Marketing Strategies: Why are we focused on Inbound Marketing?
Rodrigo Sanchez
27/05/2024
GS2 - Marketing strategies because we are focused on Inbound Marketing - GS2 Marketing Authors - Freepik
Marketing Strategies: Why are we focused on Inbound Marketing?
The transformation in the online environment that we have been experiencing in recent years, especially after the pandemic, has made it clear that: either companies invest in digital marketing strategies or they will be left behind.
Customers are increasingly demanding, so you need to show with numbers and data that your business generates effective results for the customer.
But which marketing strategies are most effective when it comes to generating sales? We’re talking about Inbound Marketing.
Want to know more about one of the marketing strategies that generates the most results? Check out the article.
Marketing strategy: what is it?
According to Philip Kotler, considered the father of marketing:
Marketing is the science and art of exploring, creating and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target audience profitably.
In this sense, marketing strategies are a set of actions created to promote, sell and build a positive image for the brand. These are the ways you will use to generate value for the business, attract more customers and generate more sales.
However, before taking several actions that, in the end, will not be effective, it is necessary to make an adequate strategic marketing plan, and, above all, define your objectives.
How to do strategic marketing planning?
1 – Define your goals
To define your goals, it is important to study your market niche. This way, you can understand what to expect in the coming months and years.
If you don't know where to start, here are some goals you can set in your marketing plan:
Strengthen the brand;
Increase the sales;
Build customer loyalty;
Generate authority in the niche;
Engage employees;
Recover relationships with former customers;
Maintain proximity with recurring customers;
Increase online visibility;
Expand the customer base;
Launch new products or services;
Generate qualified leads;
Improve customer satisfaction.
2 – Know your target audience and your persona
Know who your brand will be interacting with. This will provide more information about your customers and potential customers, making your actions much more assertive.
To develop a more personalized and effective marketing strategy for sales and action plan, you must always think about understanding your target audience.
You can tailor your campaigns to better meet the needs and desires of these customers. This means that all marketing efforts, including promotions and social media messages, will be more refined and easily absorbed by your audience.
Your messages are more relevant when you understand your customers’ interests and behaviors. This increases the chances of campaign success and strengthens connections with your audience.
3 – Understand your persona’s purchasing journey
After getting to know your persona, their pain points and desires, you need to know the path they take until the moment of purchase.
See the infographic below to find out how to identify which stage of the purchasing journey your customer is at:
Define which channels will be used
Knowing what stage your customer is at makes it easier to define which channels will be used to establish this communication:
Are you going to communicate with your customers via email? Or is your persona on social media? Do you prefer to create blog articles to build relationships with your audience?
Answering these questions is essential so that you use the correct media and don’t end up “talking to yourself” on the wrong channel.
Optimize your content
Well, now that you have defined your goals, you know who your persona is and where they are, it's time to produce your content.
If you want to attract customers through relevant content about your niche, you need to know SEO techniques.
Producing content using good SEO practices will make your texts appear on the first pages of search engines.
The result? Your business is in the sights of thousands of potential customers. That’s all you want, right?
Oh, and don't forget about social media content!
Producing content for this channel is essential to make your business more visible on social media. And you have one more reason to do so, see why.
Advantages of implementing digital marketing strategies
Did you know that Brazilians spend more time on social media than watching TV or listening to the radio?
According to G1, in 2023 a survey showed that Brazilians spend around 9 hours a day using smartphones and other electronic devices connected to the Internet, that is, If you don't invest in digital marketing strategies, you'll miss out on the opportunity to showcase your business to thousands of people.
In addition to having a digital presence, with this time and data, you can map where your potential customers are and understand what type of content they consume.
This way, you can make more assertive decisions when choosing which marketing strategies to use with your audience.
Marketing Strategy: Why are we focused on Inbound Marketing?
Also known as attraction marketing, Inbound Marketing is one of the most advantageous marketing strategies. digital marketing industry available.
This is because, unlike other marketing strategies, Inbound Marketing is measurable, that is, you can evaluate the results of your campaigns through data.
Let's learn more about this strategy?
Inbound Marketing Objectives
Attracting, converting, retaining and delighting customers, these are the objectives of Inbound Marketing, but what does that mean?
To attract: through content marketing, SEO and social media strategies (blog articles or social media posts with content about topics related to your persona's universe);
Convert visitors into leads: create a relationship with your potential customer by sending relevant content;
Convert leads into sales: sell your product or service to people who were attracted by your content;
Build customer loyalty and maintain a relationship of trust: show your customers that buying from you is better than buying from your competitor;
Delight your customers and turn them into brand ambassadors: make your customers recommend your product or service, due to its quality and the excellent relationship you have created.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing
Connect your product or service to those who need it: Inbound Marketing helps attract people who are already looking for solutions similar to those your company offers, ensuring that your products or services reach a truly interested audience;
Create a connection with your customer: through relevant and personalized content, Inbound Marketing establishes a closer and more trusting relationship between the brand and customers;
Shorten the customer purchasing journey: By providing useful and relevant information at each stage of the purchasing journey, Inbound Marketing facilitates and accelerates the customer's decision-making process, which can be an excellent marketing strategy to increase sales;
Measure actions through data: Inbound Marketing allows you to monitor and analyze the performance of each action taken, providing valuable insights to optimize strategies and obtain better results;
Increase sales and number of visits/traffic: Inbound Marketing strategies attract more visitors to the company's website, which can lead to an increase in sales and overall engagement;
Educate and inform the public: Providing valuable, educational content helps customers better understand their needs and how your products or services can meet them;
Generate qualified leads: well-thought-out and structured content is capable of attracting and capturing information from interested people, Inbound Marketing generates leads that are more likely to convert into customers;
Improve engagement: Another digital marketing strategy for sales involves relationships. Attractive and relevant content encourages users to interact with the brand more frequently, increasing attention and loyalty;
Building authority and trust: publishing high-quality, relevant content establishes your brand as an authority in the industry, earning the trust of customers;
Reduce marketing costs: Inbound Marketing, focused on organic and long-term strategies, generally requires a smaller investment compared to traditional marketing methods, providing a high return on investment;
Build customer loyalty: Continuous and personalized monitoring through relevant content and communication strengthens the relationship with existing customers, encouraging loyalty and repeat purchases.
How to measure Inbound Marketing results?
As we said before, we focus on Inbound Marketing because it shows us how effective our campaigns are, and this gives us two advantages:
Show clients that our strategies work through data;
Change the course of a campaign that isn’t converting.
But to do this, we need to observe some metrics that only Inbound Marketing can offer. Let's take a look at them.
Website visits or traffic
The number of people who visit your website gives us an idea of how effective your SEO, email marketing and content marketing strategy is.
When someone searches for a term and finds your article on the first page of the search engine, it means that you have created relevant content that meets good SEO practices.
Another way to generate traffic to your website is by feeding your lead base with interesting emails that generate clicks to more complete and interesting content on your website.
Leads
If you manage to spark a visitor's interest in your content to the point where they provide their details to download a material, congratulations!
You are doing an excellent job.
Leads are people who decide to start a relationship with you by providing data such as: email address, full name, role and even company where they work.
And this is another way to measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
Email open rate
Email open rate indicates whether your subject line was compelling enough to make your audience open your message.
In this sense, investing in a title that generates identification and curiosity in the audience is essential to increase email opening rates.
But that doesn’t mean you need to write sensationalist headlines, okay? Being honest with your audience is one of the foundations of Inbound.
Here are some tips for getting a high email open rate:
Deliver in the body of the email what you promised in the subject line;
Make titles with a maximum of 60 characters;
Use urgency and curiosity triggers to spark interest;
Make questions;
Talk about your audience's problems.
Cost per lead (CPL)
Another way to measure whether your marketing strategy is working is the cost per lead (CPL). The cost per lead is how much the company pays for each lead generated.
To make the calculation, it is necessary to add up all the costs the company had to generate leads (materials, rent, employees, time, tools) and divide by the number of leads generated.
This is another way to measure whether marketing strategies are having an effect, or whether it is better to change direction.
Lead conversion rate
This metric measures how many visitors to your website have turned into leads. A good conversion rate is around 4%.
This metric is directly related to the cost per lead. In this sense, the higher your Lead Conversion Rate, the lower the cost per lead will be.
If your metric is below this rate, it is important to evaluate whether the website's communication is attractive or whether there are enough call-to-action buttons inviting the visitor to take action.
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
This metric helps you define how much resources you should invest to acquire a new customer.
To calculate the Customer Lifetime Value of a customer, do the following calculation:
Multiply the average sales ticket by the number of recurring transactions and the retention time of a customer (in months or years). That's it, this will be your CLV.
Cost per customer acquisition
Customer acquisition cost shows how much it cost your business to nurture a lead until they become a customer.
To know if your business is on the right track, this metric must be greater than the cost of acquisition per customer.
If it is smaller, you need to review your marketing strategies to assess which step you are making mistakes at.
Lead scoring
Imagine you have a store and several people come in every day. Some are just “looking around”, others are asking questions, and some even pick up products. On the internet, it’s almost the same thing.
Lead Scoring is a way to classify these people, called leads, according to how interested they are in actually making a purchase.
Here’s how it works: every action a lead takes on your website or in your marketing campaigns is given a score. For example:
If someone visits multiple pages on your website, downloads an e-book, or opens and clicks on your emails, these actions indicate increased interest. Each of these actions adds points to the lead.
With Lead Scoring, you can clearly see which leads are most ready to buy based on these scores. This helps your sales team focus on the “hottest” leads first.
Content engagement
Content engagement is essential to understanding how much your audience is actually interacting with the material you make available.
It goes beyond simple page views, considering how long users spend on each page, whether they watch your videos until the end, whether they participate in webinars, whether they are downloading e-books or other rich materials.
Social shares, comments, and likes are valuable indicators that your content is resonating with your audience, but they aren’t the whole story, there’s a lot more to it than that.
The more engaged the user, the greater the chance they will trust your brand and move forward in the purchasing journey.
Retention and churn rate
Retention rate measures the percentage of customers who continue to use your products or services after a certain period of time, while churn rate indicates how many customers stop using them.
These metrics are essential for evaluating customer loyalty and the effectiveness of your retention strategies.
A high retention rate suggests that customers are satisfied and see continued value in what you offer, while a high churn rate may indicate satisfaction or competitiveness issues.
ROI
ROI is the return on investment, that is, how much profit you made considering the investment you made. It is the result of your campaigns.
Regardless of the marketing strategies you used, in the end, they need to show a financial return, that is, an increase in sales.
To find out if your campaign has achieved positive results, simply do the calculation:
Reduce your customer acquisition cost Customer lifetime value and divide again by the customer acquisition cost.
This is another way to assess whether your Inbound Marketing campaigns are actually bringing financial returns to your customers.
ROAS
This metric differs from ROI because it only calculates the investment in paid media and shows you how optimized your campaigns are with paid ads.
See why we love Inbound Marketing? With it, there is no guesswork. There is planning, execution and measurement of results.
Everything to achieve excellent financial results for our clients.
Still in doubt about the power of Inbound?
Meet GS2 Digital Marketing
Our success strategy is based on the design of your persona's purchasing journey. We gather data and analyze our successful clients from different segments to come up with a methodology that will increase your sales.
We are a digital marketing consulting specialized in Inbound Marketing and we have the most strategic areas of digital marketing to help you sell more!
Our numbers speak for us and ours success cases are proof that Inbound Marketing works and can bring extraordinary results to your company.
Want to know more about how GS2 Marketing can help you boost your sales and implement an Inbound Marketing strategy that works?