If you are involved in delivering your business’ marketing strategy, you might have heard the term inbound marketing before. What is it exactly? What can you achieve with it? Let’s establish what inbound marketing stands for and how it is different from traditional digital marketing.
Inbound Marketing
The main idea of inbound marketing is to boost brand awareness and sales by providing quality content to help people solve their pain points. It focuses on gaining the attention of customers instead of finding them directly.
Inbound marketing provides content that’s designed to attract customers at every stage of their journey (awareness – consideration – decision). Inbound is a more human and better way to market, to sell and most importantly provide value to your customers. All of which, in return, will help your company grow in the long-term.
The leader of inbound marketing is HubSpot. They provide customer relationship management software for sales and marketing teams all in one place. It helps you to see a potential customer’s evolution through the buyer’s journey, nurture your relationship with them and, ultimately, create your brand ambassadors.
Inbound Marketing Tools
There are various inbound marketing tools out there for key digital marketing efforts like blogging, social media, email marketing, reports, analytics and SEO that operate independently from each other.
When starting out any digital marketing activities, a good place to begin is with your website. Having analytics tools on your website will help to get insights on website traffic, leads and conversions. Google Analytics (GA) is the most common and widely used tool that gives in-depth data on prospects and their journey on your site.
For blogging, there are tools like WordPress, with many custom plugins and SquareSpace suitable for small businesses. However, these platforms do not offer to configure multiple functions at once. To optimise your blog posts, you need to install plugins and rely on their basic tools.
MailChimp is a popular email marketing platform that enables you to upload contact databases, divide your contacts into lists, set up and analyse campaigns. For more segmented audience campaigns, ConvertKit offers ‘sequences’ feature. One of the biggest advantages in HubSpot is automation and workflow feature that works wonders for email campaigns.
Social media platforms that are most commonly used are Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social. Hootsuite allows managing multiple social media channels with analytics on the social network. Buffer also allows scheduling of social posts and provides analytic tools to improve future optimisation of published posts. Sprout Social additionally offers social listening and influencer identification features.
When it comes to SEO tools, Moz is an SEO tool that provides a variety of features from tracking keywords to site audits. WordStream is another platform to help with SEO efforts.
If you want to get the most of your inbound efforts, you would be better off with all-in-one marketing platform like HubSpot. HubSpot has built-in social media and analytics features. It allows you to produce optimised blogs and see reports within the platform. Another advantage is the landing page building tool on the platform.
While individual inbound marketing tools offer greater insights and have more powerful capabilities, we advise using HubSpot for top-level analysis and tracking. HubSpot is a marketing automation and business growth platform which allows you to utilise analytics, email marketing, blogging, social media, SEO, and seamlessly manage them from a single platform.
Sounds too good to be true? Sign up for a free trial or speak to ExtraDigital to learn what your business can achieve with HubSpot. ExtraDigital helps hundreds of businesses to define successful inbound marketing strategies. As a HubSpot Gold Partner agency, we are ready to help you grow using HubSpot.
