Ads can be annoying because they are interruptive, especially when they interfere with your potential prospects’ day. For example, your prospect is trying to watch a video for entertainment or listen to music to calm down, suddenly, they are interrupted by ads. This experience can leave a bad taste in their mouth although advertisements are commonly used to increase brand awareness and promote products.
Though advertisements are used to reach your target audience and let them know about your brand, it is not the only way. Based on statistics, 80% of key decision-makers prefer to learn about a company through content compared to advertisements. This method of reaching your audience through content and experiences is called inbound marketing. It is cost-effective compared to advertisements and helps you build trust and credibility amongst your target audience. Looking to consider a method that will help you find success with your customer relationships? Keep on reading.
In this blog post we will dig deep into:
- What is inbound marketing?
- What is inbound methodology?
- Inbound marketing strategies to pull in customers the right way
- 8 inbound marketing tools you need to know to build successful customer relationships
- How to use Interactive Content as an inbound marketing tool?
- Build lasting relationships with inbound marketing tools such as Interactive Content
What is inbound marketing?
So, what is inbound marketing? It is simply expanding your business by reaching customers through marketing methods such as content marketing, social media, SEO, email marketing, lead nurturing, and more which are less intrusive to audiences. The focus of inbound marketing is on building and nurturing meaningful relationships with prospects by meeting your customers where they are and empowering them to reach their goals. For example, a prospective customer who needs more insights on their audience learns about multiple ways to collect customer data through a LinkedIn post. This is how inbound marketing works compared to traditional advertising methods.
What is inbound methodology?
The key to inbound marketing is understanding inbound methodology which is:
1. Attract: This stage focuses on capturing potential prospects through valuable content and initiating conversations that pose you as a credible advisor.
Examples: Captivate your customers with inbound marketing tools such as social media, blogs, and videos.
2. Engage: Offer insights and solutions that are tailored to audiences’ challenges and goals to engage them. This will make you their top choice when purchasing and choosing a brand.
Examples: Inbound marketing tools to engage customers are lead management and flow, email marketing, marketing automation, and chatbots.
3. Delight: Providing assistance and guidance to help customers find success in your product.
Examples: Inbound marketing tools which can be used to delight customers are smart content, email marketing, chatbots, attribution reporting, and marketing automation.
Inbound marketing strategies to pull in customers the right way
Here is a list of inbound marketing strategies that will help you attract, engage, and delight customers so you can grow your business and find favor with customers.
1. Content marketing
Deliver content that is relevant to your customer’s needs such as creating how-to articles, whitepapers, or guides. Your content should help answer questions they are searching for. This makes you valuable to them compared to businesses who do not offer or publish content. Try this inbound marketing strategy to attract and engage customers.
Pro-tip: If you want to make your guides more captivating to audiences, bring them to life by using this PDF converter that transforms them into stunning Interactive Flipbooks.
RELATED: 20 Ways to Repurpose Content into Successful Interactive Experiences
2. Social media marketing
Are you looking to authentically connect and engage your audience? Try out this inbound marketing tactic. Social media is great for growing customer relationships by providing valuable and informational content that answers your audience’s questions. Adapting your blogs into bite-sized information and creating Interactive Content is a great social media content strategy. Additionally, consider adding videos to your content plan as 96% of marketers acknowledge that videos allow customers to understand their products better.
Moreover, Interactive Content such as Social Interactive Content is perfect for social media. It increases brand awareness and social sharing allowing you to be discovered.
Pro tip: Connect with your audience in attractive ways through a fun Marketing Game with a leaderboard. This allows audiences to compete and share their scores on social media, fostering and growing connections.
Here is an example from our clients at Motorola who wanted to enhance their engagement rates as it is paramount to customer loyalty. They wanted a solution that could engage, entertain and boost sales and the answer was an easy to implement spin-and-win Marketing Game.
Motorola’s gamification significantly boosted their customer engagement rates and doubled their conversion rates. This is a great testament to using Marketing Games as an inbound marketing strategy.
3. Email marketing
This inbound marketing strategy focuses on building and maintaining relationships. It allows you to nurture leads and keeps an open line of communication with your customers. Use email marketing as part of your inbound marketing strategies to foster existing relationships by sending them personalized offers, personalized messages, and personalized content.
Pro tip: Show your customers you care about the relationship by sending out discount cards in your email to say thank you or reward them on their special day.
4. Personalization
Personalization is an inbound marketing strategy that allows you to create tailored experiences to meet customers’ needs such as personalized experiences and relevant information.
Pro tip: Make shopping feel personal and satisfactory by creating an interactive Personalized Landing Page that showcases personal recommendations and deals that empower customers.
RELATED: 6 Examples of personalized marketing for beautiful customer experiences
5. SEO
Want your business to be found? This inbound marketing tactic allows you to be discovered by ranking on search engines and search pages. This inbound marketing strategy is important as it allows you to attract customers by optimizing your website and publishing content that contains information and keywords relevant to your prospects’ search. In addition, with SEO, your content will be able to reach your target audience.
8 inbound marketing tools you need to know to build successful customer relationships
Want to try out those inbound marketing strategies we shared earlier? Get started with these inbound marketing tools.
1. HubSpot
HubSpot’s platform contains a huge suite of tools made for inbound marketing. They are one of the top software out there who offers a free inbound marketing course on their website. They don’t play when it comes to inbound marketing.
HubSpot tools for inbound marketing include:
Content Hub: ContentHub is HubSpot’s content management and creation software. You can use this tool to create and manage content. HubSpot’s Content Hub consists of tools such as a website builder, a free CMS tool, content embed, brand voice, and many more tools to ensure you produce high-quality content that resonates with your audience.
Marketing Hub: It is a comprehensive marketing software for automation, reporting, and campaigns which allows businesses to generate leads and streamline your marketing, driving growth. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub contains tools such as email marketing tools, ads, lead capture, social media, blog software and more.
This tool is one of the best inbound marketing software with all you need to reach and attract customers, effectively engage and delight them.
2. FluentForms
Build forms for lead generation with Fluent Forms. With this inbound marketing tool, you can create multiple types of forms all in one platform like lead capture, newsletter sign-up, event registration, survey and application forms.
Key features of FluentForms for inbound marketing include:
Drag-and-drop builder: You can create and choose from over 60+ ready-to-use customizable input fields.
Conditional Logic: Build personalized user experience with dynamic forms that show or hide form fields based on user actions.
Conversational Forms: Make your forms feel like conversations by asking users one question at a time in real time.
This inbound marketing software is perfect for generating leads, capturing contact information, and collecting valuable insights. Moreover, this tool is great for attracting and engaging customers through the information collected, which allows you to understand their pain points and provide a suitable solution.
3. Ahrefs
Another great example of inbound marketing tools that are great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is Ahrefs. This SEO tool can help you with inbound marketing by attracting prospects and building and driving traffic to your website and pages.
These Ahrefs tools can be used for inbound marketing:
Site Explorer: Inspect your website’s organic search traffic and backlink profile including your competitors so you can analyze and discover effective strategies.
Keywords Explorer: Find and analyze keywords such as high-volume or low competition that are relevant which will help you rank and be discovered.
Content Explorer: Lets you find the most popular content for a topic together with social shares and backlinks. In addition, you can use this tool to identify trending topics in your industry that you can touch on in your content or blog posts.
Rank Tracker: Monitor your website’s ranking for specific keywords.
With this inbound marketing tool, uncover all the insights about your website and improve your search engine optimization (SEO). Use this tool to your advantage and optimize your blog posts, pages, and website so you can attract customers and increase your brand awareness.
4. Pardot
Pardot offers a solution for email marketing, marketing automation, lead nurturing, landing pages, form building, A/B testing & reporting. This inbound marketing tool is effective for attracting and gathering leads and nurturing them.
Try out this Pardot features for inbound marketing:
Content generation: Pardot can be used to generate relevant content based on keywords which can help you create content that attracts.
Lead nurturing: Nurture and engage leads with Pardot. Send personalized emails to your customers based on their actions, behaviors, and interests. This approach will prove you are customer-centered and that you are interested in providing them a solution.
Social media marketing: Post on social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, using Pardot and then track post engagements. See what content performs well which will allow you to find and produce the best content that engages customers.
This inbound marketing software will help you attract and engage customers better and aid your inbound marketing strategies.
5. Google Analytics
Need insights to support your inbound marketing strategy? Look no further because Google Analytics is the answer. Understand user behavior, your campaign effectiveness, and content performance to help you attract the right audience and turn them into customers.
Put these inbound marketing tools from Google Analytics to use:
Audience and behavior reports: Uncover detailed information about who your audiences are, their interests, locations and more. Additionally, see how audiences navigate your website and what content they interact with.
Conversion, ecommerce, and real-time performance tracking: Track conversions, your marketing campaign performance, and see where your profitable customers come from.
Email campaign metrics: Want to see how well your email marketing content and campaign performed? Get a better idea by checking your email campaign metrics.
Audience segmentation: Easily segment your audience by demographics and behavior. This allows you to create an inbound marketing strategy that is successful.
This inbound marketing tool is the key to understanding your customers better. Additionally, view and analyze your campaign and content performance to help you realign your strategy, ensuring that it adds value to customers and is successful at captivating audiences.
6. Canva
Canva is a superhero for marketers when it comes to easy visual content creation. This cost-effective inbound marketing tool allows you to create various content formats such as social media posts, whitepapers, infographics and more, great for attracting and engaging customers organically.
Canva features for inbound marketing are:
Content creation: Create and design various visually stunning content easily for various platforms in multiple formats with customizable templates and drag and drop features.
Lead magnet creation: Create lead magnets such as infographics, eBooks, and guides with ready-made templates and formats.
Brand kit: Develop and maintain consistent branding throughout your content and visuals to familiarize customers with your visual identity.
This inbound marketing tool will allow you to create visually engaging and branded content that can effectively attract and nurture leads.
7. Active Campaign
Active Campaign is perfect for engaging with potential and existing customers. Boost your customer interactions with their email marketing, marketing automation, landing pages, and forms tools.
Active Campaign features for inbound marketing that you need to try:
Campaign personalization: Create personalized and targeted campaigns by integrating with apps and tools such as email marketing, sales and marketing automation.
Audience management: Automatically build contact lists and segment your customers so you can create and send content that benefits them.
Content studio: Create various content such as emails, landing pages, forms and dynamic content to engage audiences.
Email marketing: Deliver high-quality content that your audience can relate to and build successful email campaigns.
Effectively attract and engage your audiences through inbound marketing strategies such as email marketing and content marketing with this inbound marketing software.
8. Dot.vu
With Dot.vu you can create highly engaging and captivating content such as Interactive Content. Interactive Content encourages active participation from audiences such as answering a quiz, flipping a page, or playing a game which drives engagement. Make content such as Interactive Flipbooks, Interactive Videos, Marketing Games, Interactive Quizzes and Surveys with this inbound marketing tool. This tool is ideal for attracting, engaging, and delighting customers.
Here are features and tools from Dot.vu that can be used for inbound marketing:
Interactive Experiences: Explore and choose from over 20+ Interactive Experiences that are highly engaging and effective at captivating customers.
Marketplace & Customizable Templates: Create Interactive Content with ease by selecting from over 350+ ready to edit templates that are professionally designed.
Content Editor: Based on your skill level, use the quick editor and advanced editor to your advantage. The quick editor allows you to edit a template easily following the menu whereas the advanced editor gives you more freedom to customize and edit your Interactive Content to your liking.
Analytics: Collect data and insights on your audience and see how they interacted with your content. Additionally, you can also create and track custom KPIs to gain a deeper understanding of your audience and your campaign performance.
Pro Tip: Not sure how to create custom KPIs? You can always visit our Help Articles.
This inbound marketing tool allows you to easily create Interactive Content with a drag-and-drop builder and over 350+ customizable templates. Use and add this tool to your inbound marketing strategy to attract, engage, and delight customers and build a solid relationship.
How to use Interactive Content as an inbound marketing tool?
Are you wondering how Interactive Content can be used for inbound marketing? Based on the inbound methodology, we will explain below what Interactive Experiences are suitable for each of the stages.
Attract
Want to attract customers, generate leads, and increase brand awareness? These Interactive Experiences are the way to go:
- Interactive Flipbooks
- Marketing Games
- Interactive Landing Pages
- Interactive Popups
- Interactive Videos
Engage
Wondering how you can add value and provide solutions to your customers? Try out these experiences that will surely convert them:
- Interactive Calculators
- Product Recommenders
- Solution Finders
- Guided Selling
Delight
Maintain your customer relationships by delighting them. Getting feedback and collecting zero & first-party data, and incentivizing with discounts can help you do that. Use these experiences to retain your customers:
- Interactive Quizzes
- Interactive Surveys
- Interactive Polls
- Marketing Games
RELATED: What Is Interactive Content? The Best Guide to Start!
Build lasting relationships with inbound marketing tools such as Interactive Content
Interactive Content is a great inbound marketing tool and software. It allows you to create content that is captivating and highly engaging. This is because it encourages active participation from audiences, unlike static content.
Dot.vu is the perfect inbound marketing tool for attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. With a comprehensive suite of tools and over 20+ Interactive Experiences, you can create outstanding content that provides value to your customers.
Build lasting relationships with high-quality content such as Interactive Content and try out successful inbound marketing tools like Dot.vu. Start your 14-Day Free Trial with us and create content that will surely resonate with your audience.
