Do you know? Almost 8 of the 10 companies report that from their blog, they get a positive Return on Investment or ROI. Moreover, it costs 62% less for each of the leads than other traditional marketing.
This one is a classic example of inbound marketing. Most of the renowned brands are now rooting for such ways of marketing, as it indeed works!
In this digital era, traditional marketing seems a bit overwhelming to the customers. The psychological aspect of it is that it directly persuades a customer to buy a product.
Inbound marketing is a different concept from it. Here a company tries to gather insights from its customers and plans the tactics according to those insights. While doing this, a company strives to provide enough value in the life of a customer.
The role of inbound marketing for eCommerce is crucial. Getting success for an eCommerce business depends mostly on it.
How?
Hubspot says five core services fall into inbound marketing methodologies, like,
“Attract, Convert, Grow, Delight, and Analyze”
eCommerce businesses can implement these methodologies in their business to get a completely new momentum in the market.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing precisely the opposite of the traditional or aggressive marketing approach. It is the process through which a business attracts the customers naturally rather than seeking them out.
It means inbound marketing provides information and value to the people through different content. Thus, it creates a more lasting impression in the minds of the people.
Inbound marketing is comparatively a newer term, though the implementation of it started way before that. It got this name after Brian Halligan, co-founder, and CEO at Hubspot named it in 2005. After that, this term is being used in various marketing books, blogs, and journals.
It is now the ultimate “buzzword” in the marketing world.
How Inbound Marketing Works
Inbound marketing concentrates on earning the audience organically by providing valuable content of different sorts. On the other hand, traditional or outbound marketing focuses on paid campaigns, mostly, which require a lot more money to invest.
Inbound marketing comes with different marketing strategies, but these are some of the popular ones that attract the audience;
- Blog posts
- E-books
- Vlogs or video blogs
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- White paper
- Infographics, etc.
Through all of these ways, businesses provide information that potential customers are looking for. This is how eCommerce businesses and other businesses can grab the attention of the customers by intriguing their minds to know even more.
Whereas outbound marketing requires a lot of money to invest, inbound marketing requires a comparatively lesser expenditure on it.
To evaluate if the marketing approaches are working as per planning, Return on Investment or ROI plays a very crucial role. Determining the ROI with traditional marketing is not very easy to do. But with inbound marketing, you can do it pretty easily.
You can determine the ROI, and based on it; you can understand if all your inbound marketing approaches are working well. According to the result, you can decide on your next marketing strategies to generate more qualified leads to make even more sales.
Is Inbound Marketing for eCommerce Business?
Marketing is an ever-evolving topic. Consumer behavior is always changing. So what is working now might be obsolete a few days later.
Let’s have a look at how this is happening,
- In the USA alone, 79% of Smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile devices in the last six months of the year 2018. Again, 40% of all the holiday eCommerce purchases happen on a Smartphone device.
These data show, most of the potential customers get to know and interact with a business mostly through mobile and tab sorts of devices. So, having a mobile and cross-browser friendly website is essential.
- Online purchases are made with different social media as well. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are now a very prominent medium of huge shopping potential. An eCommerce business owner needs to utilize that for sure.
- Voice search is getting popular every day. With the up-gradation of Artificial Intelligence, people are getting more prone to it. The increasing demand for Amazon Echo and Google Home is the evidence of it.
What do you find out from these data?
It proves previously mentioned words. Ecommerce business is continuously growing and evolving. It is changing at a very first pace, and it doesn’t rely on a single platform.
So, inbound marketing works tremendously well for this evolving and ever-changing eCommerce business. It is more applicable when the marketing campaigns need to be done in a tight budget.
But to make a thriving inbound marketing strategic plan, thoughtful and valuable content needs to be created. So even though the cost is comparatively less, the creative team has to come up with brilliant ideas.
These creative minds are the ones who will make the content that would stand out among all those cluttered content. Without adequately optimizing the inbound marketing opportunities for an eCommerce business, it is quite challenging to achieve success.
These are some of the goals that can be achieved through implementing inbound marketing for your eCommerce business,
- Attracting and increasing visitors to your website,
- To provide genuine value through your content to the prospective customers,
- Making people more curious about your brand and what you offer to them,
- Increasing the conversion rate; that means converting the qualified leads,
- Increasing the amount of order,
- To Increase the lifetime value of your brand,
- Building a long-lasting relationship with the customers.
How Inbound Marketing Contributes to the Success of an eCommerce Business
As it is already previously mentioned that according to Hubspot, inbound marketing does five core services. Along with these core services, there are some supporting services. These supporting services also play a massive role in the success of an eCommerce business.
With the core inbound marketing services, you have to combine these three elements like optimizing the Content Management System or CMS based website, posting quality content, and leveraging social media.
Now let’s dive into the core services of inbound marketing,
Attract
Here in this core service of inbound marketing, you try to attract potential ideal customers. In doing so, you strive to provide them with the valuable information they need to know before making the final purchase decision.
This way, you start promoting your business to them.
In the process of it, you have to do some tasks. For example, to identify the target audience, to do thorough keyword research, creating and posting valuable blogs to your content management system or CMS based website, last but not the least social media interaction with potential customers.
Inbound marketing is the first part of all marketing campaigns. So, to begin with, firstly, you have to identify your target audience. You have to know what do they want and what their journey is, and where you can bring an impact. This way, you will connect more with them emotionally.
So, take enough time to create an accurate buyer persona. It would make the works easier later.
Keyword research is a must for creating valuable blog posts. It would let you know what your target audience is currently looking for. You can create blog posts targeting those keywords with useful information. Through organic search results, your website will get those target customers.
It is prevalent to look for where the target audiences mostly hang out in social media. You can choose to be active on those mediums and share valuable content to get a notice from those potential customers. Trying to grow your eCommerce business followers on social media is always a good idea, I must say.
Convert
After you are successful in attracting potential clients to your website, it’s time to convert them into your leads. You can do it when you know them enough.
For continuing interaction with potential customers, the common practice is to collect their contact details. There are some ways that you can embrace, to manage those leads.
Creating lead magnets like e-book, whitepaper, guides, forms, etc. can help convert the website visitors into leads through the exchange of information.
Then, you can use CTAs or Call-to-Action to your website. These would help the minds of the visitors of your website to take action while being on there. These CTAs would also help to get information from those visitors.
Grow
Its time to nurture your leads. There are so many marketing automation platforms that would help you to create an effective marketing funnel for your eCommerce business.
You can do the task manually as well without getting the help of any marketing automation platform. But this will be a real challenge for you to do. To find out if you are doing it in the right way, you can ask yourself these following questions.
- Are you collecting the email address of the qualified visitors?
- Are you classifying those leads according to some criteria that serve your purpose well?
- Have you created an automated workflow targeting those leads?
Can you answer all of the previous questions positively? If not, then you are letting your customers go in vain. It is not healthy for your eCommerce business.
Having a solid plan for the growing list is crucial. It is found that the average online shopping cart abandonment rate is around 70%. Can you imagine what impact it would have brought to your business if you could lessen the number?
Delight
Now the leads are flowing in and impacting your sales significantly. It’s time to make them true friends or loyal customers to your brand. Make them so satisfied with your offer that they start promoting your business to other people. Word of mouth still works in the world of marketing.
Here you have to apply some differentiating factors of your business that would amuse the customers. It would have a longer impression in their minds. Again here you can use some automation platform that would do some tasks on your behalf like;
- After the purchase is complete, it would send personalized messages with different alluring offers with the CTAs.
- It would send a reminder for the customers who purchase frequently.
- Re-engage with the former customers with special offers.
- It would design different incentives to retain customers.
These are some of the prominent ways you can increase a customer’s lifetime value. The activities mentioned above will make a customer satisfied with your eCommerce business services. It would ultimately help to create a good reputation and build a strong brand.
Analyze
You have implemented all the inbound marketing strategies. It needed money that you gladly invested in, expecting a positive outcome. Now, how would you know if all the tasks of inbound marketing for eCommerce business worked or not?
The answer is through analytics and measuring.
It can be a bit overwhelming at the beginning. After some studies, you will get used to it, and things will get clearer about the data and analytics. There are so many tools that are there to make your works a lot easier.
You would get the insight about the journey of a visitor to your website. According to it, you can optimize your website. This way, you can increase the likelihood of conversion.
Wrapping Up
With the change of consumer behaviors, marketing tactics are also changing with it. People now find the traditional ways of marketing very much distracting. They are choosing every possible way to avoid those distractions. So inbound marketing tactics are here to stay.
Ecommerce businesses need to implement inbound marketing tactics to achieve their goals. It costs very little, and the result of it remains for so long. Moreover, the return of investment also tends to be more than the rest.
So, it is quite impossible to ignore the need for inbound marketing for an eCommerce business to attain the ultimate success.
What are you waiting for?
Implement inbound marketing in your eCommerce business and witness the result without further delay.
inbound marketing concept -DepositPhotos
