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Inbound Marketing for Startup Growth
If you have just begun your startup journey, you might be aware of the big challenges you may have to face ahead, such as lack of big marketing funds, or a lean customer base. Due to the unique problems that most of the startups face, most of the startups resort…
If you have just begun your startup journey, you might be aware of the big challenges you may have to face ahead, such as lack of big marketing funds, or a lean customer base. Due to the unique problems that most of the startups face, most of the startups resort to social media channels and post regularly in it. While this tactic might gather you many fans and followers, this will not do much to leverage your marketing strategy in the long run. This is the reason why many good startups are not able to sustain themselves even after making a fantastic entry in the market. According to a report by CB Insights, the two major roadblocks in the startup's journey are high entry level barriers at 42% and shortage of cash at 29%. Inbound marketing provides a systematic and customer centric marketing strategy which will help you to drive ROI. Inbound marketing focuses a lot on nurturing leads, and uses a number of tools such as SEO, SEM, or even email marketing in many cases. This process requires you to build your buyer’s persona which is required in targeted communications to your buyers. Gathering all this information helps you know your buyers better, and enables you to create specific content for each individual buyer persona. Inbound marketing provides the solution to all the marketing needs of startups, SMEs and other business. The real struggle for any startup is to reach out to their potential customers, since you want people to know about your products and services. It is very essential for them to gain an online presence and be an active part of discussions. Inbound marketing proves to be the most effective and efficient marketing method – especially for SMEs and startups, since they lack big funds for marketing during their initial phases. 
How startups can leverage Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is an approach which focuses on all the overall elements of a marketing strategy. It emphasises on optimizing a consumer’s experience on each stage of his journey, i.e., attraction, consideration, close and delight. It focuses on building a long-term relationship between customers and the business. Its main idea is to capture leads with high interest or need by building up a level of trust with the customers. For this purpose, it emphasises on optimizing the user’s experience at every stage of his interaction with the business by providing relevant solutions to their problems and/or needs at every stage of their interaction. Hence, apart from the initial stages of attraction and consideration in a buyer’s journey, it also focuses on the delight stage, and thus helps build trust and credibility of the business among its customers. Ultimately, this goes a long way to increase the sales and reach of the business. Also, by using inbound methodology, you target customers who are genuinely interested in your product or service. It makes proper use of various interactive and appealing mediums of attracting customers such as blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, infographics, videos, etc. Hence, the retention rate of customers in inbound marketing is generally high, as compared to traditional marketing methods since you are targeting only potential customers who are genuinely interested in your product or service. Another great advantage of implementing inbound marketing strategy is that it uses quality content with the help of SEO and SMO to drive traffic to your website. Thus, it emphasises the generation of leads by drawing traffic organically. Hence, it helps to increase ROI and sales through customer retention. Another development in the sphere of inbound marketing has been the emergence of marketing automation tools. These are softwares which help to streamline marketing actions by automating repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions. Thus, it eases the work of the marketers, and performs these tasks with a high level of accuracy. It enables a company to nurture prospects with highly personalized and useful content which help convert prospects into customers, and these customers into highly delighted and satisfied ones. Thus, marketing automation tools such as HubSpot helps to bring desired results for the company through the medium of inbound marketing. It saves time by bridging the gap between the sales and marketing teams of startups and SMEs. It is the best bet for startups and SMEs since it helps to bring qualified leads in a cost-effective manner.Conclusion
Traditional marketing methods essentially took the one-way communication route, whereas inbound marketing provides a channel of communication between the users and the brand. It emphasises on fulfilling the needs and queries of the users through relevant and informative content. The biggest challenge for any startup or SME in its initial phase is to reach out to its potential customers and generate leads in a cost-effective manner. By publishing useful and accurate content and optimizing it according to your buyer persona, inbound marketing helps to drive prospects to your website. Thus, it is an ROI-driven approach, which is expected to grow in the coming days. It can be incredibly useful for startups and SME’s who want to raise the awareness of their brand online.
