How Inbound Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Startup

Inbound marketing refers to a marketing strategy that helps companies bring their potential audience to their business, rather than having the marketing team pay a hefty amount and fight for the customer’s attention. Companies create marketing content in order to appeal to their potential customers, which attracts qualified client leads to the business and keeps them engaged for a longer term.

According to Hubspot, ‘Since 2006, inbound marketing has been the most effective marketing method for doing business online. Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people towards your company and product, where they naturally want to be.’

Due to the perceived lack of funds and experience during the introduction stage, it is pivotal for start-ups to adopt cost effective marketing strategies to promote their services and products. This is where inbound marketing strategies come into play and provide startups with cost effective marketing tools. As a novice in the business sphere, an entrepreneur who is working actively to get his startup to new heights will always find himself in the need for constant guidance.

As an entrepreneur, one needs to understand the A to Z needs of their business along with the needs of their teams. From managing a budget, maintaining profit margins, deciding the software for accounting department, handling employees to developing a sales and marketing structure that will attract customers to a brand and simultaneously build a market share; these are way too many tasks with very little or no expertise to address them.

Find out How Inbound Marketing can Help You Grow Your Startup

#1. Cost Effective

Since inbound marketing works in the prism of organic marketing, it is cheaper than traditional methods of marketing. A bootstrapped startup can use inbound marketing strategy as a tool to attract and build up an audience of fans, loyalists, potential customers and followers organically. As long as firms make use of inbound marketing they can save a lot more than before and utilise their resources better. Customers get their services where they want them to be, and businesses get customers from new avenues, hence making it a win-win situation.

#2. Prepare Yourselves for the Future

For a startup, it is pivotal to capture an audience right in the beginning and continue that relationship for a long time. Inbound marketing helps startups to establish relationships with their target audience from the beginning. Hence, it becomes easier for startups to get them to convert into customers and continue growing along with them. A good consumer base helps a firm to understand the prevailing trends keeping in view their demands and recurring nature.

#3. Good relationship with Customers

According to a research by McKenzie, ‘70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated. Inbound marketing helps companies to ensure that they are able to engage customers, get more qualifying leads, convert those leads and satisfy the customers’ demands. The inbound marketing strategy focuses on the happiness of their customers. Hence, companies can build long and lasting relationships with them using these strategies. Inbound marketing enables businesses to convert customers and also make sure that those customers come back to buy more of their services or products. Inbound marketing helps firms to capture all kinds of customers and ensure that they remain associated with the company – be it first-time leads or existing ones.

#4. Helps in Building Credibility

With inbound marketing, businesses can create and post effective content on their websites which establishes their authority on the web. Hence, inbound marketing helps firms build visibility and credibility in the market place. This provides the potential audience with an impression that the firm is dependable and will be able to help them fulfil their needs.

Though Inbound marketing does attract a lot of customers and converts considerable leads, many analysts and firms believe that complementing it with traditional methods will result in better sales conversions.

Even Hubspot, the dominant leader in inbound marketing, uses outbound and traditional marketing strategies towards the last stage of the sales funnel to convert more customers.

As an owner of a startup, an entrepreneur can run a good marketing campaign by creatively combining inbound as well as outbound marketing strategies that results in more potential leads and higher customer conversion rates. There is no perfect amount of inbound or outbound marketing strategies. It depends on factors like the industry size, the competitors’ strategy, the target audience and the objectives of the marketing team.

Having a balanced mix of both outbound and inbound is pivotal and a must for today’s business ecosystem that is driven by digital-first scenarios.

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