Inbound marketing is founded on a methodology that helps brands attract, convert, close and delight visitors, leads and customers through a variety of channels, including social media, blogging, SEO, and email. Inbound marketing pulls customers to your company and creates lasting relationships.

Attract

Strangers are attracted to your website by blog articles focused on answering questions around targeted long-tail keywords and through building an audience on social media.

Convert

The strangers find valuable content, click on the call to action to get to a well-designed landing page, fill out a form to download it and become leads.

Close

You have the chance now to nurture those leads carefully through email marketing, workflows and signals to close them into happy customers.

Delight

Those customers will be delighted through smart content, social media interactions and events. That increases brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

How It Works – The 4 Inbound Marketing Steps In Action

Attract Phase of the Inbound Marketing Methodology

Attract

What is the first thing you do when you need to buy a new smartphone or plan a vacation? You google it, right? Your customers do the same when they are looking for what you have to offer.

But most people are not ready to put money on the table just yet. Especially, when the purchase has significant consequences or the product is a major investment. They turn to search engines to find answers to questions and solutions to their objections or even buyers remorse concerns.

If you can attract the right kind of searchers to your website, you are likely going to get the deal. Otherwise, your competitor will be there to help them.

See How We Attract

Convert | 4 steps of inbound marketing methodology

Convert

Now that you are getting your content in front of people, it would be nice to be able to nurture them until they are ready to buy, right? This is where premium content comes in.

Premium content offers, such as eBooks, webinars, checklists, toolkits, and more entice interested visitors to self-identify themselves as leads by telling us a little bit about themselves in exchange for the offer.

To allow a stranger to convert to a lead, we have to built conversion paths, including call to actions, landing pages, thank you pages, follow up emails and sometimes workflows.

See How We Attract

close | 4 steps of inbound marketing

Close

Great, now you are seeing a steady flow of website traffic and your lead pipeline is filling, you need nurture those leads to move through the sales funnel. Email marketing is one important way of accomplishing this.

Remember that premium content offer we talked about earlier? The person who downloaded it was trying to solve a pain point he or she has – so follow up. Once the lead becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL), sales will give the lead a call.

Can you imagine how different this conversation is from a cold call? We have collected information, done our homework and know the paint points. The lead has been engaged with our company before and has shown interest. If there is a genuine pain point, budget and urgency, it should be a snap to close the deal.

See How We Close

delight | 4 steps of inbound marketing

Delight

The hard part is done. Now, you can use social media, email marketing and smart content to delight your customers. This will not only help you built a loyal customer base who comes back for repeat purchases, but also turn happy customers into your brand ambassadors.