If you have or are in the process of learning about marketing methods for your store, you must have heard of Inbound Marketing methods. This is a new term, appearing not long ago talking about the method of approaching customers with useful content for customers, helping to solve their problems. Thereby attracting them, making them trust you more and buy from you.

Specifically, what Inbound Marketing is and why it has become a new marketing trend, let's explore in the article below.

1. What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a business taking activities to break the cold between strangers with the business to start a new relationship. To build customer trust, you need to prove yourself as a reputable, trustworthy brand for customers to trust and convert from viewing to purchasing.

Passive advertising methods, forcing users whether they want to or not, they still have to see the business's ads. Inbound marketing aims to be proactive, providing useful value to customers for free. Let customers find your business proactively, free knowledge-sharing activities will help build a good brand image, make a good impression in the eyes of customers, then when customers have a need to use products or services your business name will appear first in their mind.

2. How to implement an Inbound Marketing plan?

The truth is that there is no 100% correct process when implementing a marketing plan because of different resources and contexts. However, the process I share below will give you an overview of the relatively standard implementation of an inbound marketing plan for an e-commerce store. The implementation process is summarized as shown below.

Attract

First, you need to attract the right audience, the right group of people who have needs and are likely to become your customers, avoiding spreading messages without a clear direction. To do this, you need to do two things first: segmenting customers and selecting target customers, clearly determining which groups of people are most likely to buy from you. For example, if you sell sportswear, the most likely customer group to buy is men and women 18-35 years old, who play sports,...

To attract the right customers, you need to touch their pain points (show up when they need them), then soothe and provide solutions by bringing them valuable information. Here are a few ways to attract customers:

- Blogging: This is the best way to attract customers to your website. You need to write content about instructions, answering customer questions.

- Social Media: Share valuable content on social channels like facebook…and interact with potential customers on the channels they use a lot.

- SEO: The customer's buying journey often searches for information on google. So make sure your store shows up when customers search for related keywords.

- Website: Optimizing the website to be more attractive, clear information, easy for customers to manipulate on the website. The content of the article on the website should contain interesting and valuable content for customers, turn the website as a portal for this potential customer. Use more website effects applications such as Super Effects to enhance the customer experience when visiting the website.

Convert

After attracting customers to your website or another informational channel, the next step is to get these people to convert into leads. In order for customers to leave email or phone number information for you, you need to bring valuable information to customers such as answering questions, implementing instructions, giving away ebooks, reports, in-depth documents, etc. trust they feel worthy to leave information. A few ways you can refer to:

- CTA: A button that encourages customers to take an online action such as downloading an ebook, attending an event, etc. If the CTA is not strong enough or attractive, you cannot collect leads from customers visiting the website.

- Landing Page: This is the page that when customers click on the CTA above. On this page, the customer needs to fill in the lead information.

- Forms: Optimize lead form to be closer and convenient for customers to manipulate when leaving information.

- Contact information: Provide your contact method clearly such as email, phone number, fan page so that customers can actively contact you.

Close

After you have collected customer information (lead), then you need to make these customers buy your product/service. You need to analyze customer behavior to find the right time and message to drive their purchase. Some tools to help you convince customers:

Email: Building a series of emails focused on useful and relevant content can help you build trust in your potential customers and make them more ready to buy. 

Marketing Automation: The process of marketing automation involves creating marketing emails and lead nurturing according to the different needs and stages of each lead's sales cycle. For example, if a reader downloaded an in-depth document on a certain topic in the past, you could send them a list of emails on the same related topic. But if they only follow you on Facebook and only visit certain pages of the website, you may want to use other messages that are more relevant to their interests.

Telesale: Call your customers to take care of them and convince them to buy products.

Delight

When a customer makes a first purchase, you can be considered a success, but we need to always stay in touch and build trust with users. That is how marketers enhance customer value, also known as “customer for life”.

- Smart CTA: send different messages and offers tailored to different customers based on the buyer's personal information and the specific stage of their buying cycle.

- Social Media: Using a variety of social platforms gives you the opportunity to provide real-time care to your clients.

- Email and marketing automation: Provide your existing customers with truly impressive content that can help them achieve their goals, and showcase products and features that can make them care. You can use automatic reporting applications such as Super Report to view and export reports about customers, thereby sending them useful messages such as: instructions for use, maintenance, ..and persuasion. they come back to buy another product.

3. Is inbound marketing the optimal solution in all cases?

The answer is definitely no because each method has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, in the era of rampant digital advertising, consumers have less and less trust in advertising. Inbound marketing will be a method to help you develop your business sustainably, get regular and loyal customers.

However, this method will not be effective if you do not really make efforts, implement, apply and continuously improve for your business, really invest in understanding customers, providing them useful information and you will get unexpected results in the future.