Why inbound marketing is the way forward

Think of an era where people are not bombarded by ads (63% are going to ignore them anyway), instead they are attracted by content they actually want to read; where, instead of telemarketers going for the hard sell, people are provided with information on topics they are interested in (thereby increasing interest, engagement and trust, leading to purchase) and where people have the delightful experience of being cared for and having their concerns and questions addressed.

This era is already here and it is called Inbound Marketing. As one of the most effective methods to grow a business, inbound marketing leverages the power of the Triple C: content, communication and caring.

Online marketing strategist and author, David Meerman Scott, differentiates between outbound and inbound marketing brilliantly. According to him, outbound marketing consists of buying, begging or bugging one’s way through paid ads, billboards, banners, spam and telemarketing. Inbound marketing is about using valuable and informational (rather than overtly promotional content) to attract (the right kind of) customers to a business. In other words, inbound marketing is about turning prospects not only into paying customers, but into the brand’s most vocal advocates.

Here are some of the most important takeaways from Hubspot’s 2015 State of Inbound Report:

• 75% of marketers worldwide “prioritise an inbound approach to marketing” and this was consistent across all company types (B2C, B2B and non-profit).
  
• Paid advertising (print, outdoor, broadcast) is ranked as the number one “most overrated marketing tactic” by inbound and outbound marketers alike.
  
• Irrespective of marketing spend, every company surveyed was three times as likely to see a higher ROI on inbound marketing campaigns compared to outbound marketing ones.

In terms of methodology inbound marketing is about attracting, converting, closing and delighting customers.

1 Attract: The attraction phase consists of using SEO and content marketing to attract potential customers. It is strongly advised to spend only 20% of the time creating the content and 80% in promoting it. For example, when our agency created the 10 Astonishing Technologies that Power Google’s self-drive cards infographic for an auto-care company, we used ahrefs to identify sites which have similar content. Then it was a simple matter of interacting with these sites and building a relationship, after which we introduced them to the infographic we had created. This helped to make the infographic hugely popular, thereby helping our client gain significant rewards.

2 Convert: Using opt-in forms, calls-to-action (CTAs), and landing pages, incoming traffic to a website is converted into leads (e.g. into a list of email subscribers who have expressed interest in something specific). Here acquiring email subscribers is of the utmost importance because according to more than one study, the conversion rate for permission-based email marketing is much more than SEO and social media.

3 Close: Use methods such as permission based email marketing and CRM to convert leads into paying customers.

4 Delight: Inbound marketing doesn’t stop at the closing stage. The brand should continue to delight customers by asking for their input through surveys and providing them with personalised content (among other things) in order to convert them into promoters and advocates.

Here are examples of inbound marketing successes and how they can be applied in Pakistan.

Answer popular questions rather than sell
In 2009, Rivers Pools and Spas was spending $250,000 on TV, radio and PPC (pay-per-click ads) every year. Yet, the company’s monthly orders went down from six to two. This was when Marcus Sheridan, the co-founder of the company, reduced spending on paid advertising by a tenth, and did something different. Sheridan noticed that most of his competitors liked to talk about their company rather than answering people’s queries. He sensed an opportunity and started to answer these questions through blogposts and videos.

One of the most frequently asked questions was “how much does a fibreglass swimming pool cost?” He answered the question in a detailed blogpost. The blogspot became the number one search result for every fibreglass pool-related search engine query, and according to the New York Times, up until February 2013, this single piece of content had generated at least $1.7 million in sales for the company.

Some easy ways to find what your customers are asking include using sites such as Quora, Answers.com as well as industry-specific sites. For example, the most asked question on MySkin.com is about chapped lips (over 20,000 views to date). So a local skincare brand can create an infographic on how to deal with chapped lips in winter.

Use Google Adwords to find the number of searches different keywords generate
For example, if a local showbiz magazine wants to identify the right celebrity for their next cover, they can do this by finding out which celebrity has the most searches. The keyword ‘Fawad Khan’ is searched 74,000 times a month in Pakistan alone, whereas the monthly search volume for the keyword ‘Juggan Kazim’ is 12,100.

HootSuite: the game of social thrones campaign
Irrespective of how technical or boring you think your niche is, it is always possible to make it interesting and ‘newsjacking’ (building your content piece around a popular news item) is one way to do it. Hootsuite, a social media scheduling tool ‘newsjacked’ GoT’s new season in 2014, by creating a video which was similar to the opening credits of the original GoT. This video received almost a million views to date.

Local newsjacking applications could be for a TV channel, a cinema, or a ticketing startup developing their own desi version of the forthcoming Batman versus Superman film which people can then download. Or, given that the T20 Cricket World Cup is starting in March, a Pakistani sports goods manufacturer aiming to increase their exports for cricket related products could create a video about the top three contenders. Then they could use lead magnets (a discount code or a PDF-based schedule of the World Cup in terms of Pakistan Standard Time) to acquire email subscribers (so as to have the ability to nurture their leads through to their inboxes), before finally converting them into paid customers.

Syed Irfan Ajmal is co-founder of Digital Marketing ROI. Find more about Irfan on his blog.