<p dir="ltr">Every organization has a marketing department whose major efforts involve generating leads and driving sales. Most of the traditional marketing activities include cold calling, sending emails to prospects, putting up billboards or advertisements on various media platforms. However in recent years, these traditional marketing activities are losing their effectiveness as more people are getting frustrated with the invasive nature of these activities and are finding ways to block ads from reaching them.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">With this being a common scenario today, organizations need to take up a new approach to attract customers and drive business growth. Inbound marketing has become this new approach for more organizations due to the various advantages it provides enterprises over traditional marketing.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">What is Inbound Marketing?</h2><p><br></p><p>Traditional outbound marketing focuses on getting the organization&rsquo;s message out to as many prospective customers as possible with a hope that a few people will resonate with the message, buy into it and become actual customers. However, people are smarter today and they do not want to see advertisements or read mails that are irrelevant to them. This leads to blocking these ads or inaction on the part of the viewer.</p><p><br></p><p><a href="/blog/inbound-vs-outbound-marketing-why-is-inbound-better" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Inbound marketing offers several advantages</a> over outbound marketing. It not only promises more business leads, prospects and sales, but also better experience for customers throughout their buying journey, thus making them your brand ambassadors. Moreover, this is done in a non-invasive way.</p><p><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">Inbound Marketing Methodology</h2><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">Inbound marketing is essentially pull marketing where 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 dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">Inbound marketing employs a 4-step methodology to convert strangers into customers and your brand promoters. The following is the 4-step approach.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr"><img src="https://cdn.7edge.com/file_managers/images/000/000/066/original/InboundMarketing-1.png?1509191498" style="width: 595px; height: 519.273px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib"></p><h3 dir="ltr">Attract</h3><p dir="ltr">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. We excel at creating buyer personas of your ideal customers to understand their goals, challenges and pain points so that you can build your offerings around them. We also make use of appropriate tools and techniques to help you attract these buyer personas to your website.</p><h3 dir="ltr">Convert</h3><p dir="ltr">Once the right audience has come to your website, it is important to 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. We help you come up with the right content offerings such as eBooks and whitepapers as well as provide you the tools necessary to convert your website visitors to leads.</p><h3 dir="ltr">Close</h3><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 the right leads to customers at the right time. We can help you implement the right tools and techniques such as emails, marketing automation and closed-loop reporting to accomplish closures more effectively.</p><h3 dir="ltr">Delight</h3><p dir="ltr">Our 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. We accomplish this through tools such as surveys, emails, smart content and social monitoring.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">Overcoming Digital Marketing Challenges</h2><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">In an era where more organizations are competing online to get noticed by their potential customer, digitally marketing your company&rsquo;s services can be quite challenging. However, given that the digital marketing has become an essential part of an organization&rsquo;s effort, you want to ensure that your efforts are successful. Inbound marketing plays an excellent role in <a href="/blog/key-inbound-marketing-tactics-to-run-successful-campaigns" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">solving a lot of these issues</a> and driving your digital marketing campaigns towards success.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">Scoring your marketing and sales leads</h2><p><br></p><p>Marketing teams in most enterprises use lead scoring to qualify a lead so that the right leads are sent to the sales team. This is done through a qualification process that helps determine whether pursuing the lead makes business sense. However, scoring every lead manually can be a tricky and difficult process. Predictive lead scoring eliminates this problem by automatically bucketing your leads helping you to identify qualified leads.</p><p><br></p><h2>Setting up an automated workflow</h2><p><br></p><p>Marketing automation is increasingly becoming popular among marketers across industries due to its ability to improve the efficiency of marketing activities. Automated workflows are a great way to nurture your leads so that they are sales-ready when the time is right. Not only this, but they can also help you tackle several administrative marketing tasks.</p><p><br></p><p dir="ltr">In a simple way, automated workflows trigger certain actions automatically based on your lead&rsquo;s contact details, their behavior or both together. However, it is absolutely necessary to ensure that you have set up a proper automated workflow in order to effectively nurture your leads.</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><h2 dir="ltr">Inbound Marketing Best Practices</h2><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">While inbound marketing offers a lot of advantages as you may have already seen, it takes following certain practices to become successful at this approach. Some of the key pillars of inbound marketing include identifying your buyer personas, identifying your customers&rsquo; buying journey and create high-quality, attractive and relevant content that keeps your customers hooked to you.&nbsp;</p><p dir="ltr"><br></p><p dir="ltr">Read in detail about the inbound marketing best practices <a href="/blog/7-inbound-marketing-best-practices-to-boost-your-sales" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p><p>Inbound marketing is a relatively new approach gaining popularity among organizations across the world. Having said that, it requires a certain effort on the part of organizations. While some organizations may be more than willing to dedicate certain resources for this effort, others may not. In the latter case, it is critical that you <a href="/blog/5-things-to-check-before-hiring-an-inbound-marketing-agency" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hire the right partner</a> who understands the in and out of this marketing strategy and can help you achieve your sales goals.</p><p><br></p>