what are the 4 phases of inbound marketing?

In this post we are going to explain in detail what inbound marketing is and what are the four phases it is divided into.

what is inbound marketing?

To understand the concept, inbound marketing is not just another technique among the many that are carried out in digital marketing, but it is a very complete strategy composed of complex techniques. The objective of this strategy is to attract customers and follow the path with them until the final purchase of the product or service, all this in a non-invasive way.

To understand inbound marketing we must also explain what is the use of "pull" marketing techniques, as it is one of the most characteristic elements of inbound marketing. This consists of a series of non-intrusive techniques that attract users who are potentially interested in our product or service, the actions that this pull marketing carries out are aimed at segmented audience that have already shown interest in the brand, that is, the buyer persona. Thus we can achieve the impact we want only in those people who have previously aroused interest in the brand. Thus achieving that it is the user who approaches us to meet their needs.

Returning to inbound marketing, we could define it as a long-haul strategy, because it begins with a first contact with a user (who is not yet a customer) and continues with an accompaniment throughout the purchasing process.

All of this manages to attract new customers and build the loyalty of the brand's existing customers and is achieved through 4 distinct phases that we will explain in detail below.

The four phases of inbound marketing

This is the attraction phase, where we aim to attract user traffic to our website, directing Internet users to our brand's content. We will do this through various strategies and tools to capture quality traffic, yes, quality, we are not looking for quantity, we do not want hundreds and hundreds of users to enter our site without further ado, we want the public to be interested in our products and services. And this is possible by generating content of interest to our potential customer, that is, attraction marketing:

• Content marketing: marketing technique that is based on creating, publishing and sharing information of interest aimed at a specific target audience, all of this around the corresponding keywords to attract more audience and in all the necessary formats, articles, posts, videos, etc.
• SEO: It is very important to use SEO for our strategy and thus achieve the best positioning within the internet search engines, using good keywords, and titles of interest, we will enhance our content giving it greater visibility within that target audience.
• Social media marketing: Social networks are here to stay as a marketing strategy, they allow us to be constantly connected with the buyer and to interact in a much simpler way with the public.

The next step is to offer them an offer that may interest them, usually through landing pages or CTAs, where they fill out a form and give us their contact information. At this stage we move on to the capture and generation of leads, (a lead is a person who has provided their contact details on the website through a registration or form) the visits that there were by users on our website have already become records and thanks to this we have obtained the data of these potential customers and we already have them in our database.

With the previous phase you have some basic data about your potential customers, but through lead nurturing and lead scoring, you will be able to increase the information you have about them at the same time that you nurture the user with valuable information about your company, until the moment of closing, that is, you are ready to convert them into customers. The objective is to achieve that most of the users end up becoming customers.

This is achieved by means of two fundamental tools:

• Marketing automation software: this is a system that allows us to plan and implement our entire inbound strategy.
• Emails (lead nurturing): Sending a chain of personalised emails to our different leads, allows a progressive interaction with the user until they are ready to buy our product or service, that is when the email is sent with the complete commercial offer. All these emails cannot be sent just like that, they have to be well cared for in terms of content, structure and design so that the user notices them and get their attention, encouraging them to open them and interact with them.

This phase is different from the other three, in this phase inbound marketing takes on great importance, this phase is of analysis and in it we must analyse the results of the processes implemented previously. After all that it costs to get a customer, in terms of time and financial investment, we must know how to make them loyal, repeat with us and maintain a relationship with them, we must remain their number one choice, interacting by sending emails and information that may be of importance. For this is this phase, in which we draw conclusions from the actions we have previously done in the previous phases of inbound marketing. With this phase we get the customer to have a good image of the brand and is predisposed to continue buying our products.

In conclusion, we can say that inbound marketing is a very important process within digital marketing and that it is divided into 4 very marked phases. All of these are closely related to each other, they follow a process of rigorous continuity, so you have to take great care in each of them to achieve the expected results.