Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

Inbound Methodology

On April 2nd, Paul Schmidt, HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Consultant visited Babson College to help students and entrepreneurs to promote their businesses using inbound methodology.

IMG_5946[1]

Inbound methodology provides techniques to help convert strangers into customers and promoters. The methodology includes four steps: attract, convert, close, and delight. Instead of using the traditional outbound marketing methods which include purchasing advertisements and mailing them to potential customers’ houses, inbound marketing enables companies to attract customers by providing high quality and relevant content.

According to Schmidt, the first step of the inbound method starts with attracting the right potential customers to the website. From Schmidt’s experience, some of the tools that can help to attract visitors to the site include blogging, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.), good keywords, and optimized content pages. These resources help strangers to be aware of the products and services offered through the website.

After the customers land on the site, they are no longer strangers because they can be converted to leads using calls-to-action like “Download our free PDF”. Schmidt explained that this helps to encourage potential customers to fill in the online forms landing pages with their contact information.

The next step is to figure out who would be the most willing to purchase. The companies can use marketing automation tool to send promotional contents relevant to each opt-in person’s interests and send a series of emails with useful content to build trust with prospects and encourage them to check out.

After the customers finish the purchase process, it is important for the companies to interact with customers frequently. This can be done by helping the customers to be aware of companies’ promotions through emails and provide good customer service using various social media platforms.

Key takeaways: since the year of 2006, inbound marketing replaced outbound marketing to be the most effective online marketing method because people do not want to receive information that do not enhance their life value. They want to purchase items and services that they can relate to and inbound marketing helps companies to add value to their prospects and customers. According to Schmidt, HubSpot’s inbound methodology can help companies to convert strangers into buyers.

More detailed information regarding inbound methodology can be found here.