How to Get Started with Inbound Marketing

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing refers to strategies that marketers use to attract consumers to a business and keep them returning. Inbound marketing is centered around creating valuable experiences and interactions that build lasting relationships with customers. You can use many inbound strategies to get started, including social media, blogging, and signing up customers directly through your website.

Hubspot's 2023 State of Marketing Report suggests that marketing budgets may shift, across industries, in 2023. This may mean marketers and marketing departments spend less on paid ads (in print and on social media), in-person events, and email marketing, while continuing to invest in the most effective channels: virtual events, SEO, long-form video, and organic social [1].

To draw customers in, you must create experiences that support customers' goals and empower them to take action. Creating helpful content positions you as an expert, building trust, and allows consumers to experience what you offer before becoming customers.

Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing

In researching inbound marketing, you may come across the term outbound marketing. There are some key differences you'll need to know:

Read more: Marketing vs. Sales: What's the Difference?

The stages of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing generally takes place over four stages. You'll use different methods and strategies to achieve results at each stage.

1. Attract 

The first stage is to attract customers by providing content that solves their immediate problems, empowers them, and compels them to learn more. This stage focuses on understanding your target audience, their needs, goals, and pain points, so that you can attract the people who are most likely to buy your products or services.

Read more: Market Analysis: What It Is and How to Conduct One

2. Convert

Once you attract your ideal consumer, you need to turn them into customers. In the converting stage, you continue to provide value until consumers purchase your product or service. This could be capturing their information so you can add them to an email list or getting them to click on your landing page or social media profile. To encourage consumers to subscribe, you can offer:

• A lead magnet, such as a free ebook, video, consultation, or other valuable resource

• A link to a survey that consumers can complete to offer their feedback

• A link to a quiz that consumers can take to learn more about themselves or your brand

Read more: What Is Content Strategy? + How to Create Yours

3. Close 

Now that you have a way to contact your potential customers, you can take steps to close a sale. Closing tactics may involve communicating with customers directly, such as by conducting sales calls, sending personal emails, or tailoring product recommendations to individual customers. In addition, you can take the opportunity, during the closing phase, to address customers' remaining concerns or objections, so that they can make an informed purchasing decision. At this point, if they align with what you offer, they should be ready to buy from you. 

4. Delight

Once you close a sale and convert someone to a customer, your inbound marketing efforts should still continue. The purpose of this fourth stage is to leverage the trust you've built with customers and gain their loyalty. You can delight customers by continuing to engage with them, adding value, creating community, and providing them with more solutions to problems. Over time, satisfied customers may become enthusiastic promotors of your brand by sharing their positive experiences with others.

What are the benefits of inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is becoming a more popular option since outbound marketing can be intrusive to customers. Pop-ups, constant emails, and cold calls can turn potential customers away. Inbound marketing tactics have many benefits that trump outbound marketing, although outbound marketing sometimes has its place. 

1. Increase visibility.

Inbound marketing focuses on content creation that naturally attracts people to your brand and products. The content you create should appear on several channels. Your visibility increases as people engage with your content. 

Read more: What Is Brand Equity (+ How to Build It)

2. Get more qualified leads.

Creating engaging content is essential, but as we’ve seen from the stages of inbound marketing, converting interested consumers into qualified leads is the next step. This happens through building relationships and demonstrating knowledge in your field to solve your audience's problem. 

Focus on the consumers you want to convert to customers with a targeted approach that solves their problems. This means you’re more likely to attract people interested in your offer. 

Read more: What Is Lead Generation? And How to Get Started

3. Bridge marketing and sales.

Inbound marketing can help you bridge sales and marketing efforts effectively. When you deliver your brand's message in different ways along different points in the customer's journey, customers may begin to trust your brand. Gaining customers' trust can help you close more sales, without appearing pushy.

Read more: What Is Sales Enablement? Definition, Jobs, and Strategy

4. Reduce costs.

Big advertisements or ad campaigns for the mass market can be expensive. Inbound marketing means you can niche and target specific customers, build trust through compelling content, and have them come to you. While costs are still involved, inbound marketing may allow you to spread out your efforts rather than spending on mass marketing. 

Hubspot's 2023 State of Marketing report tells us that marketers are getting the highest return from the following inbound marketing efforts like short-form video, search engine optimization (SEO), and content creation [1].

Strategies to get started

Understanding the four stages of inbound marketing (attract, convert, close, and delight) is vital in identifying effective strategies. Here, we explore strategies that can help you build lasting relationships with customers and add value to their lives. 

Create a social media presence.

Using social media is part of stage one, attract. Social media platforms can be a great outlets for creating content that your target audience likes, engages with, and shares with their contacts. Your social media content has the potential to go viral, getting you more organic traffic. Social media content can encourage people to preview your product, visit your website, and sign up for your blog or newsletter. 

To increase your reach at this stage, consider launching paid ad campaigns on social media or working with influencers in your niche to engage their followers. 

Read more: What Is a Niche Market? And How to Reach One

Create content.

Content in all forms is essential to inbound marketing. To attract customers, you need relevant content, such as social media posts, YouTube videos, blog articles, guest posts on other people’s websites, ebooks, and newsletters. 

Specific examples of content might include:

• Checklists customers can use to complete a process, like creating a budget

• Success stories about individual customers and the experience they have with your products

• Tutorials that teach customers how to do something related to your offers

• Product comparisons that show how your products stack up against those of your competitors

• Interviews with subject-matter experts in your industry

Whatever content strategy you choose—ideally one that combines different types of content—it needs to engage your audience and position you as an expert in their eyes.  

Build a powerful website.

A powerful website is one that visitors can navigate easily, conveys your brand's message, and helps you convert and close. In addition to populating your site with excellent content, there are other tactics you can use, including:

• Good UX and UI design on every landing page

• Valuable lead magnets that consumers get for free when they enter their contact information into a sign-up form

• Call-to-action (CTA) buttons that make it clear what consumers should do, such as clicking to another page, purchasing a product, or subscribing

Email signups are a great way to convert interested consumers into leads. Once they sign up for your email list, you can continue to market to them in personalized ways, eventually guiding them to make a purchase. 

Read more: How to Build an E-Commerce Website: Your 2023 Guide

Collect customer feedback.

To enable the fourth stage of inbound marketing, delight, it's helpful to get customers' opinion on the product or service they purchased and the customer experience you created. You can collect customer feedback through surveys, polls, or live Q&A sessions.

When gathering customer feedback, it's important to ask questions that will lead to meaningful and actionable insights. Here are some examples:

• How did you first hear about our product or service?

• Why did you choose our product or service over alternatives?

• What do you like best about this product or service?

• What would make this product or service better?

• Would you recommend this product or service to others? Why or why not?

Two additional strategies for gathering customer feedback include:

• Using social listening to monitor social media channels and gauge consumers' sentiments around your brand.  

• Using customer service to find out where customers experience challenges with your products and the support they need to get more value from products. 

Read more: A Guide to Small Business Marketing

Inbound marketing careers

Inbound marketing offers a number of career paths, from using it to grow your own business to finding employment with a company you love. Below are some job titles you might come across when researching possibilities in this field. We've included US salary averages (base pay + additional compensation) and job duties, referencing information from Glassdoor, as of June 2023:

Digital marketing manager

• Salary: $77,614

• Job duties: manage and evaluate marketing campaigns, maintain consistent brand messaging on all channels, improve website function [2]

E-commerce marketing manager

• Salary: $82,616

• Job duties: optimize online stores; analyze site traffic; evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns; work with developers, designers, and writers to carry out company strategies [3]

Read more: How to Start an E-commerce business: 2023 Guide

SEO specialist

• Salary: $57,668

• Job duties: work with content and marketing teams to develop effective campaigns and optimize websites; gather and interpret SEO data; guide content decisions for maximum visibility [4]

Inbound sales representative

• Salary: $58,751

• Job duties: gather information from sales ready leads and guide leads to make a purchase decision; provide customer support; meet sales quotas [5]

To get a job in inbound marketing, you may need to earn a degree in marketing, build in-demand skills like marketing automation and SEO, and gain relevant experience. Stay up-to-date on requirements for the kind of job you want by subscribing to career sites, reading job listings, and getting notified of new job openings.

Learn inbound marketing with Coursera

Taking online courses can be a great way to build skills, discover career opportunities, and improve your inbound marketing campaigns. Here are some options on Coursera, offered by industry leaders, Google, Meta, and Hubspot: