Inbound Marketing: definition and best practices

Inbound Marketing is a brilliant way to gain minds. With the advent of the web, consumer decision making processes have changed radically. People retrieve a large volume of information before contacting a company's representatives or salespeople. And, marketing must adapt to this reality.

The Inbound Marketing approach

In classic or Outbound marketing, the company pushes its message to its audience to get a deal. This may be a promotion such as a discount or special offer, which will be delivered by interrupting the content the customer was viewing: this is interruption marketing. But in the Inbound Marketing approach, it's the opposite: the company offers content to consumers based on their interests. It aims to win their attention by offering them an interesting informational offer, in line with their needs and without it being pure promotion. The approach is much more targeted and above all does not interrupt the prospect. In this case we are talking about permission marketing . Inbound Marketing thus marks a real break with the classic marketing approach, in that it makes maximum use of the power of social networks and search engines.

Becoming your own media to better convert

With Inbound Marketing, the brand becomes a content producer. The brand no longer positions itself only as a seller, but also as an expert on its activities. This strategy leads the consumer to purchase, thanks in particular to the automation of defined tasks within a system. Based on the information collected on the visitor's behaviour (clicked links, viewed videos, favourite topics), marketing decides to send content that is relevant in its context. To carry out these operations, it is necessary to have the appropriate tools. For example, sending emails and newsletters can be done with Mailchimp or landings pages can be designed on unbounce.com.

Inbound marketing: the strategy that boosts your profitability

The time of being on the web for the sole purpose of innovation is over. Owning a site is now part of a logic of profitability and a global marketing strategy of the company. Unfortunately, many companies still do not take the web seriously, thinking that the website is sufficient on its own, and so each year they devour budgets in poorly targeted or poorly prepared web actions which they see neither result nor return on investment.
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