The idea behind Inbound Marketing is to create valuable experiences that leave a positive impact on your business and it’s customers. This is done by attracting prospects and customers to your business by creating relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using tools such as live chat, email marketing and dynamic positioned content to personalise their experience, but also to promise continued value in your companies content. And finally, once you’ve engaged with the customer, you delight them by continuing to be an adviser and expert in your businesses industry.

Unlike traditional Outbound marketing, Inbound marketing doesn’t have you fighting for your customers attention.  By creating content that’s been carefully designed with their problems and needs in mind, you attract qualified prospects, build trust and add more credibility to your business.

Inbound Marketing is a part of a much larger strategy and movement designed for business growth. The movement of Inbound.

Inbound is a natural evolution to Inbound Marketing. The idea of attracting, engaging and delighting people in order to grow a business has been evolved to extend beyond just marketing. The inbound approach fully incorporates all of the customer facing teams, and has been created to make a more human approach to doing business. As technology shifts, it’s easy to forget that your customers are humans, not just numbers on a spreadsheet. Inbound helps to keep your customers in mind which is a better way to sell, a better way to serve customers and a better way to market. Because when good-for-the-customer means good-for-the-business, your company can grow for a long time.

Like inbound marketing, inbound is composed of three stages: attract, engage and delight. Inbound companies use the methodology to build relationships with their customers that are based on trust, credibility and momentum. Inbound is about adding value at every stage of the journey the customers takes with you.

From a business’s point of view, the methodology represents growth. Happy customers provide the energy that fuels your companies growth; either because they purchase from your again or because they promote your product to other people they know,  but the opposite is also true. If you produce unhappy customers by selling to the wrong people or over-promising and under-delivering, it’ll slow your business’s growth.

When everyone in your company is aligned behind an inbound approach, your company will provide a holistic experience to your customers, no matter where in they’re in their buying journey with you.   It isn’t the role of just marketing to attract, sales to engage or services to delight – everyone is responsible for attracting, engaging and delighting your customers. In order to build trust and credibility in what you offer, your customers need to be given a consistent experience, no matter how or where they interact with your company. It does however, mean different things for each of your departments. Which is why each team needs to focus on how they can contextually the inbound methodology to keep your business growing.