What is inbound marketing?

Learning about inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a way for businesses to reach and influence quality leads in a way that creates a lasting bond built on trust.

In this article, you’ll learn:

What is inbound marketing?
How inbound marketing works
Can inbound marketing work with outbound marketing?
The benefits of inbound marketing
The challenges of inbound marketing

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a tactic to capture new customers and nurture qualified leads. Inbound marketing efforts involve putting the information out there for your target audience to find on their own.

In other words, inbound marketing heavily relies on content creation and using it as a flywheel to create brand awareness, develop trust, and facilitate lead generation.

For instance, search engine optimization (SEO) is very important in inbound — brands can rank on search engine result pages for questions people are asking and then present them with useful information via their content marketing strategy. That content could be a blog article, a web page, or an asset that’s on a landing page.

Another vehicle for inbound marketing is social media because social media marketing allows a brand to engage with customers easily and be a part of the conversations that are going on. Social media posts can develop brand awareness across time and play an integral part in your inbound strategy, especially when used in conjunction with other digital marketing content strategies.

You can learn more about inbound marketing strategies later in this guide.

The key to inbound marketing is creating quality content that customers can find while in the discovery phase of their customer journey. You should use analytics data to see how customers interact with your content (such as webinars, white papers, podcasts, and customer case studies) and whether the content produced an uplift in return visitors and marketing qualified leads.

How inbound marketing works

Inbound marketing is all about attracting and engaging potential customers through relevant content tailored to their needs.

For example:

What questions are customers asking?
What are their pain points?
What benefits excite them?

Savvy content marketers can create materials that directly speak to those questions by collaborating with Sales and Support colleagues.

Some examples of inbound marketing include:

Search engine optimized blog articles
Case studies that solve a particular pain point
Video content (self-hosted or on YouTube)
Social media posts that take visitors to a landing page, existing blog post, webinar recording, or video content.

The main idea of inbound marketing is to attract customers by offering high-quality content, which helps build lasting relationships and trust.

Next, we’ll explain how inbound and outbound marketing can create multiple touchpoints to improve brand awareness and conversion rate across the buyer’s journey.

How inbound can work with outbound marketing

Integrating inbound and outbound marketing creates a powerful strategy that leverages the strengths of both approaches to reach, engage, and convert a broader audience.

Outbound marketing methods, such as paid advertising and traditional marketing, generate initial awareness, while inbound marketing nurtures these prospects through valuable content and personalized interactions.

Together, they enhance brand awareness, target specific audiences, and optimize performance through data-driven insights, resulting in a balanced approach that maximizes reach and conversion.

In B2B, successful inbound marketing often relies on outbound efforts like radio ads, cold calling, and Linkedin posts to build brand awareness. This way, when prospects search for a solution, they are more likely to trust a brand they’ve already encountered and engaged with.

Inbound marketing strategies

Content and search engine optimization (SEO)

No matter how useful your content may be, the ability of your content to be easily found is a cornerstone of inbound marketing. If it isn’t optimized, it won’t reach your audience. You’ll need to use SEO to drive organic traffic to your site so that your content gets seen by valuable leads.

High quality content comes in many forms beyond long articles. Infographics can attract leads, while podcast episodes build authority with your buyer personas. And just because content was created for SEO doesn’t mean it cannot be shared in email campaigns, social media marketing or even used as sitelinks in Google Ads.

Know your target audience

The biggest mistake is creating content without knowing your audience. By understanding buyer personas and mapping customer journeys, you can personalize your messaging for a better customer experience, which can improve conversion rates. A strategic approach helps you prioritize content that targets the most valuable segments of your audience.

Use tools and technology as aids

Companies need a way to collect and analyze the data tied to their inbound marketing metrics. Tools help you track who the customer is and how they’re engaging across all channels. Then you stitch that information together to measure the impact of each touchpoint during the buyer’s journey. Marketing automation is also a valuable tool that can keep track of multiple channels and platforms, as well as keep to a schedule.

Align marketing and sales teams

For whatever reason, it can sometimes feel impossible to sync marketing and sales. However, it’s important to keep both business functions in communication because knowing which inbound marketing content is engaging customers will help sales lead them through the buying journey.

Maintain your channels and platforms

It would be such a waste if you spent hours crafting the most compelling and useful content, only to discover fragmented customer journeys. Test CTAs and hyperlinks to make sure they are working properly and track the visibility of your content on search engine result pages.

Next, make sure your customers can move from channel to channel seamlessly, such as from your social media content to your website and keep an eye out if competitors are bidding on your brand name.

Integrate with outbound marketing efforts

Inbound and outbound marketing aren’t mutually exclusive. As a marketer, focus on where your audience spends their time to create various touchpoint opportunities, both digital and offline.

Benefits of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing benefits you and your customer. Studies show that the most successful marketers prioritize creating content that meets the audience’s needs over an organization’s sales or promotional message.

There are several benefits to inbound marketing that can help you determine if it’s the right strategy for your company:

Inbound marketing is non-invasive. Prospects can read your blog posts or attend a webinar on their own time.
Inbound marketing content is educational. It is specifically designed for each stage in the sales funnel.
Inbound marketing is quantifiable. You can tie each part of your strategy to a metric that gets monitored over time.

Your website and content are continuously being updated, so inbound marketing continues generating leads over time.

Challenges of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing challenges:

Requires continuous maintenance. This is to ensure that content always speaks to consumers’ evolving wants and needs.
Takes a great deal of time and effort. Developing and testing out different content that will entice customers to convert takes time.
Demands a holistic strategy. You’ll need to buy tools to help you implement integrated, cross-channel campaigns.

When you’re ready to get started, evaluate the marketing software your company has so that you know your tools can support robust inbound marketing campaigns.

As a solution for complex buying journeys, Adobe Marketo Engage brings marketing and sales together to nurture leads, orchestrate personalized experiences, optimize content, and measure business impact across every channel. It natively supports both demand- and account-based marketing strategies to provide a single, integrated lead management platform from acquisition to advocacy.

Watch an overview or take an interactive product tour of Marketo Engage to learn more about marketing automation at scale.