Hubspot defines an Inbound Marketing Strategy as an approach focused on attracting customers through content that is relevant and helpful — not interruptive. With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through online channels like blogs, search engines, and social media.

Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing does not need to fight for potential customers attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, you attract qualified prospects and build trust and credibility for your business.

To establish a successful inbound marketing strategy Marketo recommends the following steps be taken:

• Identify your target audience and learn all you can about them. Your content must be specifically targeted at their needs.

Your audience will be the prospects that will benefit most from your solution or product. Try to put yourself in their shoes and think why would your solution be a good fit (or not as the case may be) for your targeted audience. Will it solve a problem, reduce time and resources currently required by your target base?

• Determine your unique, compelling story. Why should your audience listen to you?

This is where your content marketing should shine. Content marketing has been defined by the Content Marketing Institute as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract a clearly defined audience.

• Choose your delivery platforms. Will you Blog? Tweet? Use Facebook? LinkedIn or a combination?

Social media platforms are a wonderful way to deliver your content and create a loyal community following. Like most things in life, social media platforms differ greatly and play to different market audiences. For example, if you are a B2B marketer and wish to get a serious, somewhat technical message across you may find Blogs and LinkedIn Articles and User Groups work best. If you are B2C marketer with a young targeted audience you may find Pinterest and Snap Chat work best, whereas Twitter can be great for new announcements and highlights of specific events or shows.

• Create and execute your Inbound Marketing Strategy calendar.

It is important to create a schedule that will consistently turn out fresh and relevant content that continues to engage your audience. Remember that all content should be targeted at solving a particular need of your customer and not a hard sell of your product or solution.

Having a well-oiled inbound marketing strategy should see audience participation and leads grow significantly over time (a recent Hubspot survey found that organizations who adopted an inbound marketing strategy reported an increase in leads of almost 84% within the first 7 months). Once these leads are harvested and qualified they can be forwarded to the sales team for conversion to new paying customers.

If you would like help with creating an Inbound Marketing Strategy for your organization contact RML Marketing & Business Development Solutions today.