<p dir="ltr">The marketing world is rapidly changing with increasing digitalization and traditional marketing is being rapidly being pushed down by the more popular inbound marketing. So, what is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is pull marketing whereas traditional outbound marketing is push marketing. The key benefit of inbound marketing is that, unlike traditional marketing which involves chasing customers and using interruptive methods, it uses certain methodologies along with the right content that addresses the problems and needs of potential customers. This builds trust and credibility for your brand among your target customers thereby generating more conversions.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">Inbound marketing employs a 4-step methodology to convert strangers into customers and your brand promoters. Let us understand these stages in depth.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">Attract</h2><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">The first stage of acquiring customers to any organization is to attract them. Hence, attracting people becomes the first stage in inbound marketing. Attracting people to your web properties does not mean attracting random strangers. It means attracting the right visitors who can become potential leads and ultimately customers.&nbsp;</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">The attraction stage involves creating buyer personas of your ideal customers to understand their goals, challenges and pain points so that you can build your offerings to address them. You can also make use of appropriate content, tools, and techniques to help you attract these buyer personas to your website. Some of the common forms of content you can use in this stage are blogs and simple guides and some of the common ways to attract people is to optimize your website and make use of social media platforms to promote your content organically.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">Convert</h2><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">Once the right audience has come to your website, it is important that you convert them into leads by collecting their information. However, in order to obtain their details, you need to offer something valuable in return, which is usually in the form of content. In this stage, you can come up with content offerings such as eBooks and whitepapers. You also need to ensure that your call-to-actions (CTAs), landing pages and forms are made attractive and appropriate in a way that your website visitors are willing to give you their information.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">Close</h2><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">Once you have the right visitors coming to your website and getting the right leads, the next logical step is to convert these leads to customers at the right time. To do this, you need to use the right approach. Remember that all leads are not in a position to be closed. That is why you need to nurture them. Emails and social media play an important role in helping your prospects close better. You can offer content such as vendor or product comparison, case studies, and product literature or offer trial downloads and live demos.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">Besides this, you also need to make use of tools, techniques, and processes such as lead scoring, workflows marketing automation, monitoring, and closed-loop reporting to accomplish closures more effectively. One of the best approaches to close leads faster and better is to align your marketing and sales teams so that they are on the same page and achieve better results.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">Delight</h2><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">Inbound marketing methodology does not stop at helping you obtain customers. It goes one step ahead to help you get satisfied customers who can become your brand promoters and help your business grow. You can accomplish this through tools such as surveys, emails, smart content and social monitoring.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">The remarkable thing about following this methodology is that you are able to obtain results almost entirely organically and without having to invade any of your prospects&rsquo; privacy as results are achieved through content, channels, and tactics that attract your potential customers rather than pushing them away.</p><p><br></p>