Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

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. 

    • 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

    • Gravity Forms plugin not passing some fields

      I use the gravity form zoho plugin to push data from my lead form into my lead page in Zoho CRM. Everything was working file for about 6 months. Suddenly on Oct 1st, some of the fields are no longer getting passed to Zoho. The fields with the problem

    • Can't delete bank transactions (i changed from 14 days trail to free just now)

      Hi, I manually added one bank transaction When i try to delete it, it say below: What should I do?

    • Feature Request: Search in the PC client. Some thoughts about the search.

      Hi all. I'm really excited to start using Zoho Notebook, but I'm missing some of the search capabilities on my desktop. There are also some thoughts on improving search in general. Search is very important to me, without it it is difficult for me to use

    • Leave Policy for Brazil

      Hi, Brazil asked us to configure Zoho People to apply the following policy: · To block starting vacations 2 business days before holidays or weekends; Employees cannot start their vacations 2 days before holidays or weekends. Example: If December 25th

    • Adding date field to each individual Items when creating Invoices?

      When adding items into an invoice I need to be able to have a date for each item. Example below: Date Item Description Qty Rate Discount(%) Tax Amount 31/07/13 Brown Sugar Performance 1.00 3,000.00 0.00 10% $3300 Is this possible or will it be in the

    • Auto-Create OneDrive Folder Structure Upon Lead Creation

      Hello, New to Zoho and looking for help on a critical process automation I'm looking to implement. My company currently utilizes OneDrive for file management and the folder structure is Proposals -> Client Name -> Address (where I need to initially create

    • Profile Page View Customization

      I need to change the fields, sections from the profile view of an emplyoyee.

    • What do the Image Sizes mean in Zoho CRM Email Templates?

      Below you can see the image options in email templates: Banner, Fit, Small, Medium, Original, Custom. Can someone from Zoho please share with me: What each is/means? How each will look on desktop AND mobile? How to edit "custom"?  If I choose "Custom"

    • Translate any published presentation to the language of your choice

      As part of our constant effort to enrich your presentation experience, Zoho Show has rolled out a new feature for translating published presentations. Consider the following scenario: Zylker IT services, a multinational corporation, has announced product

    • Blueprint: multi-select lookup field not available in the criteria option

      I read this old forum post which stated that multi-select lookup fields are now selectable as an option in a Blueprint transition configuration: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/blueprint-multi-select-lookup-field-not-available-within-blueprint-transition

    • Apply Credit Note Automatically

      We need the ability to apply open Credit Notes toward invoices generated by recurring invoice as the first, priority payment. This should be an option that we can enable/disable in the recurring profile and/or the Credit Note. Other invoicing systems can do this. I'm not sure why Zoho Invoice doesn't have it. Here's an example for a Recurring Invoice... If a customer has open Credit Notes, and a saved credit card set for auto-pay, once an invoice goes out, the credit balance gets automatically applied

    • Workflow for "Expenses" module?

      Hi there, over the last 2 years, Zoho Expense has seen tremendous growth and we are happy with it. But, sometimes it is frustrating to see things are being implemented halfheartedly, or so it seems. For example, There is the possibility to create workflows

    • Record Template - Conditionally printing sections

      Is there a way to conditionally print a section of a Record Template? More specifically I am printing records from a Form "Invoice". That Form has 3 SubForms. I'd like to print the content of those SubForms using a Record Template but only if they have at least one line item. If they have no line items, I'd like to hide the headers for that section on the printout.

    • User can choose the PDF report

      Hi. I would like to find out if a user (Creator or customer portal) to choose from the different PDF customised reports that have been built?

    • Query table pull last 12 months

      I am tying to pull the following criteria and the date is always what causes me the issue. I want to pull people (pco_id) who have entries of "event_id" being these 2 events and whos "kind" is Regular or Guest and where the event_starts_at (date column)

    • PLEASE FIX Search options and consider a Global seach option

      A recent update has removed the ability to search for addresses and phone numbers under contacts. We cannot find where this moved to (If it is still available). Please put these options back as we cannot locate specific projects anymore. Also please consider allowing for a Global search. This would really improve the search engine. For example: If I search for "Sally Jones" then all invoices , estimates, vendors etc.. would populate.. Please let me know if you need any more information. Thank You....

    • Customize your calendar based on personal preferences

      Greetings, We're happy to introduce a few new capabilities to the Activities module's Calendar View! Now you can tailor your calendar's appearance and notification settings to suit your needs. In the past, the Calendar View lacked customization options

    • BUG ALERT: Client Script + Commands -> $Page contextual data is not updated

      When using the new Client Script Commands feature, there is an issue with the Client Script $Page contextual data not accurately being updated each time a Command is run. Assuming a Client Script Command called "Client Script Command Bug" with the following

    • Show iFrame of related List inside of Blueprint Transition

      Hey, is it possible to show an iFrame of a related list like this inside of a Blueprint transition?

    • Lookup Fields not Converting

      I manage holiday properties. I have a lookup to the Accounts (Properties) in the Leads module. The lookup is connected to the property address field. When I convert it the lookup field does not update in Deals, although the property address does. There

    • 2024: A Year of Transformation with Zoho Forms

      As we close the curtain on another exciting year, it’s time to reflect on the strides Zoho Forms has taken in 2024. From empowering businesses with advanced tools to simplifying workflows and enhancing user experiences, our updates this year were all

    • Stop selling out of stock Items.

      Hi I have been using Zohobooks for a around 8 month now. I am not involved in selling process but my staff cant stop selling product which they do not hold in stock, this is a big headache for me as physical count never matches what is shown on the books. 

    • Bigin API Token Request ("invalid_client")

      Hi people, I tried to connect to the API without success, I've read all of the documentation multiple time and tried just about everything. I tried to do it with Python Request module and with Postman, passing the information through both the URL parameter

    • Customer Happiness not clickable when using API

      Is there a way to automatically add the Customer Feedback links when generating email drafts via the API? Currently, the feedback links are only added when generating an email draft using the UI. I tried using the endpoint described in https://desk.zoho.com/DeskAPIDocument#CustomerFeedback#CustomerFeedback_Getthecustomerfeedbackplaceholderlink

    • Send To Zoho Sign not Showing

      The button send to Zoho sign is not showing on my Zoho CRM . Is there additional steps I need to take after installing Zoho Sign to CRM ?

    • How to Get An Image's URL once it's uploaded to library?

      I manage to find URLs to the images I uploaded to my library, but after a day, it seems the links stop working like its only temporary. Where can I find the ACTUAL solid URL for my images that I upload to my Library so I can use them for my custom template / HTML coded template? Thanks, Mac

    • 【Zoho CRM】インポート機能のアップデート：既存データへのタグ追加が可能に！

      ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの藤澤です。 今回は「Zoho CRM アップデート情報」の中のインポート機能のアップデートをご紹介します。 Zoho CRMのタグは、データを効率的に分類、認識するためのラベルです。 タグ付けは次の3つの方法で行えます： 個別タグ付け：少数のデータを手動でタグ付け 自動化：特定のタイミングで繰り返しタグ付け 一括更新：インポート機能でタグを追加または更新 今回のアップデートでは、インポート時に既存のタグを残したまま、新しいタグの追加、既存タグを置き換えできるようになりました。

    • Bluerprints: How to connect the created record back?

      I've a blueprint which creates another record as part of an 'After' transition. But the two records don't seem to be linked together. If it's not automatic - how do I get the created record ID to link it to the original record? Thanks!

    • Populate a Related List Item based on a Stage

      I would like to know if I can populate a CLOSED DEAL section in a contact that populates only when a Deal (something in the Deal Module) is listed as Closed - Won. I'd like another section that is just called deals, which shows me all other deals that

    • Being able to draw inside a module ?

      I was wondering if anyone know of a solution for this request. We would like to be able to draw directly from one module in the CRM and have it attached to that record. Here is an example. Paul would go to the customer once he as done the measuring, he

    • 2 serial numbers for 1 item (Mac address and Serial number)

      There is a way to track 2 serial number type for 1 Item. Ex: Some electronic devices have a MAC address and a serial number. I need to track those 2 numbers

    • Holidays

      Hi; For defining Holidays, you need to add logic to handle the year as well as the month & day. We need to be able to enter Holidays for the next year. I need to add a holiday for January 2, 2017, but I can't until January 1st, which is a Sunday and we

    • Delete a department or category

      How do I delete a Department?  Also, how do I delete a Category? This is pretty basic stuff here and it's impossible to find.

    • Remove or hide default views

      I'm looking to only have the views pertinent to my organization.  Is there a way to show only my custom views (or separate them to a different area or something)? If not, this should be a feature as switching from Zendesk we had this option...

    • Analytics Module: Can you move items from one dashboard to another?

      Is there a way to move items from one dashboard to another? I want to rearrange my dashboard now that I know what i'm doing but i don't want to remake my various widgets? Edit: Hey Zoho, This would be a good feature: to be able to move/copy widgets to

    • Copy Widget to another Dashboard

      I can see the option to clone a widget to the same dashboard but is it possible to copy it to another dashboard?

    • Is there a way to print the dashboard?

      I would like the capability of printing the dashboard - is that possible?

    • Custom Deal Name in Lead Conversion Mapping

      I know there are ways to change the name of a Deal after conversion using a custom function, so no need to repost that information. I would like to see the CRM Improved with Deal Name Customisation and I think the Lead Conversion Mapping page would be

    • Introducing Record Summary: smarter insights at your fingertips

      Hello everyone, Building on the recent launch of Zoho's in-house Zia Large Language Model (Zia LLM)—a major milestone in Zoho CRM’s AI capabilities—we’re excited to introduce the Record Summary feature. This powerful addition makes use of Zia LLM to simplify

    • Suppress "spreadsheet will not be saved" message on published sheet

      I have published a sheet and have one column on that sheet that the user can edit (a dropdown picklist where the user can select the status for each line). Is there a way to suppress the Zoho Sheet message "Any changes made to this published spreadsheet

    • Next Page