Inbound & Its Key Components

The core concept of an inbound methodology could be distilled to a customer pull approach — identifying the perceived needs of an individual decision makers within companies and leveraging the said needs to provide them with a solution or move them towards the next stage of a buyer’s journey.

Inbound methodology

The inbound methodology could be visualized in a follow way:

Attract

Attracting strangers and turning them to visitors is the first step in the inbound methodology. This initial step provides the visitors with the right content, at the right time and solves their immediate needs.

Key tools within this step are most notably company owned properties used to distribute the content such as blogs, landing pages, microsites or various social media accounts.

The content used to attract the traffic can have various formats such as a simple document, visually appealing infographic or an extensive webinar, yet it needs to be freely accessible.

Convert

The goal of the convert stage is to turn the visitors into the leads by having the visitors provide their own contact details in turn for the gated content — usually achieved by asking for an email address (and/or other additional details) to email the requested content.

The content at this stage needs to provide a remarkable perceived value to warrant it being gated.

Close

Leads within this stage are being transformed into customers by the use of marketing tools such as marketing automation and lead nurturing. The key prerequisite for a successful close step is to be able to identify the leads‘ position within their buyer’s journey, so it’s ensured that the correct leads are closed at the right times.

Delight

Even after the leads are closed, they will engage with the company’s content and by providing them with a continuous support, the company will still continue solving their needs and they could turn into active promoters.

Buyer’s journey

Purchase process is a journey, and consumers advance through a process the industry has called ‘the buyer’s journey.’

The buyer’s journey is a core concept within an inbound methodology and serves as a tool for a content classification and plays a crucial role in a creation of an editorial calendar based upon a content path which puts the buyer’s journey into the greater context.

Awareness

An audience which is aware of issues symptoms and is actively looking for solutions fall under the awareness stage. Such symptoms could be either generic or highly specific in nature, but the lowest common denominator is that a visitor isn’t yet aware of a solution or a reason why is something happening to them.

Examples:

• My sales are decreasing, what could be the reason?
• I want to increase the number of my sales prospects, how should I go about it?
• We are expecting a child, yet our flat is too small and there is no good nursery nearby.

Consideration

This audience is one step further in their perceived need and they have identified the cause of their issues and are actively considering which solution could be the best for their particular needs.

Examples:

• My landing page isn’t performing as well as it should. How do I increase its conversion rate?
• I have a highly segmented customer database. What are the best ways to monetize it?
• Our family is considering moving to a larger house, but what can we afford with our salaries?

Decision

Visitors within the decision stage have clearly identified a solution and are looking for additional details to support their final decision.

Examples:

• I want to invest into either Sugar CRM or Salesforce, which is the better option for me?
• I want to add affiliate links to my newsletters. Which partner will provide me with a better revenue sharing option?
• We need to find an experienced property agent who will be honest with us, where can we find him or her?

Buyer persona

Buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and what you already know about your existing customers.

Its role within an inbound methodology is to provide a deeper understanding of the ideal customers so we can define the ideal touch points and key communications to drive them to our managed properties and offer them the content they need at the right time.

Persona vs. target group

The key difference between a target group and persona is that a target group is an amalgamation of a demographical data lacking any context.

Personas, on the other hand, represent a fictional member of a target group and they help to focus decisions surrounding site components by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation.

By working with a persona, we can ask deeper questions which in turn help us gain a better understanding of the individual characteristics of our ideal customers which help us to define content paths.

The highly important differentiator between a persona and a target group is that by thoroughly researching a persona through a set of questions (examples mentioned bellow), we are able to get an insight into the personas thought patterns about the subject matter. This will help us to identify further topics to cover, form or a channel for the content distribution.

Questions to ask while researching persona

While researching a persona, the researcher needs to prepare a set of questions which will help them to create a usable buyer persona for the needs of their company. The set of questions need to be prepared in way that will provide the crucial insights into a persona and its habits.

There is no standardized set of questions which needs to be answered while creating a buyer persona and it’s up to the individual researchers to create a set of questions which they can work with to provide the appropriate insights for other stakeholders.

The following set of questions serve as an example of the most frequently asked questions during the persona creation phase.

Role:

• What is their job role and title?
• How do they spend their day at work?
• What skills do they require?
• Which tools do they use?
• Who do they report to and who reports to them?
• Do they interact with other departments?

Goals:

• What are they responsible for?
• How do they measure their success?
• How do they achieve the success?

Challenges:

• What challenged do they need to overcome?
• And how do they overcome them?

Company:

• What is the industry they operate in?
• What is the size of their company?

Watering Holes:

• How do they gather the news?
• Are there any influences they follow?
• Which social networks do they visit?

Personal Background:

• What is their age?
• Do they have a family?
• What is their education?

Shopping Preferences:

• How do they purchase goods and services?
• What is their preferred method of contacting service providers?