Inbound marketing is not about ‘being’ found. It is about helping people to find what they are looking for by being relevant and keeping your promises. It’s about intent and how you facilitate it.
Inbound marketing is a ‘hot’ topic among marketers, as are its good friends content marketing, social media marketing, blog marketing and search engine marketing.
The rising attention for inbound marketing, basically and very simply put processes and tactics to “be found” among marketers has everything to do with the growing awareness that people are seeking information themselves and that the impact of more ‘interruptive’ forms of interactions is, in general, less successful than it once was. Furthermore, the need for a people-centric way of marketing is growing in a multi-channel context: the buying journey is increasingly used as the basis for marketing activities. The main success factor of inbound marketing revolves around people.
Inbound marketing is somewhat a holy grail and even a buzzword nowadays. Nevertheless, it is important to have a good understanding of the realities behind it. Being found is obviously just the beginning. Furthermore, it’s important to get found by the right people. Having visitors and traffic, just for the sake of it, makes no sense. What really matters is how you can improve the ways you can be found but most of all how you can turn the people that find you into leads and ultimately customers in the broadest sense.
Content marketing, social and inbound: human networks decide how you will be found
When talking about inbound marketing, people often tend to have an approach based on tactics and channels. However, what matters is the customer, in the broad sense. And, as is always the case, a customer-centric / people-centric approach requires a holistic and integrated one, that combines the right inbound and, indeed, outbound techniques, depending on your customer’s individual journey.
In inbound marketing, a lot of attention is paid to search engines, content marketing, lead management and, obviously, social media. Again, it’s important to realize that inbound marketing is not only a matter of tactics and channels.
It’s a matter of people and intent, and that’s what social media marketing and content marketing partially are about. Being found has to do with social interaction as well. In a way, people are channels and what we call channels are really carriers. People decide how content and awareness will travel and how successful you will be in getting found.
Relevance and keeping your promise: enable people to find what they seek
Word of mouth is never far away in inbound marketing. And so is content and the way it turns into a story: content marketing is closely related to word of mouth, lead management and social media marketing. The focus is on people but most of all on relevance. Relevance, as I recently described it, is your single most success factor in inbound marketing.
How relevant is what you do in the eyes and the emotional and rational needs and purposes of the people you would like to find you? It’s about respect, remember? Relevance is the criterion you should keep in mind. It’s marketing with meaning but most of all with purpose and intent. Not only yours but that of people in the first place. When looking at inbound marketing in a people-centric way it’s not about being found, it’s about helping people find what they seek. If you keep that in mind, results will follow automatically.
This is also the case for relatively direct and less ‘social’ forms of inbound marketing, such as search engine marketing. Ranking high in, say, Google is worthless if the promise in the link is not fulfilled on the so crucial landing page. This will give a very bad impression of your company since you focused too much on being found and not enough on enabling people to find what they seek. It will also result in zero conversion.
The same goes for so-called PPC advertising but also for blog marketing, content marketing, partially social media marketing (if your story isn’t relevant, it won’t be shared and thus found by others) and all other ‘tactics’ that are commonplace in an inbound marketing approach.
Content, interactions and relevance are contextual
Finally, note that the need of relevance (for instance, regarding the mix of interaction channels, content marketing, etc.) is contextual. It requires a customer-centric marketing approach, based on nurturing, profiling, personalization, behavior and multi-channel touch points.
You want visitors, fans and so much more. However, what you need most are customers. People use several channels and carriers. Thus, so should you.
Relevance is channel-agnostic.
About J-P De Clerck
