good inbound marketing strategy is the best way to do it.

Wondering how to do it? Then you’ve come to the right place! This guide will help you understand what inbound marketing is and how to implement a successful strategy for your business.

What is an inbound marketing strategy?

An inbound marketing strategy is a set of tactics designed to attract potential customers and follow them through the sales funnel to build loyalty.

It can include elements such as:

  • content creation,
  • search engine optimization,
  • social media campaigns,
  • email marketing,
  • etc.

The goal of inbound marketing is simply to attract the prospects that make up your core target audience by providing them with useful information that directly addresses their needs and interests.

Simply put, by attracting prospects with relevant content, you can easily convert them into paying customers.

Why is it important to have a good inbound marketing strategy?

Having a good inbound marketing strategy in place is important for any business because:

  • It helps you reach potential customers more effectively, while increasing brand awareness and loyalty.
  • It is more cost-effective than traditional digital marketing methods and outbound marketing because it delivers effective results with a limited investment of time and money.
  • Inbound marketing allows you to better understand the needs and interests of your prospects in order to adapt your content accordingly and maximize conversions.

Basically, inbound marketing allows you to get closer to your customers to sell more and better while spending less money and time.

So you can see that it’s in your best interest to quickly implement an inbound marketing strategy for your business.

And that’s good because we’re going to see how to do just that. But first, let’s see what the 4 main steps of an inbound marketing strategy are.

The 4 steps of an inbound marketing strategy

Remember, at the beginning of this guide we saw that a good inbound marketing strategy allows you to accompany the customer at all stages of his journey.

To do this, we need to proceed in 4 steps:

  1. Attract: the main objective of inbound marketing is to attract the right people to your website through interesting content.
  2. Convert: Once you have attracted visitors to your site, it is important to convert them into leads or customers by offering them offers in exchange for their email address or contact information.
  3. Sell: After converting a visitor into a lead, it’s time to move them through the sales funnel by interacting with them via personalized messages that encourage them to take action.
  4. Retain: Finally, it is essential to continue to interact with existing customers to retain them. This can be done through specific content, newsletters or special offers.

Now that you know everything about inbound marketing strategies, you probably want to develop one for your company… So, let’s see how to do it right now!

How to set up a good inbound marketing strategy?

As you can see, a good inbound marketing strategy can bring you a lot of benefits. But for that, you need to proceed methodically in order to build the best possible strategy.

Here are our 9 tips to achieve this:

  • Define your goals.
  • Identify your buyer personas.
  • Choose the right type of content.
  • Optimize your SEO and SEA.
  • Adjust the design and technical aspects of your website.
  • Create a social media strategy.
  • Use marketing automation tools.
  • Measure and analyze results to adjust and optimize.
  • Periodically review your strategy to maximize its effectiveness.

But let’s look at this in more detail.

Define your objectives

You want to increase the traffic on your Website? You want to improve your brand visibility? Before you can start implementing a good inbound marketing strategy, you need to define your objectives.

Think about the goals you want to achieve:

  • Increase brand visibility,
  • increase your sales,
  • develop new products,
  • Increase the visibility of some your services,
  • attract more visitors to your website,

Once you have determined your objective(s), you are ready to move on to the next step.

Identify your target audience

When your objectives are setted up, it is time to identify your audience (buyer persona) in order to better understand their needs and interests.

In concrete terms, this means knowing what your typical customer looks like. It will help you to create relevant and convincing content that meets their needs. To do this, you need to ask yourself questions such as:

  • How old is my typical customer?
  • What do they do for a living?
  • What is their budget?
  • What language do they speak?

Answering these questions will allow you to know what content to use to address them.

Choose the right type of content

Once you know your target audience, it’s time to decide what type of content will make it easy to reach them:

  • Blog article.
  • Video.
  • Social media posts.
  • Podcast.
  • E-books.
  • White papers.
  • Infographics.
  • etc.

The type of content you choose will depend on your target audience, as well as the goals you want to achieve.

Optimize your SEO and SEA

To ensure that your inbound marketing strategies are as effective as possible, you need to optimize both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA).

This means that you need to make sure that all technical aspects of your website are in good shape, so that Google can easily find and understand it. You also need to make sure that you are using the right keywords in your content to appear in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

Adapt the design and technical aspects of your website

Your website plays an important role in inbound marketing. It must be:

  • visually appealing,
  • easy to use,
  • pleasant to navigate,
  • and optimized for speed.

You also need to make sure that all the elements for visitors to become your customers (forms, newsletter sign-up…) are in place.

Create a social media strategy

Social networks are an essential part of inbound marketing strategies, as they allow you to reach more potential customers and build relationships with them.

You need to create a plan for how you want to use each social platform, what type of content will work best on each platform’s sites, and how you will measure the success of your efforts.

Use marketing automation tools

Marketing automation tools can help streamline inbound marketing processes and save time by automating repetitive tasks such as email campaigns.

This allows you to focus on creating more effective content and strategies.

Measure and analyze results of your marketing campaign to adjust and optimize it

To ensure that your inbound marketing strategies are working, you need to regularly measure the performance of each action. Once you’ve identified areas where improvement is needed, you can then make adjustments and optimize accordingly to maximize effectiveness.

Periodically review your strategy to maximize effectiveness

Finally, it’s important to review your strategy and adjust it to maximize effectiveness.

  • Continually update your content,
  • refine SEO and ATS tactics,
  • apply new technologies and look for ways to optimize processes for maximum effectiveness.

So by following the nine steps to implementing an inbound marketing strategy, you can create a powerful and effective system that:

  • Bring you leads,
  • convert prospects into customers
  • and improve your return on investment.

Establishing a good inbound marketing strategy: a summary…

Inbound marketing is a strategic approach of digital marketing that focuses on creating and delivering valuable content to attract, engage and convert customers.

It can be an effective way to generate leads and increase ROI.

  • Inbound marketing is about generating qualified leads for your business.
  • Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing doesn’t bother the clients.
  • The goal is to accompany each lead throughout the sales funnel to successfully convert them and make them a regular customer.
  • To generate relevant content you need to identify your buyer persona.
  • You must follow the evolution of the actions carried out within the framework of your campaign in order to adapt them according to the results obtained.

Bastien