Inbound in Action: From Attraction to Delight

When someone takes the seat next to you on a plane, you have two choices: you can choose to engage them in conversation and pass the journey by getting to know someone new and perhaps making a friend; or you can screw your earplugs in tighter, focus on the movie and ignore them completely. The choice will be made quickly - with a glance, an assessment, a quick exchange of information and a decision about how similar they are to you. If your fellow passenger is someone who matches your life, you’ll talk and bond, and tell your friends about the great person you met on your trip. If not, you’ll happily pretend each other doesn’t exist, while trying to hog the armrest.

Inbound marketers also have to show that the brand matches the persona’s life and they have to create a bond that brings benefits to both sides. It’s a four-step process that draws in the public and eventually turns them into more than buyers. It produces evangelists, people who are so engaged by the brand and its products that they want their friends to join them in a lifestyle that includes its presence.

The first action is attraction.

Through blogging and SEO, optimized Web pages and social media posts, inbound marketing draws not just any old traffic but the people who match the personas created when formulating the marketing strategy.

When that content works, when it matches the needs, interests and goals of those personas, it attracts them, pulling them in and making the brand a part of their lives. They see the content, read it, come back for more, seek it out and tell their friends about it.

The next action is conversion.

This doesn’t have to take the form of a sale but it should be a kind of greeting. It’s the difference between designing a window display that draws foot traffic and a sales person who meets people as they enter the store, greets them with a smile, leads them to the product they want and lays the foundation of a long-lasting relationship.

In inbound marketing, it may take the form of submission forms or calls-to-action, landing pages and email databases. The conversion provides a way for the marketer to keep the conversation flowing and the relationship intact.

The Close Connects Leads To Sales

The close is more technical. This isn’t just where a lead becomes a customer, although it is that. It’s also where more leads are constantly turned into more customers through careful monitoring of statistics, data and experimentation. Emails with focused, relevant content can help produce sales, as can autoresponders, but much of the ongoing work of the close happens through customer relationship management (CRM) software. Together, they create an environment in which content naturally connects the customer and the brand.

Inbound marketers test different forms of content to see how audiences react and measure the results to ensure that the attraction won at the start of the process turns as efficiently as possible into sales.

Delight Makes RIght... And More Customers

And the last action is what Hubspot, a maker of CRM software for inbound marketing, calls “delight.”
This may sound excessive. The marketer has already done the job. We’ve attracted, converted and closed, but the benefit of inbound marketing is that we get to maintain an ongoing relationship with customers. Surveys and social media interaction enable marketers to continue learning about audiences, refine personas and create better, more effective content.

When that happens, audiences don’t just reward the brand with continued sales, new sales and upsells. They reward it with sales from their friends. They share the brand’s content on social media and they attract more people to take part in inbound marketing actions.

Inbound marketing may act like a funnel but the pipe is circular. It starts by attracting audiences with targeted content and when that content delights those customers, they attract more people, pull them in and start the process again.

We don’t always meet someone interesting on our plane journeys, but when we do, we don’t forget them.

To learn more about inbound marketing and to understand what it can do for your business, contact us at contact@astelo.com.

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