This post was originally published on November 3, 2021, and updated on April 21, 2023.
Information in this blog post was obtained from the HubSpot Blog, SemrushBlog, and Sprout Social.
Spam emails, annoying pop-up ads, and video ads in the middle of your content – they’re rarely welcome or effective in swaying an opinion about a product or service in a positive direction. They may even hurt your purchase decision. And yet, we are exposed to as many as 2,000 of these messages daily! It’s no wonder that methods of circumventing these marketing efforts are on the rise.
This method of reaching consumers is inefficient at best, and intrusive at worst. As a marketing professional, you want to reach customers in the hopes of maintaining long-term relationships. There are two common methods of accomplishing this goal.
Traditional sales involve outbound marketing that distributes a message to consumers. More specifically, Brian Halligan for HubSpot defines outbound marketing as “a traditional method of marketing seeking to push messaging out to potential customers.” Halligan suggests that this form of marketing is more expensive and has a lower ROI when compared to its counterpart: inbound marketing.
Halligan defines inbound marketing as “a strategy where you create content or social media tactics that spread brand awareness so people learn about you, might go to your website for information, show interest in your product, and potentially make a purchase.”
Pull Marketing
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on attracting customers by creating and sharing relevant and useful content, rather than interrupting them with unwanted messages. It is about creating a long-term relationship with customers by providing value and building trust.
Outbound marketing, on the other hand, is a traditional method of marketing that seeks to push messages out to potential customers. It is often seen as more expensive and less effective than inbound marketing.
Three Ways to Reach Consumers Through the Inbound Methodology
Ultimately, this marketing strategy is about meeting potential customers where they already are: online. Further, it’s about bringing customers to your business hub (your website) via the “Attract, Engage, Delight” model.
To learn about the complete model, visit the HubSpot post. In this article, however, we’ll focus on the “Attract” stage and three ways to use social media marketing to reach consumers through the inbound methodology.
Your process will involve the following:
Targeting the right audience
"Drawing in" your audience with relevant content
Evolving your communications for optimal results
Target the Right Audience
According to Kelly Lyons in an article for Semrush Blog, developing an inbound marketing strategy starts with understanding your audience. To properly reach individuals and “pull” them towards your marketing content, you need to understand everything from basic demographics to more detailed behavior. Semrush offers a Traffic Analytics Tool that can help to gain insight as to where you can best meet your audience.
You can also learn more about the composition of your existing social media audience when you visit the analytics section of a particular social media platform. For example, Facebook Business Suite offers an Insights page that provides a breakdown of your follower demographics including age, gender, and location. These demographics can then give clues as to how your target audience interacts on specific social media platforms.
When you truly understand your audience and how they utilize the various platforms, you will align with the inbound marketing strategy Halligan likens to “lions hunting in the jungle for elephants.” Even when the elephants have migrated to a different location, the lions continue to hunt in the jungle. However, they should be following the elephants to their new watering hole (in our case, the proper online and social media channels). So make sure that in targeting your audience, you are following your potential customers to their actual location.
Lyons also emphasizes the importance of creating your inbound social media marketing campaigns where the majority of your customers interact. Thus, you will want to analyze the platforms on which your audience is most active to maximize engagement with your social media efforts.
“Draw In” Your Audience with Relevant Content
Once you determine the social media platforms on which your target audience lives, it’s time to develop content that will attract their attention. According to Mahnoor Shelkh for Sprout Social, “The first stage of inbound marketing strategy is about attracting potential leads and making them aware of your business and its offerings.”
How you attract your audience will depend on the audience itself and the platform on which you are working to reach them. However, general content creation ideas for social media include user-generated content, blog post promotion, quizzes, polls, holiday content, giveaways, and more.
As you’re organizing this content, it’s important to ensure that you maintain consistency in your content and regularity in your posting frequency. Content calendars serve as a great tool to manage content and save time as you do so. The SMMU highlights the essentials of creating a content calendar specific to your company in this article.
With your content fully planned, you will be able to consistently interact with your audience via various forms of social media posts. If you’re maintaining several social media accounts at once, content calendars will also allow you to “draw in” your target audience which may be slightly different from platform to platform. To effectively reach each of these audiences, you’ll need to be sure to customize content. Cross-posting may save time but it may also hamper the relationship-building power of your inbound strategy.
Evolve Your Communications for Optimal Results
Even as you harness this power with social media campaigns and posts, Lyons notes that it is never too late to modify your content calendar. If you notice that types of posts are performing better than others, you might adapt your content strategy to feature more of these posts. Additionally, if posts garner more engagement during certain times of the day, you might schedule your posts during these windows.
No matter how you modify your social media content strategy, an essential step of the inbound marketing process is to analyze your results and modify your plan to optimize your return. Regardless of the platform you use, be sure to dig into essential engagement measures such as views, likes, shares, clicks, comments, and more, to gauge your audience’s response to your communication. You can utilize a social media management platform like HubSpot or HootSuite for this task. Alternatively, you can investigate the analytics section of each social media platform to discover the content that furthers your inbound strategy.
Keep on Building!
Following this analysis, you can continue the process by building upon what you have learned about your audience and the content that creates engagement. When you interact with your audience via meaningful content that meets potential consumers in their “natural habitat,” you’ll be doing far more than avoiding the spam folder in their email inbox. You’ll be forming relationships with consumers that help attract them to your products and services. You’ll draw them to the characteristics that make your business unique and ultimately successful. You’ll be maximizing the potential of social media. And finally, you’ll be successfully reaching your consumers' thanks to the pull of inbound marketing.
Resources
Halligan, B. (2021, October 9). Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing. HubSpot. https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/2989/inbound-marketing-vs-outbound-marketing.aspx
Lyons, K. (2021, August 9). What is inbound marketing & how does it work? Semrush Blog. https://www.semrush.com/blog/inbound-marketing/
Mahnoor Sheikh (2020, February 10). What is inbound marketing and why is it important? Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/inbound-marketing/