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What is the Inbound Marketing Methodology?

By looking at the illustrations you can see that the methodology is a series of silos or sections that each represent a segment of the buyer's journey as they progress along from a stranger ultimately to a promoter of your business. Wikipedia says the key is the promotion by a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, eNewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing and other forms of content marketing.

It really is all of these things and more that is then refined into a strategic, well-planned game plan to get that content out onto the internet and social media and be found by specific buyer personas that are seeking information at one of many stages of the buyer's journey.

The information displayed was initially created and largely distributed by the pioneer of the inbound marketing methodology, software innovator and creator HubSpot. HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software that allows marketers to have one truly integrated system and one dashboard for tracking all marketing campaigns. HubSpot is the 2nd fastest growing software company in the INC 500 for good reason. We have found it to be an enterprise-capable marketing platform that is designed with the growth-oriented small to mid-market company in mind.

When looking at the graphics you may interpret them as follows:

Within the methodology are four key segments. Attract, Convert, Close and Delight are the things required of a successful inbound marketing plan in order to obtain visitors, leads, customers and promoters. You will also see that in each of these four key segments are various tasks and actions that must be taken to have your inbound strategy work and provide new business. You should also note that some of the actions and tools in each section are not necessarily unique to that section only. Things like emailing, blogging and SEO can apply to more than a single segment.

Awareness Stage

awareness

Prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. Is doing educational research to more clearly understand, frame and give a name to their problem.

Consideration Stage

consideration

Prospect has now clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity. Is committed to researching and understanding all of the available approaches and/or methods to solving the defined problem or opportunity.

Decision Stage

decision

Prospect has now decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. Is compiling a long list of all available vendors and products in their given solution strategy. Is researching to whittle the long list down to a short list and ultimately make a final purchase decision.

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Some of the major themes of the Inbound Marketing Methodology:
  • Content Creation & Delivery – Create precise content that answers buyer persona pain points, concerns and needs, then take that content to every delivery point available.
  • Lifecycle Stages – Modern day consumers are generally strangers to start with. They are seeking out helpful and useful information. It takes skill, precision and thoughtful marketing to move these individuals through the stages of strangers to ultimate brand promoters.
  • Persona Based Content – Create your content based on the pain points and questions of the consumers who are looking and reading it. As you learn more about your visitors and conversions over time, you can precisely develop personalized messages to their pain points and questions.
  • Live Where They Live – Inbound marketing goes where the buyer personas live. Whether that's search engines, social media channels, live webinars, podcasts or videos, if you live where they live they will seek you out.
  • Infrastructure – Creating content, distributing that content, analyzing and reviewing your strategies should all come together in a powerful lead generating machine. This makes sure that you can determine what your content is, who should be viewing it and getting it to the right place at the right time.

Inbound Marketing & Content Marketing – The New Frontier

The Inbound Marketing Methodology takes a series of steps and breaks them down into actionable silos. The basis of the methodology is to cover all of the steps used by a buyer as they travel the journey from stranger to delighted customer. It gives the power, tools and process to marketers to enable their client's success. By breaking it all down into the four steps of Attract, Convert, Close and Delight, and then mapping out everything necessary to promote the evolving lifecycle stages of today's consumer, inbound marketing drives results. By following the steps, tasks and best practices, you will deliver precisely targeted content in the right context for your buyer personas. It's like Novocaine; it may take a while but it always works.

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