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

• Critical Issue: Tickets Opened for Zoho Support via the Zoho Help Portal Were Not Processed

  Hi everyone, We want to bring to your attention a serious issue we’ve experienced with the Zoho support Help Portal. For more than a week, tickets submitted directly via the Help Portal were not being handled at all. At the same time no alert was posted

• Tip of the Week #72– Assign thread ownership to avoid confusion.

  When teams handle a large volume of emails, managing threads becomes important to stay organized. Without a clear system, duplicate replies, missed follow-ups, or confusion over responsibilities can happen. Thread assignment solves this by designating

• Unarchive tickets

  How can I manually unarchive tickets?

• Optimize your Knowledge Base for enhanced accessibility by adding alt tags for images

  Let's learn why alt tags are crucial for your articles. You can add alternative tags (alt tags) and alternative text (alt text) to the images you share on your community forums or when embedding them in articles. Alt tags refer to the HTML attribute,

• FSM trying again

  have not linked FSM yet to the rest of out Zoho suit. It certainly looks like the apointment and service part is more manageable for our staff. The question is that our engineers multi task examples 1. deliver products to customers not fitted 2. Service

• Feature Request: Conditional Field Mandatoriness Based on Display Status

  Hello Zoho Creator Team, I would like to suggest an enhancement to improve the flexibility of form validations. Currently, when we need a field to be mandatory only if it's displayed on the form, the only option is to: Set the field as not mandatory in

• Data Migration Strategies for Moving to a Cloud Solution

  Hi everyone, I’ve been working on moving some of our critical systems, including CRM and project data, to a Zoho cloud solution, and one of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is data migration. Transferring large volumes of data while keeping it

• Commerce Order as Invoice instead of Sales Order?

  I need a purchase made on my Commerce Site to result in an Invoice for services instead of a Sales Order that will be pushed to Books. My customers don't pay until I after I add some details to their transaction. Can I change the settings to make this

• How to set different item selling prices for Zoho Commerce and Zoho Books

  Item selling prices for Zoho Commerce and Zoho Books are in sync. If we update the Item selling price in Books, the same will happen in commerce and vice versa. I need a separate commerce selling price for online users and a separate books selling price

• Time Entry Notifications

  Hi All - I have support staff who place notes of their work in the time entry section of Zoho Desk. Is there a specific workflow or setting I need to enable to have the ticket holder updated via email when an entry is saved?

• How to report 'Response violation' OR 'Resolution violation'

  Hi, I want to report on SLA Violation Type. I grouped my tickets on this column. It seems I only get 'Response and Resolution Violation' or 'Not Violated'. The former seems to be given to a ticket if only the Response Time was violated. I would expect

• [Webinar] Automate sales and presales workflows with Writer

  Sales involves sharing a wide range of documents with customers across the presales, sales, and post-sales stages: NDAs, quotes, invoices, sales orders, and delivery paperwork. Generating and managing these documents manually slows down the overall sales

• Power of Automation :: Quick way to associate your Projects with Zoho CRM

  A custom function is a software code that can be used to automate a process and this allows you to automate a notification, call a webhook, or perform logic immediately after a workflow rule is triggered. This feature helps to automate complex tasks and

• Date triggering Workflow rule

  I have a function triggered by a workflow rule. The function takes a date and creates a task for that date and fills in a field with the name of the day for that date. It also updates the status field of the record. The workflow rule is set to run whenever

• Restricting contact creation

  Hi all! I am looking to use Zoho Desk in a part of the business that takes end user enquiries. These are generally single interactions, and not linked to an account name. As Desk is Account centric, has anyone designed a way to manage these incoming emails

• Import Holiday Calendars

  HI Zoho Is there anyway of importing an online calendar like https://www.calendarlabs.com into the business hours calendars, to speed up setup of holiday calendars. Also could we also request a feature where you can specify a Holiday as hours, i.e it could be that the company is on a 1/2 day due to a holiday or when it is Eid in the UAE and they are only allowed to work restricted hours so we need the calendar to be flexible to allow for this. Regards Jamie

• Filtering Tickets based on Email headers

  We're starting to get a lot more junk coming into our Zoho Desk, which is then triggering unnecessary email alerts to agents. Once thing we could do to cut this junk in half, is to filter tickets based on email headers. Any email containing the `List-Unsubscribe`

• Error 550 5.4.1

  I’ve tried sending an email to someone but keep receiving this back. Any help would be greatly appreciated 

• Billing Management: #2 Fair way of Billing- Prorated Billing

  Hello, From speaking about the traditional ways of billing in the previous post, we are moving into the deep sea of billing. We are now in a zone to break out the most complex yet, I would call it the fairest way of billing, the Prorated Billing. Prorated

• Automatic Matching from Bank Statements / Feeds

  Is it possible to have transactions from a feed or bank statement automatically match when certain criteria are met? My use case, which is pretty broadly applicable, is e-commerce transactions for merchant services accounts (clearing accounts). In these

• Has Anyone successfully integrated Zoho and Sage Intact?

  Hey all, We’re evaluating Zoho One + Sage Intacct and I’m trying to connect with anyone who has actually implemented the two together.Specifically, I’d love to know: -- Which functions you kept in Zoho vs. Intacct (e.g., Product Catalog, AR/AP, invoicing,

• How can I filter a field integration?

  Hi,  I have a field integration from CRM "Products" in a form, and I have three product Categories in CRM. I only need to see Products of a category. Thanks for you answers.

• Adding image in HTML report page

  Hi, I want to know two things: 1. Can anyone advise how to add an image in HTML report. The tagged used is <img> but what path do I mention for the image to be added in the HTML report. 2. Also, I want to know if I am creating an application for the market

• How to change view of HTML report based on device but always print in A4

  Hello everyone, I am aware that HTML report view can be configured to adjust according to the screen size like Laptop, Tablet and mobile using media queries. But my concern is no matter on which device the reports is opened when printed should always

• Age Calculation

  I've attempted to calculate the age of someone based on their birthday input by using the formula field. It works but I don't want all those decimals on there. I then tried to use "set variable" after birthday input but I get a field type mismatch, long vs. floating. Any ideas would be wonderful.

• Search on Custom Field

  We're working on an integration with the Zoho FSM API and are trying to retrieve companies based on a custom field we added to the Companies module. However, we can't find a way to filter or query records using custom fields through the API. We have a

• Sendmail function / custom action?

  I've setup a function hoping to email various business departments the details of a record once all work in that record is complete so gone about setting up a custom action in such way that each record line on the report has a button to click. Question is how do I actually include data from that record in the email that is sent when the button is clicked? I had thought that since this were being sent per record the email would include the data which had been entered

• API to post drafts for social media

  I we want to post draft posts to our zoho social account and then approve and schedule them within Zoho social. is this possible with for example: https://apis.zoho.com/social/v2/post TIA Jon

• Canvas View in Zoho Recruit

  Is it possible or would it be possible to have the new 'Canvas View' in Zoho Recruit?

• What impactful sales coaching techniques have you used to boost your team's performance?

  I'm curious about the real-world impact of sales coaching on team performance. What specific techniques or strategies have you found most effective in driving consistent improvement and growth in your sales team? Any success stories or lessons learned

• Adding Taxes to paid consultations in Zoho Bookings

  I created a 'paid' consultation under Zoho Booking and integrated it with payment gateways for online/instant payment before a booking is done. How can I add 'taxes' to the price of consultation? I can add taxes to other Zoho apps (liks Books, Checkout,

• Zoho Finance Suite - Customer Custom Tabs - Dynamic Link

  Hi Finance Suite team, When creating a Custom Tab for a Client Portal, there is no option to add dynamic parameters. This would be very helpful for adding Zoho Analytics dashboards which can be dynamically filtered through the URL to only show information

• Feature Request - Insert URL Links in Folders

  I would love to see the ability to create simple URL links with titles in WorkDrive. or perhaps a WorkDrive extension to allow it. Example use case: A team is working on a project and there is project folder in WordDrive. The team uses LucidChart to create

• Bug in allowing the user to buy out of stock items

  Hi i want to allow the user to buy out of stock items, according to the commerce documentation if i disable Restrict "Out of stock" purchases it will, but it doesnt work, so i want to know if it had any relation with zoho inventory, and if theres any

• Bug in allowing the user to buy out of stock items

  Hi i want to allow the user to buy out of stock items, according to the commerce documentation if i disable Restrict "Out of stock" purchases it will, but it doesnt work, so i want to know if it had any relation with zoho inventory, and if theres any

• How to Calculate MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve)

  We want to calculate MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve) in our Zoho Analytics report under Tickets. Currently, we are using the following fields: Ticket ID Ticket Created Time Ticket Closed Time Ticket On Hold Time We are planning to calculate MTTR (in days)

• Possible to bold or indent text in the description field?

  As part of one item, I often have a detailed description that would be much easier to read if there was the ability to have a bulleted list or bold text and the like. Is this possible? My last invoicing software allowed markup in the field so, for example, an asterisk meant a bullet. I haven't been able to find any documentation related to this.  Any information would be appreciated. Thank you.

• How can I setup Zoho MCP with Chat GPT

  I can set up custom connections with Chat GPT but I cat an error when I try to set it up. The error is: "This MCP server can't be used by ChatGPT to search information because it doesn't implement our specification: search action not found" Thoughts?

• Formatting of Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss Reports

  The default format of the Balance Sheet and P&L Reports are based on the Account Types and then the individual accounts within the Chart of Accounts. These are then ordered alphabetically under these sub-headings and one is unable to re-order these or

• UK MTD reports concerning turnover and cerash accounting

  Hi I am a sole trader, and I have just started with Zoho Books in order to comply with the new HMRC requirements. I use 'cash basis' - which I understand to mean that income is when the cash comes in (not the invoice date) and expenses are when they are

• Next Page