Inbound marketing campaign seeks to attract customers to your product or service by providing content that is of interest or useful to them. In contrast, outbound marketing involves using traditional marketing techniques, such as advertisements, that ‘go out’ to the customer. The goal of an inbound marketing campaign is to produce content that will attract new leads and potential customers to your business.
These types of campaigns focus on identifying a specific type of potential customer to create a ‘customer persona’. Content that is produced in support of an inbound campaign seeks to answer questions this customer may have or otherwise provide them with valuable information about your product or service. The goal is to attract and engage potential customers with this content that helps build trust with your brand and makes them likely to purchase from you. It is a more helpful and personal way of helping customers meet their wants and needs.
The most important element of these types of campaigns is to clearly identify your potential customer so that you know what type of content will appeal to them. A buyer persona is a representation of your target customer that takes into account their needs, attitudes, pain points and demographics in order to create as complete a picture as possible of who you are marketing to.
The next step is to create content that will appeal to this particular type of customer; the type of content you create will depend on the data you have gathered in creating your buyer persona. This content should not be a sales pitch as such, instead it should offer information that is of value to the customer – for example, or that solves a problem that they have. It should be educational and seek to empower customers by educating them or entertaining them without expecting any particular return.
Content can be provided in a variety of formats and through multiple channels such as articles, videos, blog posts, social media posts, emails, podcasts and so on. Once again this will depend on your buyer persona and which method makes most sense for them. The goal is to produce great content that will build a sense of trust with your customer so that when they are ready to make a purchase your company is the one they turn to. This also helps build brand awareness by outlining your company’s values, mission and purpose in a subtle way without annoying the customer.