Many people have heard of inbound marketing but aren’t familiar with how it differs from traditional online marketing. So, the question that might be on your mind is what exactly is the inbound methodology and what makes it unique?
Since 2006, inbound marketing has been one of the most effective ways of driving lead generation and customer engagement by providing prospects with high value and relevant content. Its principal purpose is to understand user experience (UX) and use these findings to help businesses nurture customers throughout their journey.
At Xtra Mile Marketing our foundations as a web design company are firmly rooted in inbound marketing. We believe that the principles of the inbound approach are multiplied when they are built upon a CMS framework with the core inbound tools already hard baked into its armoury.
Basically, we know the inbound approach is kick-ass for websites, and here’s why:
The customer is at the heart of the inbound methodology so we’ll start here…
The inbound approach acknowledges that there’s a lot more to customer-centricity than just offering standard customer service, it also means creating a great user experience (UX) from the awareness stage up until after the sale has been closed. When customers are at the core of everything you do, your business becomes top of mind to your customers; 86% of buyers are prepared to pay more for better customer service.
A website is the first salesperson a visitor will meet, and it can make or break an experience. If you’ve got an enjoyable, easy-to-use website that’s aligned with your customer needs, wants and experience, you’re likely to outperform competition. Luckily, this is the inbound speciality. Customer-centric websites contain enough information to create a seamless user browsing experience that sets a clear path for your prospects to complete the buyer journey.
Today, businesses need to have a good idea of who their consumers are and how to market to them. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data from your existing customers.
An inbound website design methodology uses learnings from this persona research and flips the traditional model of website design away from unique selling points and instead zeroes in on your customer’s needs, through an engagement and a ‘what’s in it for the customer-led strategy’.
This approach has proven effective for businesses, 90% of marketers who use buyer personas understand their customers in a deeper, more meaningful way. Likewise, research has found that using buyer personas can make websites up to 5 times more effective, as touchpoints and content are optimised based on buyer personas to successfully nurture customers through the buyer’s journey.
The key to a successful inbound website strategy is the buyer’s journey. To properly categorise your contacts, leads and customers and move them through the sales funnel it’s crucial to know the difference between each stage and what triggers a move from one stage to another.
The ‘digital touchpoints’ in the buyer’s journey play a crucial role in an overall sales strategy, as website and social media channels are often the first places your visitors will research your business. With this in mind, you must be set up with a strategy built to engage your audience, no matter what stage they’re at in your sales cycle.
You can add or take away as many buyer journeys stages as your customer trends deem appropriate. At Xtra Mile Marketing we add these two below between stage 2 and 3 to help us understand better where our prospects are, so we can prepare and create content specifically for their needs.
HubSpot’s state of the art CMS Hub is the platform that ties both inbound and Growth-Driven Design (GDD) together and is perfect for growing businesses. CMS Hub’s hard-baked features birth powerful websites that’re constructed to sweat and earn back the money you spend on them. A GDD approach means launching at speed and then you have the data feedback to drive regular customer trending updates, helping your website evolve.
Recently, the game has changed, and your website should no longer be a digital brochure. To remain relevant to your audience it should adapt to the ever-shifting trends. Much like a salesman reacting quickly to the needs of a lead, websites built on CMS Hub are flexible and can adapt quickly to solve the problems of visitors, stay responsive to changing trends in the market, enhance user experience (UX) and help users with their decision making.
In reality it could be the LAST website you’ll ever need.