Inbound Marketing is one of the best ways for companies, marketers, entrepreneurs and influencers to address the challenges of earning their customers’ trust, as well as to improve their sales efforts and revenue results.
Inbound Marketing is a business concept that encourages marketing and sales campaigns that are focused on developing and sharing educational content for customer success.
The aim of these campaigns is to solve customers’ problems by providing them with information that they need – not to interrupt them with marketing messages or product advertisements that are irrelevant to them. In other words, Inbound Marketing initiatives focus on enabling your customers to become successful in their personal and professional pursuits.
Unlike Outbound Marketing, with Inbound Marketing, you do not need to fight for your potential customers’ attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, you attract qualified prospects as well as build trust and credibility for your business.[i]
Before we jump into the details of Inbound, I would like to take you through a bit of history and context to explore why there is now, more than ever, a need to become an Inbound Organization focused on solving customer problems.
[i] https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
In the 1970s, when technology was far less advanced than it is today, the need to evaluate customer satisfaction arose.
However, there were only limited ways for most businesses to accomplish this. Essentially, they could ask each customer, individually, using manual and other paper-based methods that took time to consolidate, and even longer to compile into useful reports.
At that time, only companies that had access to standalone mainframes could afford to gather and analyse all the data required to make educated decisions about their customers’ behaviour and satisfaction levels.
In 1986, Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney launched their early version of ACT!, a digital Rolodex-like system that offered better management of customer relationships and interactions. In the 1990s, others took this concept further and developed the first generation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. These systems began to include the first generation of functionality, processes and applications to better manage customer relationships.
Towards the year 2000, Siebel, IBM, SAP and Oracle further improved CRM by adding more sophisticated marketing and sales functionality. In 2004/5, the first cloud-based CRM system was launched. At the same time, the concept of customer experience was gaining traction as customer awareness increased and good customer service became a business imperative.
As technological innovation and the speed of the internet improved, customers gained even more access to information and so their expectations continued to evolve. While all of this was happening, so too was advertising and the flood of interruption marketing, as we know it today, increasing. This resulted in customers wanting more options and greater value for their money, as well as less advertising and even less irrelevant messaging. This is what ultimately gave birth to permission marketing, the idea of customer success, and later Inbound Marketing as developed and championed by HubSpot and later Infusionsoft, SharpSpring and others.
Scott Brinker, blogger and Chief Marketing Technologist (chiefmartec.com) created a ‘supergraphic’ in 2011 called ‘Martech 5000’, depicting all the marketing solutions available at the time. In 2019, despite the fact that it is still called ‘Martech 5000’, there are now 7040 marketing solutions! Check out The Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2019) below.[i]
HubSpot
Inbound Marketing, as a concept we understand today was developed by a company called HubSpot. According to Wikipedia[ii], HubSpot was founded in 2005 as a developer and marketer of software products for Inbound marketing and sales. Its products and services aim to provide tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization.
As of 2023, the company’s total equity was US$1.32 billion and 7 663 employees. Their strategy for growth and the success they have achieved, thus far, is a testament to, and a perfect example of, how Inbound can be used to grow and build a successful business.
HubSpot makes the following salient points about Inbound[iii]:
– It is about how your entire company, not just marketing and sales, works together to attract, engage and delight customers in a way that grows the business, provides value and builds trust.
– It guides an approach to doing business in a human and helpful way, in the face of shifting technology.
– It is a better way to market, a better way to sell, and a better way to serve your customers. If ‘good-for-the-customer’ means ‘good-for-the-business’, growth is inevitable.
Inbound marketing is about creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business. How do you do that? You attract prospects and customers to your website and blog through relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat and by promising continued value. And finally, you delight them by continuing to act as an empathetic advisor and expert.[iv]
If implemented effectively, Inbound will help you to:
– Increase the number of leads you attract and the customers you convert,
– Increase the value of purchases made by each customer, and
– Increase the frequency of your customers’ purchases.
It is important to mention here that Inbound is about much more than just marketing and sales. Inbound is a philosophy of doing business, a way of being. You need to work towards becoming an all-round Inbound Organization, not only in sales and marketing.
An Inbound Organization, as defined in the book with the same title by Dan Tyre and Todd Hockenberry, is:
A business that focuses on, solves for and reacts to the customer’s new demands and expectations. An Inbound Organization figures out who their ideal customer is and then relentlessly establishes resources to attract them first, educate them second, start the relationship third, add value at every step in the process, and then ensure their success so they can initiate a series of loops helping the buyer to solve more problems.[v]
It is on this basis that I align the parallels between Inbound and customer success.
My favourite definition of customer success is by Lincoln Murphy, who defines it as follows:
Customer success is about helping your customers to achieve their desired outcome through Interactions with your company, as well as through the use of your product or service.[vi]
In other words, customer success is all about ensuring that your customers are able to solve their challenges and that your products and services enable them to achieve their goals. And we can all agree that the more customers you help to succeed, the more successful your business will become.
Even though Inbound as a methodology was developed by HubSpot, the concept itself is system-agnostic. This means that you can effectively implement Inbound Marketing regardless of the system you have. What is important is to find the best-fitting solution for your budget, challenges and growth opportunities.
In this Book, I will show you how to use Inbound Marketing to achieve this.
Sources:
[i] https://chiefmartec.com/2019/04/marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-2019/
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HubSpot
[iii] https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
[iv] https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
[v] Wyre & Hockenberry. Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company’s Future Using Inbound Principles, John Wiley & Sons, 2018
[vi] Customer Success: The Definitive Guide 2017 Lincoln Murphy, Founder Sixteen Ventures
