Inbound Marketing
A Complete Guide
Table of Contents
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the process of building high-quality digital real estate to attract, engage and nurture users that are trying to solve a problem. A successful inbound marketing strategy involves the integration and growth of multiple online channels including search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, email, social media and more – to expand visibility among your target audience, build relationships, and generate leads.
Whereas traditional advertising methods like TV, radio and billboards aim to broadcast a message to anyone in radius, digital marketing enables a more personalized and timely approach to connecting with potential customers. Inbound digital marketing, when done correctly, empowers users to create their own buyer journey through the use of valuable content on your website – whether they’re just starting to look for a specific solution, considering different products, or maximizing their success after purchase.
A fully integrated inbound marketing program enables a seamless journey for your potential customers to find and interact with your website or online product. These intuitive interactions have become somewhat of an expectation for most customers, therefore establishing a proper inbound marketing funnel early on can be critical for building trust and generating adoption.
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
Above, we compared the inbound process to building “digital real estate”. That’s because creating content and other inbound marketing assets for your brand are often owned on your website or social media pages – they are not as temporary as renting air time on a local TV station, sending direct mail to prospects, or paying for ad space on social media.
Assets on your website such as a blog, technical white paper, or eBook can be optimized for specific keywords, enabling you to generate organic visibility and traffic from search engines like Google. These inbound marketing assets, when optimized successfully, can continuously reward you without the need to perpetually spend marketing budget for clicks.
While various outbound marketing tactics such as LinkedIn Ads provide a fast and easy way to reach decision makers, in the long run, this approach becomes very costly. An experienced LinkedIn lead management service can develop and optimize campaigns to hit key performance metrics, but the engagement from this third-party platform is temporary.
The fundamental difference between inbound and outbound marketing lies in the intent of the user.
While outbound seeks to push messaging out to potential customers who may be simply scrolling social media, inbound attracts those users who are actively looking for a solution to a specific problem. Outbound is often a more aggressive, wide-sweeping approach, while inbound is a more subtle, targeted strategy.
It’s a lot more effective to have a hub of resources readily available to help users throughout various stages of their inbound marketing journey than to push a specific message to them when they’re not expecting it.
Inbound marketing growth may require more resources initially, but the sustainability of an inbound approach leads to a much higher long-term ROI.
Although we advocate for a primary focus on inbound at any B2B company, inbound and outbound marketing strategies should work together for holistic results. Building an extensive digital footprint is only valuable when consumers are engaging with that content. Outbound ads can be leveraged to generate initial awareness of your brand, re-engage previous visitors to help guide them along their journey, and encourage action on your important landing pages.
Together, inbound and outbound marketing create the foundation for a strong omnichannel marketing strategy.
Inbound Marketing Methodology
According to HubSpot, the company that coined the phrase “inbound marketing” in 2006, the inbound marketing methodology can be applied in three ways:
Attract
Draw in the right people and build credibility
Engage
Present insights and solutions to pain points
Delight
Provide help and support to customers
Let’s dive a bit deeper into each of these three primary inbound marketing phases, and how improving upon each methodology can create a sustainable cycle of growth – also known as the Marketing Flywheel.
Attract
To attract new customers that have never heard of your brand, you will need to create quality content at each stage of the marketing funnel.
You can reach users in the awareness stage with a strong social media presence (along with outbound paid advertising) to introduce them to your brand and product.
Creating a blog for your website and writing about popular topics in your industry is a great way to reach new users, establish credibility, and build rapport with potential customers. Make sure that you follow our SEO copywriting checklist or read the full length SEO copywriting 101 eBook to maximize your traffic from search engines, and share your blog posts on social media for more organic visibility.
Engage
Focus on a strong user experience (UX) can really uplevel this part of your inbound strategy. Adding internal links and an “Additional Resources” section on your blog posts can guide users to different content on the site, moving them further down the marketing funnel.
Inbound marketing automation can be extremely useful at this stage to scale your growth strategy. By automating email marketing campaigns and setting up conversational chatbots on your website, you can nurture leads without the need to constantly monitor consumer behavior.
HubSpot offers useful marketing automation software to set up efficient workflows that run in the background, so you can deliver a positive customer experience while taking care of more pressing tasks.
Delight
When users are ready to convert and become customers, it’s important to make that transition as seamless as possible. Provide reliable access to sales teams with intuitive calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your website and marketing communications, establish online documentation to guide users through the onboarding process, and ensure your checkout flow is bug-free.
The Delight stage goes beyond the sale as well, since happy customers can be your best marketing channel through word-of-mouth. Consider sharing ‘smart content’ via automated email workflows to help guide your customers through the product based on what stage they’re in or use case they’re working on. Offer a quick way to reach customer service if they run into an issue, whether that be through email, online chat, or even SMS.
Ultimately, the goal is to meet the customer where they’re at with relevant content, resources and communications.
Improving B2B Inbound Marketing Tactics
Contrary to B2C marketing which is primarily concerned with driving sales on the first or second website visit, B2B inbound marketing is focused on building trust and establishing credibility with potential customers. The B2B buying cycle can be long, so the more well-rounded a businesses’ approach to customer experience is, the better chance you’ll convert your target audience into customers.
While it takes more time and resources upfront, employing B2B inbound marketing tactics at your organization will be a much more effective and sustainable approach to growth – whether that’s building brand awareness, nurturing relationships, or generating leads.
The first step is to understand your target audience. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself from the start:
- What are the top 3 personas that will resonate with your product or service the most?
- What are their biggest issues or challenges, and how can you solve them
- What social media channels are they active on?
- Who are the thought leaders and influencers of the industry, and how do they produce content?
Now that you have narrowed down your audience and their characteristics, let’s ask ourselves a few more questions before finalizing our B2B inbound marketing strategy:
- What are your short term and long term inbound marketing objectives? Are you looking to grow a social media following and drive signups to your email newsletter so that you can nurture users over time? Or are you looking to employ a more aggressive approach and focus on generating whitepaper downloads for an influx of leads?
- What resources do we currently have for each level of the marketing funnel? If a user is new to your company’s type of solution, will they quickly understand the purpose and value? Do you have a blog that explains different use cases? If a user is aware of the solution, do you have content that compares your company to a competitor, or documentation that explains how to get started effectively with your product?
- How will you measure the success of your B2B inbound marketing tactics? Do you have sufficient analytics and reporting tools, proper UTM links for ad campaigns, and a sound conversion tracking setup? Are your lead forms, CRM, and sales outreach processes all integrated?
Since the buying cycle is longer for business-to-business than in business-to-consumer sales, it’s important to provide easy to digest, yet detailed content that helps consumers complete their objectives whenever best suits them. While B2C ads may invoke an emotional response that drives an instant sale, B2B ads may be accompanied by multiple other marketing channels, holistically influencing an action on your site.
While B2B inbound marketing techniques may be more difficult to measure, they’re equally as important. Let’s discuss how to do so.
How to Measure Inbound Marketing
So you’ve identified your target audience, inbound marketing KPIs, and gaps in your existing content – now you’ll need to set up an air-tight MarTech configuration to track success of each new activity.
Most organizations use some form of an analytics platform (e.g. Google Analytics) to track growth of various marketing channels over time. However, it’s very easy to gloss over a step in this delicate process that will harm the validity of your metrics – this can be cause for an awkward conversation at your next board of directors meeting.
Instead of reporting on uncertainty, let’s learn how to measure inbound marketing metrics with a data-driven approach. Here are our recommended steps to get started:
- Setup Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform
- Create Landing Pages with Forms
- Install Google Tag Manager (GTM)
- Setup Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
- Setup Conversion Events in GA4
- Setup Google Ads and Social Networks
- Create UTM Links for All Campaigns
- Test Your Conversion Configuration
- Setup a Dashboard to Monitor Your Success
This marketing measurement framework will enable you to accurately track performance of campaigns across various channels with a reliable source of truth. Follow our guide Measuring Marketing Effectiveness in 9 Easy Steps to get started.
What Channels to Focus on First
For startups in particular, choosing the best inbound marketing channels to invest your time and resources into is a critical decision. Creating a winning B2B startup marketing strategy should always start with a whitehat inbound marketing program leveraging the primary channels your target audience resonates with.
While each industry fosters unique customer personas that need to be catered to on different channels, we’re going to focus primarily on B2B inbound marketing for tech companies as this fast-growing market resembles a group often familiar with most current platforms.
Content Marketing
The number one challenge we run into when scaling inbound marketing for B2B businesses is the lack of content on their website. Developing a content strategy for inbound marketing is absolutely one of the most effective things you can do to move the needle on your site traffic, engagement and lead generation metrics.
Content marketing serves multiple purposes. When drafting a content plan, think about the people you’re trying to reach and the benefit of each page. A good place to start is to determine the types of content you want to create, while thinking about each level of the sales funnel.
Top-of-Funnel
Looking to grow your top-of-funnel and bring new users to the site? You can generate brand awareness with blog posts that discuss specific issues your target audience often runs into, trends in the industry, and new company partnerships or integrations. You can boost the visibility of these blog pages by posting them on your organic social media channels and optimizing them with SEO.
Glossary pages are another great way to bring in new users to your website. These are unbiased, longer form pages that describe a specific technical term in your industry. Glossary term pages usually target higher volume, more competitive keywords, but they are ripe for search engine optimization due to the educational nature of the page format. Plus, you can achieve holistic inbound marketing benefits when interlinking between each glossary term and clustering them towards a broader, ultimate-guide type anchor page (like this one!).
Middle-of-Funnel
The middle of the sales funnel is all about nurturing. Users are already familiar with your brand, so the goal is to re-engage, educate, and answer questions.
If your organization is developing a B2B SaaS inbound marketing strategy, your customers likely need a wealth of information before making a complex purchase decision. Creating comparison pages on your site can help customers understand the differences in features and benefits between you and your competitors, aiding the Evaluation of Alternatives stage of the consumer buying process.
The MoF is also where you’ll want to start personalizing content for specific personas. Depending on your product and industry vertical, explore creating content for specific use cases, industries and roles to help potential customers understand how their life can be easier with your product.
Bottom-of-Funnel
You’ve attracted and educated your audience, now it’s time to close the sale. Using remarketing campaigns on advertising platforms (and longer-tail keyword targeting) can help you bring high intent traffic to bottom-of-funnel landing pages.
These landing pages can lead to gated content such as a whitepaper that explains the technical aspects of your product to help your audience understand details of implementation, a webinar describing a specific use case, or directly to a signup page for a free trial or other offering. Marketers can design advertising-specific landing pages for different roles, targeting segmented audiences for personalized communications.
After you’ve developed the right content to persuade a purchase decision, it’s important to focus on conversion-rate optimization (CRO) to improve the efficiency of your landing pages. This often involves A/B testing different messaging, images and CTAs to see what resonates with your audience – we like to use Crazy Egg.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO inbound marketing has one of the highest rates of return for any marketing activity. There are four main pillars to SEO – On-Page Optimization (OPO), Technical Optimizations, Content Creation (which we’ve already discussed), and Off-Page Optimization.
Based on our SEO experience, the latter is best improved through collecting backlinks by simply creating high quality content consistently, rather than paying for sub-par links with black-hat techniques or spending valuable resources manually reaching out to web developers.
That being said, here are the two main activities your startup should focus on to maximize success from inbound SEO marketing:
On-Page Optimization (OPO)
In contrast with content creation, there is still a strong focus on each step of the sales funnel for SEO. Instead of creating new content for each level, SEO is often concerned with optimizing existing content around keywords with various measures of intent that users search for depending on their readiness to purchase.
This search engine optimization technique is called On-Page Optimization (OPO). In practice, marketers would look for seed (or focus) keywords to optimize specific pages around while considering what the intent of the customer is. It is recommended that marketers use best-practice keyword mapping to create an SEO information architecture diagram that informs how to optimize each page so that you have a consistent theme across each page on your domain.
For example, if you are to optimize a long-form blog post, you might want to target a higher volume, broad keyword that users query when just starting their search for a topic. If you’re optimizing an industry page, you’ll work around a keyword profile on a similar topic that is specific to that vertical. For a bottom-of-funnel landing page or product page, you might target a long-tail keyword that includes a qualifier such as “whitepaper”, “solution” or “product” that indicates a user is actively ready to convert.
Technical Optimizations
Your inbound SEO efforts can be holistically improved by making sure your website is discoverable, fast and interconnected. Performing technical tasks like the following can ensure Google understands the content on your site and the expertise you’re trying to build for particular topics:
- Meta Tag Audits – Write a relevant title tag and meta description for each page that relates to the content on the page and includes the seed keyword you’re trying to rank for. Make sure you don’t have any duplicates or empty tags across your site.
- Core Web Vitals – Google has outlined some specific metrics that they use in their algorithm to determine ranking, based on the speed and performance of your website. Adhering to these guidelines in the Core Web Vitals report of Google Search Console will help improve your chances of ranking for the terms you’d like to be known for.
- Internal Links – Interconnecting the content throughout your site via internal links is not only helpful for real users trying to navigate to pages they’re interested in, but it also signals to Google that your site is resourceful and that the pages you’re linking to are related to the text they’re hyperlinked on. Make sure to use the seed keyword of the page you’re linking to within the anchor text of the hyperlink whenever possible.
- Disavow Backlinks – Collecting backlinks is great for your website, and we often find that it is easiest to receive these backlinks through simply creating high quality content consistently. However, oftentimes spammy websites will link to your domain which can actually hurt the health of your site. Collecting a list of these domains that have a low Domain Authority and submitting this disavowed list to Google can signal that you do not want to be associated with these spammy sites. Be careful not to disavow real backlinks from quality sites though, as backlinks are one of the top metrics Google uses to rank domains in SERPs.
- Sitemap and Robots.txt Files – Making sure that Google search crawlers (Googlebots) can crawl your site easily will increase the indexability of your site and make your content more visible to organic users. To improve these backend files, only list pages you want to be indexed in your sitemap, upload your sitemap to GSC, and include your sitemap URL on your robots.txt file.
Paid Media Advertising
PPC inbound marketing is not free, but it can be a much quicker and more effective way to scale up the discoverability of your key content. Although not all PPC marketing is considered inbound, there are certain platforms and strategies that can help you narrow your focus.
One of the first strategies that comes to mind when thinking about where to start in your inbound journey is remarketing (AKA retargeting). Especially for longer B2B buying cycles, you’ll need multiple customer touchpoints before a sale is made. Therefore if a user has already visited your website, you’ll want to make sure you’re top of mind and easily accessible when that user searches again for your brand or products.
A tried-and-true approach to this is setting up a branded search campaign on Google Ads. Use your brand and product keywords in targeting, and increase your bid for remarketing audiences so that you don’t lose clicks to a competitor conquesting campaign.
Remarketing can also be used to capture audiences as they move along the buying cycle. If a user has already read your use case page outlining a solution for their role, then retarget that user with a Google Display campaign that shows ads on websites relating to your product, leading them to a solution brief landing page that talks more in depth about your personalized offering.
Although SEO and PPC are distinctive examples of inbound marketing, integrating these approaches can help you maximize your marketing performance. Read our post on SEO vs PPC to learn more.
Image from RiseFuel
What is the Future of Inbound Marketing
The future of inbound marketing depends on the evolution of the sum of its parts. Since any comprehensive inbound program consists of various digital marketing channels, marketers need to be familiar with how each of those platforms are changing in order to stay ahead of the curve and deliver exceptional experiences to potential customers.
Although it is difficult to predict what the future will look like, there are certainly some inbound marketing trends to monitor as you grow your organization:
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
SERPs are the primary medium of visibility and traffic at any level of the sales funnel for most B2B organizations. Whether you’re running search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns to drive inbound traffic from business-critical keywords you target, or managing a full-scale content marketing strategy that leverages SEO for organic website traffic, SERPs are the prime real estate you want to establish a presence on.
The results that users see after making a query on Google’s search engine are becoming more dynamic, and changing as Google adapts their algorithm. According to the Zero Clicks Study by SEMrush, 57% of mobile Google users don’t click a single link after making a query. This overall decrease in click-through rate is enabled by a host of SERP features that deliver the most relevant information to users with as little friction as possible. Some of these SERP features include:
- Carousel results
- Featured snippets
- Image packs
- Knowledge cards
- Relevant questions
- Reviews
In short, Google SERPs are becoming the destination, not the journey. Google is trying to be more helpful, relevant, and accurate, oftentimes at the expense of the marketer. Therefore marketers need to further optimize their webpages with rich content and structured data to increase their brand’s visibility in these prominent SERP positions, which leads to better brand awareness and higher traffic.
User Privacy
Privacy issues are no doubt a hot topic in the marketing world as Apple halted third-party cookies on their Safari web browser in 2021, making it much more difficult to track users on the web and deliver relevant advertisements. The more difficult user tracking becomes, the harder it is to keep potential customers in your sales funnel with marketing techniques such as remarketing.
The good news is, there are certain ways to re-engage your target audience and complete your inbound marketing objectives with tools and features supporting first-party tracking. For example, you can use Google’s Enhanced Conversions feature to improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement. The move away from third-party data and towards first-party data emphasizes the need for effective lead generation.
That means marketers need to get more creative with how they collect user information. Some enterprise inbound marketing trends that have resurfaced in the modern advertising age to combat the death of cookies are the use of surveys, contests, and webinars. Additionally, a strong content marketing strategy will continue to drive the future of inbound marketing. Without strong gated assets like eBooks, whitepapers and video content, B2B marketers will struggle to capitalize on first-party data that guides an effective advertising approach.
Hyper-Personalization
The goal of inbound marketing is to attract and engage your target audience with relevant content tailored to the potential customer. With many B2B markets becoming saturated with new tools, products and features, organizations need to find a way to stand out. Customers have begun to expect a hyper-personalized solution to their specific problem and to receive instant gratification once beginning their search.
With a sound SEO and keyword targeting strategy, a first-party approach to customer data, and an extensive collection of web content, marketers can offer personalization to their audience. However, the future of inbound marketing will require a strong focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data. While many popular marketing tools already use AI, marketers would be wise to continue exploring how they can leverage it for the following activities:
- Chatbots
- Automated email drip campaigns
- Customer relationship management and support
- Audience segmentation
- Real-time analytics
- Product-led growth
- On-page user experience
- Advertising
- Dynamic content distribution
In terms of hyper-personalization, dynamic content is an especially interesting topic. While there are emerging advertising features that automatically place landing page images and text directly into digital ads based on a user’s query, there are also organic methods to split test content based on the different personas you’re catering to. These techniques enable your organization to deliver real-time solutions tailored to the issue your customers are looking to solve – a key aspect of inbound marketing.
Interactive Content
Consumer attention spans are on a decline – so how do you keep your potential customer engaged? One way is to create really engaging content, but not everyone is Mark Twain. Another is to create interactive content.
According to Demand Metric, interactive content generates more than 2x conversions than passive content.
Although these unique pieces of content may require more of an investment, your user’s time spent on each page will increase – a key metric that Google uses when ranking web pages for certain keywords. Some types of content your marketing team may want to consider creating include the following:
- Interactive charts and maps
- Virtual reality content
- Calculators and tools
- Image sliders
- Interactive infographics
- Quizzes, forms and surveys
How to Choose an Inbound Marketing Agency
Inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional outbound marketing. However, that doesn’t mean you should use your savings to over-spend on an inbound marketing agency that isn’t going to drive the right measurable results for your business.
An effective inbound strategy requires specialist skills and dedicated time, which can be hard to come by for a scrappy marketing team focused on other initiatives. There are many pros and cons of outsourcing to a B2B inbound marketing agency:
Pros
- Reduce costs – Hiring a dedicated inbound marketing consultant is much more cost-effective than hiring senior level marketing professionals that are often specialists in other areas. This brings additional taxes and overhead expenses that your startup could be spending elsewhere.
- Greater objectivity – Constructive criticism can be hard to come by when your marketing team has all been working on the same project over a long period of time. Bringing in new perspectives from an agency that has worked on many different websites and projects will bring objective experience that can help move past traditional bureaucracies.
- Efficient output – Agencies are laser-focused on bringing results for their clients. Meetings, event gatherings, PTO and shifting priorities can distract internal marketers from moving the needle and creating measurable results.
- Experienced expertise – Companies that outsource inbound marketing are essentially bringing on experts to the term without a long-term contract. Agencies like Stark Visibility have tried-and-tested strategies they can implement immediately, familiar third-party tools that you won’t have to pay for, and well-researched tactics that can educate your team for more sustainable improvement overall.
Cons
- Hiring the wrong agency – There are countless agencies who overpromise and underdeliver. They may claim they specialize in one thing, but don’t have the years of experience to back it. Or, they are particularly focused on the wrong aspects of inbound marketing that don’t drive sustainable, holistic results.
- Inability to adapt – Startups are constantly evolving, so clear communication between the company and agency, as well as the willingness of the agency to move quickly when the need arises is essential. If your sales team finds success in a specific vertical for example, you need your agency to quickly adapt and shift the approach to cater to this new customer persona.
- Low skill level – Many large agencies tend to scale fast and hire cheap. When you hire an inbound marketing agency, that company is going to have direct contact with your target customers – it’s not feasible to risk your brand reputation having a junior marketer writing ads and content that don’t communicate with the voice your brand has established.
Finding the right inbound partner can be daunting, but ultimately you’re looking for an agency that is customer centric, strategic, makes data-driven decisions, has integrated experience with SEO and paid advertising, and is not a full-service agency that pushes inbound marketing to the side and tries to upsell you on approaches that you don’t need.
About Stark Visibility
Stark Visibility is a B2B inbound marketing agency for tech companies and other innovative startups, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our holistic approach to website and brand growth is rooted in the funnel-based strategies that have proved essential for small business expansion in the digital age.
Our San Francisco inbound marketing agency focuses on three core activities: SEO, content creation, and paid media. With our competitive B2B lead generation services, startups are able to scale their marketing programs without needing to hire additional personnel and adopt third-party tools – we’ll take care of your complete inbound marketing strategy as an extension of your marketing team.
Looking for affordable inbound marketing solutions? Start with Stark Visibility. We’ll even give you a free inbound marketing consultation to see what challenges we can help your business overcome. Reach out today and let’s get started!