Inbound Marketing: advantages and disadvantages

In the field of Marketingwe like to use all kinds of English sounding words, it does more Intrendier, you see. And then, when you Frenchize these words, it immediately sounds less professional! This is the case ofInbound marketing. More seriously, this recent marketing trend, unfortunately still little or poorly implemented in France, represents a significant and truly exciting step forward for all those who are tired and disappointed by traditional marketing.

What is Inbound Marketing?

THE’Inbound marketing it’s the opposite ofoutbound marketingdad’s marketing, more traditional. Outbound consists of finding the customer among a mass of people who are more or less interested in your offer. These are media advertising, promotional operations, shopping inserts, etc. We cast our net very wide hoping to bring some potential customers back into our networks.

Inbound marketing goes in the opposite direction: attract an audience interested in your servicesyour products or your industry. The goal is therefore to create content that attracts people who are more involved than traditional marketing since they themselves are looking for this content through a Google search, for example. In addition to content creation, we also try to do that create communities on social networks and its website, where such contents will also be disseminated.

We generate like this Guide. Again, a somewhat mysterious word that designates the state of a consumer who is not yet a customer or potential customer. We can decline these three states:

– The customer he is the one who has already purchased your services or products and whose loyalty we hope to instill.

– The perspective is in the process of being purchased. He knows your company, your services, he may not be a customer yet, but he potentially is. It is one of the actions of the company’s salespeople to seek out these prospects. We distinguish between hot prospects and cold prospects based on their progress.

– Finally, lead is a consumer who is not yet a potential customer. He is potentially interested in your offer. In the case of inbound marketing, it is this person who, after carrying out an Internet search regarding your business sector, will visit your site and obtain information.

The advantage here is that we are only targeting a segment of the population potentially looking or waiting for what your business can offer them. It’s easier to sell to people who come to read or listen to you than to interrupt strangers who aren’t interested in you.

Finally, unlike traditional marketing, inbound is two-way. There is a real exchange between company and consumer. It is viral thanks to its distribution on social networks. This escapes you a bit because consumers also communicate with each other. It is consumers who initiate word of mouth.

Marketing that aims to be more authentic

You will tell me that today there are a large number of companies on social networks, and often much smaller ones. Some run communities there and produce content that they share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

You can leverage social media and still follow a traditional marketing approach.. Digital doesn’t magically transform marketing into inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is first of all a global technique, a different philosophy. Where advertising will talk excessively about you, praise your qualities or those of your products and, from time to time, defeat your opponents, the content associated with inbound marketing is essentially made up of non-promotional information. We will return to Content marketing in a future article and we will take the opportunity to talk about it Narrationvery popular right now.

In short, we talk less about ourselves and more about what our potential customers or contacts are interested in. This requires listening to their expectations, knowing their needs, their difficulties and providing solutions. While this highlights your expertise, it is not self-promotional. It is a sharing that helps to understand the problems of your sector. We raise awareness before making them become customers. Let’s abandon buying databases, abandon spam, etc. Traditional marketing aims to lead directly to sales, here we will rather try to cross the threshold first.

For this to work, it is necessary to bring together departments that are sometimes far from your company. In fact, without close collaboration between the marketingTHE commercial and the digitalit will be difficult to meet expectations.

The sales department will be able to raise the most common questions from customers and prospects in order to write appropriate content. Digital and marketing will also be able to work hand in hand to create animations on social networks, increase visibility, etc.

Be generous. Share, without revealing completely, the secrets of your profession. The goal is not to become an online training organization that helps your customers do without your services. You will enlighten, raise awareness and also demonstrate that the difficulties of your missions require a professional. It is marketing that creates value.

But we will see in future articles that the production of brand content can deal with completely different things and sometimes quite distant from one’s profession. Let’s see the example of Red Bull which has become a real media producer through websites, online magazines and videos, not to mention the sporting enterprises it sponsors and which increases its visibility and associates its brand with overcoming oneself.

Inbound marketing, how does it work?

Hubspot summarizes the Inbound mechanism very well through this image and how it allows you to transform a stranger to your brand into a customer and promoter of your company:

– Attract : You are no longer the one who goes looking for the consumer and interrupts him while you read his magazine, listen to his music or watch an evening of TV. It is he who joins you thanks to your content that he will have found on your blog, on social networks or through your keywords.

– convert : This person then becomes a visitor to your site. But how to convert this step to keep track of it. Different solutions: a newsletter subscription form, a Call-To-Action, a landing page (optimized page so that the visitor can complete an action).

– Come closer : If he takes action, he becomes a Lead. He signed up for your newsletter or contacted you by phone, in any case you have his contact details. From now on you can contact him again and the dialogue has begun.

– Build loyalty : Hopefully, if you don’t move too fast, he might become a customer. But a beautiful love story doesn’t end with marriage! We know that love at first sight doesn’t last, you have to maintain a relationship. If the customer experience is good, not only will you gain a loyal customer (read this article), but you might even gain someone who will promote your business to them!

Is Inbound Marketing Burying Traditional Marketing?

There is a bit of a tendency on the Internet to bury everything that has existed so far in favor of the latest novelty. Traditional marketing has worked and continues to work, otherwise brands wouldn’t invest so much in expensive television commercials to produce and broadcast.

It’s a certainty, people are relatively tired of marketing. A more authentic approach is likely to find more favorable ground than large-scale defamatory publicity. However, inbound requires an investment of time, training, reorganization and takes some time to achieve some notoriety.

Wouldn’t the best trend be to finally merge the two during startup or reboot? In fact, if I am convinced of the merits of Inbound, I also believe that traditional marketing and advertising offer enormous potential for gaining visibility and that it would be a shame not to exploit it.

For large customers, a television, newspaper or magazine advertisement at least allows the consumer to discover that you or your product exists. For smaller businesses, why not speed up your promotion and increase your chances of being seen by purchasing words in an AdWords campaign or even purchasing posts on Facebook. These solutions allow you to increase your awareness more quickly than waiting for the sometimes slow-to-arrive fruits of your SEO and SMO.

I was told inbound isn’t expensive?

There is truth and falsehood in this. For a company with a strong backbone and already used to paying for advertising campaigns, an Inbound campaign will seem strangely too cheap.

On the contrary, for a small SME, if the financial cost is not unsustainable, it is more likely that human resources are lacking. In fact, you will have to plan training times, possibly hire a Community Manager, someone capable of managing the website, creating content, expanding communities on social networks and yes, let’s not lie, all of this takes time, especially at the beginning.

Everything has a cost, everything is also a question of context. What is your target, what is your market, where are your customers, what is your company, its identity, the size of your teams. All these questions will help you find guidance on how to organize your marketing.

However, what makes me believe in Inbound Marketing, what pushes me to propose it, is that it puts the consumer at the center of the marketing circuit. Let’s not fool ourselves, we are still here to make money and sell our products. But inserting a pinch of authenticity and humanity into all this is even more virtuous! When will the same phenomenon occur in politics?