Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media, or videos. Offering educational content to attract relevant potential customers to your website organically without paid media ads is inbound marketing. 

What's great about inbound marketing is that the buyers are not persuaded directly to buy the product. Instead, you are letting them understand its know-how and educating them. This strategy effectively opens a door to attracting more visitors to your website.

Enticing more strangers, converting them to leads, closing deals, and finally creating brand advocates can be easily achieved when you optimize your foundational blocks under the inbound marketing method. They are, i) understanding and defining your target audience, ii) mapping the buyer's journey, and iii) serving value through content.

Why create a buyer persona?

Spending time crafting quality content without defining your target audience, is a big no. 

Develop a buyer's persona by identifying, and defining target audience, leveraging data based on demography, challenges, and goals.

It helps you to think from your customers' perspective to understand their challenges and thereby figure out how your solution can help bridge the gap. It is easy to create a buyer persona by simply analyzing  this few pro-questions categorically. 

 

Demography

• What is the name of the persona? A pro tip: Naming the persona along with the role helps to remember the person's role throughout the process
  
• What age does your persona fall under?
  
• What gender?
  
• What is your persona's educational qualification (mention the highest degree earned by your persona)?
  
• What is the persona's role?
  
• How much does your persona earn per annum?
  
• What type of organization and where does the persona work? (mention its growth)
  

Responsibility

• What are the goals and objectives of the persona? (List at least two) 
  
• What makes this persona successful in the role?
  

Challenges

• What are the persona's challenges?
  
• What tools does your persona use?
  

 A final outlook would look similar to the persona I have created above. Analysing the answers helps in identifying where your solution best fits and you can tailor your message accordingly. If you are unsure of matching your customer's perspective, then you can interview your customers or prospects to get answers to your questions. 

What are the different stages of the Buyer's journey?

Knowing where your audience is in the pipeline helps you figure out the content that best suits them and eventually paves the way in product sales. Customer journey or buyer's journey what  tracks your customers' conversion path and optimizes strategy based on their status in the marketing funnel. The buyer's journey is divided into four stages. 

 

Discovering stage:

This is the beginning or the phase  where your audience is in search of solutions to their business problems. Providing 'how-to' guides and informative blogs resonate well with your audience and attracts new leads to your website. Don't pitch your product or service here. 

For instance: Let's say a user is looking for an ideal solution to manage his contacts. He is looking for contact management. To capture the user's interest, you can suggest they read a blog that explains the importance of CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

 

Considering stage:

During this phase, your audience wants to learn more about your product or service that might fit their needs. Prompting them to download an ebook or whitepaper as a takeaway allows you more information about your buyers.

 

If the user proceeds to download a suggested resource such as an ebook, the marketing team can follow up with an invite to a webinar or workshop to learn more about the product without being pushy. 

 

Finalising stage:

This last phase is also called the revenue-creation stage where the buyer decides whether to choose your solution or not. Regular follow-ups at right intervals maximize the chances of conversion.

 

After gauging the user's interest, the sales team pitches in with an offer of a  demo tailored to the user's needs. Showcasing the ability to address the user's problem with your product or solution is crossing 90% of this bridge. Patience and showing you understand and value the users's needs is key here. 

 

Promoting stage

Happy and satisfied customers will be your brand advocates and help in promoting and recommending your product or service to their peers. 93% of B2B businesses can easily convert a referral to a customer when your brand advocates recommend them. Also, there is a good chance of cross-selling the product to your loyal customer base effortlessly.

 

Once your deal is closed, it doesn't stop there. You have to assist the customers when required, constantly follow up and support them in their growth phase. This paves the way in building your brand champions who will bring in quality leads.

Why to capitalize on content marketing - the backbone of inbound marketing

Today we live in an information-dense world and it is no surprise that content is the key. Content marketing is a strategy to create and deliver contextually relevant information. It can be blogs, newsletters, landing page, emails, videos, social media - everything that serves information or shares content. Communities, blogs, and social media are widely considered the best platforms to share and promote content. 

Communities

Communities are networking spaces for a peer group with common interests to connect, learn, and share experiences, build expertise, and make contacts. Communities inspire trust and help build credibility for a brand. When content is shared or opinions are expressed, it endorses a brand and validates the thoughts of users and therefore influences buying decisions greatly.

Blogging

Blogging gives you a space to publish content that attracts visitors to your website. It opens up a world of knowledge that has made it a sought after medium to learn new things.

Simple tips that can go a long way in blogging:

• Choose a long-tail keyword topic as it is SEO friendly and more specific.
  
• Ensure your title is not more than 60 characters because the google display screen is 600 pixels.
  
• While drafting blogs, address the industry, not your business 
  
• While formatting, have a lot of white space for easy navigation and include images, gifs, and videos wherever necessary 
  
• Optimize your content for SEO, including your long-tail keyword in title, body, URL, Alt text, and meta description
  
• Your blog posts must be mobile friendly.
  

 

Social media

On average a person spends 142 minutes a day on social media. Social media marketing became and continues to be the hub to spread content and create brand awareness to attract more users, and drive growth. There are a lot of social media platforms. Choosing your ideal platform extends better reach and visibility. 

For example, If you want to increase your engagement rate, you can give Instagram a shot as its engagement rate is 10 times more than what Facebook and 80 times more than what Twitter gives you.

If you want to know more about your target audience or build a leadership portfolio, Linkedin is the right platform. 

Best social media strategies to increase your overall engagement rate:

• Always keep a tab on your social media performance. Continuous monitoring helps to spot the areas that need more attention.
  
• Don't focus on the likes. Other crucial parameters define the quality of the content such as shares, comments, and followers.
  
• Identify your optimal time and optimise the posts further. 
  
• Captivating user-generated content creates more engagement and builds credibility.
  
• Using relevant hashtags bring more traffic. Don't use generic hashtags as the search results are high in volume.
  

Each social media platform is different and unique in its purpose. Identifying which social media handle your audience spend more time on, helps tailor the content that is more relevant and meaningful in delivering the message.

 

Pro tip: Perform social listening. Social listening tools surf the social media to find out if someone mentions you, and notifies you instantly. There are free tools for social listening such as google alerts and Zoho Social to monitor mentions and also analyze your social media performance.

 

Whether it is blogging, communities, or social media marketing, content marketing is core to all these mediums, and great content marketing is the art of delivering value without selling. 

• Topic Participants

• Shaveethira G

  

• Alex

• Kirian

• Vinit Tibrewal

  

• Sticky Posts

• 10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

  Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through. Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth. 1. Avoid cart abandonment If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.

• Marketing in a post COVID-19 world!

  Consumers across countries are increasingly spending more time on a wide variety of digital activities, right from online grocery shopping, to video conferencing, to tele-medicine. There is a good chance that you performed one or more of the following activities during this lockdown, thanks to COVID 19: Cooked a meal Made a TikTok Video Signed up for a remote learning session Consulted a doctor online (or ordered medicines online) Shopped for groceries online A study by Hunter, a food and beverage

• Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

  According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media,

• How Zylker doubled their webinar registrations!

  Webinars are good educational resources to gather qualified leads for your product. But what if your visitors are dropping off from your webinar landing page without signing up? What more could you do to convert visitors into registrants? This is the

• The ideology behind why features tell, but benefits sell

  Do you think there's any truth to this? Do features only tell, and benefits sell?  Well, let's see why we should focus on benefits rather than features as the great marketing wizards, David Ogilvy and Steve Jobs proved to be the best examples leveraging

• Recent Topics

• Custom Module missing SDK function fetchRelatedRecords(...) in a Client Script

  Good day, We have added a new module with a Multi-Lookup relation to Contacts.  When we tried to use the fetchRelatedRecords(id, related_list_api_name) function to get Related Records it is missing for our new custom module. https://js.zohocdn.com/crm/5124797/documentation/DotSDK/Modules.html

• Assistance with Setting Default Values for Zoho Chat Custom Fields

  I am currently using the Zoho Chat JavaScript API to successfully add custom fields to the chat interface. While the implementation of these fields has been smooth, I am now looking to set default values for these custom fields. However, I couldn't find

• Subform Client Script

  Good day,  I have a subform where users can subscribe to various magazines. I would like to prevent the user from selecting the same magazine twice when adding a new row. Is there a way to prevent the user from doing this? (Can it be done via a client

• Serious question: Are there actually "solo-preneurs"/small business owners who made Zoho-one work well for them?

  L.S. After already many years of continued struggle with Zoho-One, I am seriously wondering if there are actually solo-preneurs (one person small business owners - without a large, dedicated IT dept.) who got it (Zoho-One) to work well for their businesses.

• Calendar Bookings in Recruit

  Hi there, We have recently started using Zoho recruit and although it has some great functionality there are a few gaps that are causing real headaches. One of those being how interviews are scheduled. The majority of our hiring managers are field based

• Getting Error : Developer Tool Detected

  Hi Team, Getting the error during open the portal, error attached on the same ticket. Please check and help us to resolve the same.

• Send Zoho Creator Template by Email or sendemail

  Hello All Question:- How we can send the Zoho creator email template using the send email by the workflow or using the Function? by the Workflow sendmail [ from: zoho.adminuserid to: "zohodeveloper@yopmail.com" subject: "Test Template" message: "Test

• Upgraded to Zoho One but Zoho Meeting still says Free Plan

  I signed-up for the Zoho One plan. When exploring the applications included, I came across a problem with Zoho Meeting. It says it's the free plan. I emailed support but they sent me a link that doesn't work and, when I found the article on my own, it

• 新年のご挨拶、直近のイベントスケジュール

  🎍🐍謹賀新年🎍🐍 ユーザーの皆さま、明けましておめでとうございます！ コミュニティチームの中野です。 本年もよろしくお願い致します。 昨年のZoho Japanコミュニティでは、東京・大阪・名古屋・福岡 4都市でのユーザー交流会開催や、自社最大イベント「Zoholics Japan 2024」でZoho Championの皆さまとのパネルディスカッション、10月の東京ユーザー交流会では本社CRMプロダクトマネージャーを招きロードマップ解説セッションの実施、さらにZohoアンバサダープログラムのローンチ（近日公開予定）など、新たな取り組みに挑戦しました。

• Request to Customize Module Bar Placement in New Zoho CRM UI

  Hello Support and Zoho Community, I've been exploring the new UI of Zoho CRM "For Everyone" and have noticed a potential concern for my users. We are accustomed to having the module names displayed across the top, which made navigation more intuitive

• Client script: Can not choose a date field for an onChange field event

  Hi Zoho Team Why can't I choose one of my date fields to trigger an onChange event? Is this a client script limitation, or something wrong with my instance? If it is a limitation, is this mentioned in the documentation anywhere? Thanks. Marcus

• Upgrade User

  Hi Sir/Madame, I have 7 users in my organisation but I need upgrade more space only 2 users. Is it possibe? Thanks

• Dashboard Auto-refresh

  Why is there no Auto-refresh on the Dashboard? People have been asking for the last 6 years for this function from what I can see in my reasearch, it seems like a very simple intergration for Zoho to achieve. on Sept. 2, 2014, this was added: Support

• Console error with widget in View mode, not present in Edit Mode with ZOHO.CRM.API.updateRecord(config)

  hello i have that function to update an account records (from a widgets created with sigma) function handleCopyButtonCRMClick() { console.log('handleCopyButtonCRMClick'); /* * Fetch Information of Record passed in PageLoad * and insert the response into

• add meeting link

  i want to add A meeting link in the mail when the user book the appointment then with the conformation mail i want to add meeting link there

• Zoho One - White Label

  Releasing a white-label feature for Zoho One, or any software or service, can offer several advantages and benefits for both the company providing the software (Zoho in this case) and its users. Here are some key reasons for releasing a white-label feature

• Missing parameters in request, any way i can figure out what parameters i need to add?

  const url = "https://people.zoho.com/people/api/forms/json/P_Task/insertRecord"; const inputData = { "Status": "Open", "Description": "Task to set up and configure Zoho Mail on desktop application.", "CreatedTime": "01-Jan-2025 10:30 AM", "Due_Date":

• Running Total % in Pivot with filters

  Hi there, I have seen a few posts on this topic, but i cant seem to find one that will work when applyig filters to the data. I have Rows and Data in a pivot view I want to show the running total of revenue as a % of the total for the data set. If i add

• Included in Zoho One?

  Will LandingPage eventually be included in Zoho One?

• Add an "Impersonate" feature to Zoho Projects

  It would be nice to have an "impersonate" feature added to Zoho Projects that would allow administrators to impersonate employees to enable administrators to see for themselves what employees can and cannot see in the system. I am aware of all of the

• Select CRM Custom Module in Zoho Creator

  I have a custom module added in Zoho CRM that I would like to link in Zoho creator.  When I add the Zoho CRM field it does not show the new module.  Is this possible?  Do i need to change something in CRM to make it accesible in Creator?

• GROUPING OF CUSTOMER

  SIR PLEASE ADD GROUPING OF CUSTOMER IN ZOHO BOOKS

• Zoho LandingPage is integrated with Zoho One!

  Greetings to the Zoho One users out there! We're delighted to let you know that Zoho LandingPage is available in Zoho One too! With Zoho LandingPage, you can host custom-made landing pages, and persuade the visitors to dive deeper by making further clicks,

• 2024 Wrap: Rediscover these features and enhancements in Zoho CRM

  Hello everyone! I wish all of you a joyful and prosperous 2025! As we welcome 2025, I’m excited to share a recap of the year 2024 and highlight some of the coolest new features and enhancements we’ve added to the Zoho CRM platform. Last year, we announced

• A quicker way to provide accountants access to Zoho Books, similar to Xero and Quickbooks

  Hey guys, I'm finding the procedure to give access to an external accountant to Zoho Books less than ideal. Having to create an account by Zoho instead of myself, and then wait for it to be given a license to then pass to the accountant seems a bit time

• This user is not allowed to add in Zoho. Please contact support-as@zohocorp.com for further details

  Hello, Just signed up to ZOHO on a friend's recommendation. Got the TXT part (verified my domain), but whenever I try to add ANY user, I get the error: This user is not allowed to add in Zoho. Please contact support-as@zohocorp.com for further details I have emailed as well and writing here as well because when I searched, I saw many people faced the same issue and instead of email, they got a faster response here. My domain is: raisingreaderspk . com Hope this can be resolved.  Thank you

• Update Candidate Status Through Workflow in Blueprint

  Hi Team,  We have a blueprint built out with custom functions that update particular fields based on candidate actions. When particular fields are updated we need to move the candidate forward in the blueprint. We tried to do this through a workflow,

• Zoho Canned respond do have a huge lag issue.

  Previously the Zoho canned respond works perfectly ... on once server update and all the Canned respond enconter huge lag... in the end cause most of the canned respond just shown code with /xxx and not the sentence....

• ShipStation and Zoho Inventory

  Hello, I am looking to sync zoho inventory with shipstation ZOHO INVENTORY           SHIP STATION Sales Order  ==>  create ORDERS INVOICE  <==    Shipments What exactly does BETA mean on the Shipstation connector?  This is required for me to sign-on in the next month. Thanks in advance for your efforts

• Saving slide elements

  I have created grouped items including text and animation that I want to use in later slides. (Like an animated logo) Is there a way to save these grouped elements in my library?

• Are downloadable product available in Zoho Commerce

  Hi all. We're considering switching to Zoho Commerce for our shop, but we sell software and remote services. Is there a features for downloadable products? I can't find any information about this. Thank you very much Alice

• Function #10: Update item prices automatically based on the last transaction created

  In businesses, item prices are not always fixed and can fluctuate due to various factors. If you find yourself manually adjusting the item rates every time they change, we have the ideal time-saving solution for you. In today's post, we bring you custom

• Move site from WIX to ZOHO Sites

  I have a simple website on WIX.  I am wondering if someone is available to help me move this website - https://www.videothreezero.com/ to ZOHO.  Michael  Boston

• zoho calendar week view - "super compact by default"

  every time i go to my calendar i have to re-engage the "super-compact view" for the week view...is there a way to make "super-compact" a default view so I dont have to keep on setting it manually?

• Change work hours per day for employees

  Hello, Is there a way to modify the work hours per day for employees in Zoho projects? This would be helpful for resource allocation to more accurately see when an employee who works 35 hours a week vs 40 hours has a full schedule. Thanks.

• Zoho CRM Automation Help: Send Email When Fault is Marked as Done & Module Relationships

  Hi everyone, I have the following User-Created Modules in Zoho CRM: Clients Assets Faults Handymen Every client can have multiple assets. Every asset can have multiple faults. Every fault is assigned to one handyman. What I Want to Achieve: ✅ I want to

• Adding New Domain to Zoho mail

  Hi, I have one Zoho account already called for example "Awesome Animals". Under this account I have one domain already setup with zoho mail, example: - awesomecats.com I have another website as well which I want to add under this "Awesome Animals" account,

• I cannot receive emails.

  I need help, I've tried everything but I still can't receive emails from other people. I can send it but I can't receive emails, When I created the email it was all in order and suddenly I can't get emails from anyone anymore.

• Incoming Gmail Email Not Coming Into Zoho

  My outbound email from Zoho is working, but when people respond to the email, it's not coming back into Zoho. I can see it when I'm in Gmail, but it's not in Zoho.

• Não foi possível enviar a mensagem;Razão:554 5.1.8 Email Outgoing Blocked.

  Preciso de ajuda não consigo enviar emails,conta recen criada

• Next Page