Inbound Marketing is a highly common strategy used by hi-tech companies to generate leads, and includes all the tools and tactics needed for marketing throughout the customer journey – from raising awareness to conversion. As many hi-tech companies sell to international markets, the need for a lead generation and conversion system that does not resort to telemarketing or cold calling, but rather relies of a preset digital process designed to further users and generate organic leads, is of the essence.
Inbound Marketing is a marketing field born of the world of digital marketing and new media, and based on the creation of valuable content, from the customer’s point-of-view. Instead of “pushing” messages onto the customer, marketers try and “pull” customers towards a website using high-quality content.
You can say that Inbound activities are akin to SEO activities on steroids, as they include a wide variety of techniques necessary for successful SEO, in addition to ABM (account based marketing) marketing automation and customer identification tools.
So, what do Inbound activities actually include?
The creation of content (and lots of it) – The anchor of Inbound activity is the creation and distribution of content. The content can take the shape of a variety of formats –
- Articles
- Whitepapers
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Case studies
The content is adapted to the various stages of the sales funnel – from getting to know a new product and field, to acquiring professional knowledge of platforms or services. Of course, every company must match the types of content they produce to their target audiences and financial capabilities (The more interactive the content is, the more expensive it will be).
Promotion – The second step in Inbound Marketing is distributing the content on as many channels as possible.
We distinguish between two types of media used for broadcasting content:
Owned media – A wide variety of channels that belong to the brand and can contain content:
- Website
- Blog
- Email/automation
- Social channels
- YouTube
- Website recommendation engine
- Google and Facebook advertising platforms
- PRs
- Content platforms – Taboola, Outbrain, etc.
- Paid content on relevant websites
The main advantage of these channels is the speed in which you can expose new audiences to your content.
Identification – The third stage of activity. What separate Inbound from SEO and organic promotion is its ability to help brands identify customers and monitor leads as they journey towards becoming paying customers. Identification takes place via customer data platforms (CDPs or DMPs) that enable brands to monitor unidentified users and later match them with their email addresses.
Inbound is considered a complex and even expensive strategy, but compensation in the form of organic and high-quality traffic and an infrastructure that is extremely hard for competitors to copy, provides brands with added value they cannot ignore.
