What is Inbound and what are the Fundamentals of Inbound

Inbound means doing business with customers in a more human way, creating a one-to-one relationship. With increased digitization, customers can access information at a much faster rate helping them make better purchase decisions. As customers grow to be more aware, the old outbound process becomes less effective with each passing time. Customers now want to decide on what to buy and where to buy from, and whether they want to be advertised for it or not.

FUNDAMENTALS OF INBOUND

Businesses now have a greater need to adopt the inbound methodology. It is a process of attracting, engaging, and delighting consumers to grow a business that delivers value and trust.

ATTRACT stage focus on appealing the prospect through relevant and helpful content. ENGAGE stage begins the moment a person takes the desired action. DELIGHT is all about pleasing the customers by focusing on their success. This process could also be termed as the flywheel marketing model that can help an organization towards delivering a remarkable customer service.

There are various inbound fundamentals that play a crucial role in the overall methodology:

· Inbound Principles

· Company Purpose

· Business Goals

· Buyer Personas

· Buyer Journey

Inbound principles are a set of guidelines that every organization creates for interactions of the team with the prospects or customers. These steps focus on generating standard, relevant and customized content, combined with constant optimization and finally empathizing for perspective.

Company purpose primarily aims to address the reason why a business does what it does. Having a defined company purpose is very crucial for any organization. Corporations with stronger sense of purpose can transform and invent better. It also becomes important to align the purpose to the main reason of why customers are buying from you.

Business goals could be defined as desired results that a company expect to accomplish within a specific period. Having a business goal not only helps to focus and achieve desirable outcomes, but it also ensures that everyone in the organization is focusing on efforts towards the same important issue. Whether business goals are set to provide direction to the company or motivation, they should be specific, measurable, achievable, and timely.

Buyer persona is a description of the ideal consumer based on statistics, interviews, and educational estimates. Almost every team should provide their inputs in developing a buyer persona. Creating a buyer persona requires defining the information that would be included and then figuring out the best source for obtaining that information. Developing an accurate persona becomes very crucial as it helps in creating more effective marketing strategies.

Finally, Buyer Journey is the dynamic process that the consumer goes through leading up to a purchase. Every potential buyer is focused on detecting the problem, identifying the possible solution options, and finally comparing the top options when they are ready to make a purchase.

Where many consumers cease communication with businesses because of irrelevant promotions, many organizations however have also witnessed greater brand recall because of effective inbound strategy and implementation. With rising digital environment and better access to information, the demand for inbound strategy & implementation is expected to grow and evolve.