What is inbound marketing? How do B2B businesses effectively deploy inbound activities? For an in-depth look at inbound marketing as well as why service industries should gradually shift their focus from traditional methods to inbound marketing before it’s too late, read on in the article below.

What is inbound marketing? 

Inbound marketing is a way to naturally attract the world towards a brand through:

• Useful content is highly personal, helping the target audience to solve the problems that need to be found solutions while skillfully orienting them to decisions that are beneficial to the brand.
• Strong relationships with customers are based on trust, so that whenever they have a problem in a related field, they consider the brand as an expert to consult.
• Optimal experiences throughout the customer journey so that even though the brand value provided is slightly lower than the competition, the target audience still favors you because of the outstanding service quality.

In other words, Inbound marketing is a way for brands to help potential customers solve the difficulties they are facing through detailed advice and instructions, thereby gradually gaining trust, favor, and conversion. they become loyal customers and promote the business itself!

In relation to reality, it is easier to understand if you have a friend who is a doctor. Whenever there is an abnormality that cannot be seen by a doctor, with just one phone call, they can help you ‘diagnose’ and give appropriate advice. Most of the time, we will listen because they are experts in your ‘blind spot’. 

Inbound marketing too, once it has confirmed its professionalism and high expertise in the field of operation, every proposal from the brand has weight and more or less affects the final decision of the customer. target image. This is like the same opinion, it’s much more believable to hear from a teacher/celebrity!

The main activities when the brand implements inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is just a new methodology, in essence, inbound marketing is still deployed on unfamiliar platforms such as Content marketing, Social Marketing, Email marketing, and SEO.

However, instead of deploying sporadically and sporadically, these activities are coherently chained together through the CRM system – a system for collecting and analyzing customer data from which to establish formulas automation.

The main activities of inbound marketing will start from:

• Content marketing – useful content developed specifically for each target group
• SEO – helps the brand appear naturally in the eyes of customers through the process of meticulously analyzing the search needs of each potential customer group
• Social Marketing – bring selected content to potential customers through social networks such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter.
• Email marketing – nurture leads with highly personalized content to ‘lead’ them to decisions that benefit the brand
• Marketing automation – using automated methods to send email marketing or remarketing on social networks based on user behavior and pre-built scenarios based on historical data
• CRM integration – connect data from many different platforms from social, analytics, email marketing software to evaluate the conversion potential of the customer list through the scoring system. From there, weed out the low-viability objects and pass on to sales leads who can call for advice right away!
• And much more depending on the specificity of the business sector or the complexity of the business model!

Effective Inbound Marketing implementation process for B2B businesses

Inbound marketing is a process consisting of 4 main stages: attract, convert, close, and delight!

• Attract: Engage your target audience with in-depth content. When consumers are surrounded by the advertising matrix every day, it is difficult to ‘squeeze’ in their minds. Therefore, in order to ‘catch’ customers among hundreds and thousands of messages, brands need to share their insight into the information they are looking for. Thereby, not only affirming our professionalism in the field of brand activities but also gradually narrowing the gap with the target audience!
• Convert: Persuading the target audience to leave information to receive valuable ‘offers’ after being ‘fascinated’ by useful experiences. For example, documents, in-depth reports, product demos, registration for seminars or simply to receive incentives. Coupon code is one of the most potential industries that have a high conversion rate, and although you don’t run any coupon business, you should have at least 1 couponing program or event. 
• Close: Take care of and convert leads into customers through multi-channel experiences from emailing, remarketing to consulting contacts.
• Delight: Give customers a reason to come back and treat you as a source of advice and suggestions when needed. This strengthens the relationship and sets the stage for future deals

At each stage of implementation, the tools and platforms used will have differences in focus:

The process of implementing Inbound Marketing in the Attract phase

The first step when implementing an inbound marketing campaign is to become ‘visible’ in the eyes of potential customers through online channels such as Google, social networks, etc. To attract customers, at first sight, the business must first of all need:

• Build a persona. The prospect’s portrait is a general picture of the concern/anxiety; Dreams/desires or unanswered needs that when ‘right touch’ will be the shortest way to bring the brand straight to the heart of the target audience. By grouping customers into typical stereotypes, this will be the premise for activities that bring a highly personalized experience!
• Analyze the customer journey map to find out how they make decisions, what are the barriers that prevent them from going to the next step. From there, by helping them remove these barriers, businesses will successfully bring customers closer to the brand!

After building a customer profile and understanding their behavior, the next step is to choose the right touchpoints to create opportunities for ‘first encounters’! 

Conclusion

Above is the basic information about inbound Marketing, hope readers can understand the basics of Inbound Marketing. 

If you want to refer to more information, you can refer to many case studies, especially for those related to coupons, discount codes/promotions programs, because those are very good inbound marketing application models!