Inbound Marketing: definition and steps to optimize your web marketing

By Grégory Coste.

Published: October 24, 2024

Inbound marketing is a real driving force behind your digital marketing strategy.

But what exactly is inbound marketing, and what are the examples of companies that have succeeded thanks to it? And what approach should you adopt for your own company?

Let's lift the veil on inbound marketing, and see how this lever generates conversion and performance.

See all software Lead Generation

What is inbound marketing?

Definition of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing, in B2B or B2C, is defined as an inbound, permissive and effective marketing practice. It involves bringing the customer to you, rather than going to them yourself.

Thanks to such a strategy, you no longer have to seek out your customers through intrusive promotions, since they are attracted by your content and therefore come to you more naturally.

To achieve this, inbound marketing works on the principle of a conversion funnel, in 4 stages.

Here are the 4 key moments to optimize your web marketing:

Why choose inbound marketing?

Your communication is less intrusive for prospects. Thanks to the visibility you've gained on the Internet, notably through search engine optimization (SEO) or social networks, Internet users come across you "naturally", without feeling that they're being disturbed by your advertising. This makes them less suspicious of your brand.

Inbound marketing makes your communications more relevant and interactive. Use a content strategy to deliver messages that are relevant to the issues faced by your target audience. You'll convert more easily if you provide concrete answers to real problems.

Implementing an inbound marketing strategy costs less than developing an outbound strategy... and the results can be impressive! Ultimately, inbound delivers a very good ROI.

Acquiring a prospect through inbound marketing costs 61% less than through traditional marketing actions.

SLN Web

Interested in implementing an inbound marketing strategy? To familiarize yourself with the concept, let's take a look at the key stages.

Step 1: Attract through content marketing

The aim is to generate qualified traffic to your website by attracting visitors with quality content (advice, tips, etc.) that provides solutions to their problems.

At the same time, web users need to be able to find your website easily:

through search engines, mainly Google. This means optimizing the natural referencing of your site or blog: your content is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) optimized;
via social networks.

☝️Nous The opposite principle applies to advertising. By developing your content marketing in this way, you don't disturb your target audience, because you don't interrupt their program in a way that's sometimes too mercantile and intrusive (like TV advertising). You make them come to you in a much more natural and consensual way.

Step 2: convert and generate qualified leads

The visitors are here, on your website. Now's the time to build a relationship and gather information about them. You need to identify the "hot", "cold" and least interested contacts, and turn them into qualified leads. This is what we call a lead.

💡 Encourage your visitors to fill in their profiles, with a newsletter sign-up form for example.

Also in your newsletters, insert calls to action linking to landing pages dedicated to particular topics: each web page devoted to a specific theme optimizes your results in terms of data collection. This data is invaluable when it comes to recontacting targeted prospects.

Step 3: Close sales with lead nurturing

Ready to turn your prospects into customers? Thanks to the collection of qualified data mentioned above, you can now recontact these prospects until they become customers.

This is what's known as lead nurturing, a strategy that consists of accompanying your prospect with content, or even more commercial appointments, to help them mature their decision until the act of purchase.

Qualification and segmentation are essential here: you need to adapt to the theme you're looking for, and to the maturity of your prospect, in order to act at the right moment.

Step 4: Build customer loyalty and make them your ambassadors.

A returning customer who speaks highly of you is worth its weight in gold!

But customer satisfaction and customer relations must be nurtured on a daily basis: a loyal customer wants your proposals to continue, both in terms of content that nurtures them, and in terms of appropriate commercial promises.

Make sure they have only one thing to say: good things about you! This is what we call a promoter of your company, or a brand ambassador.

Examples of successful companies using inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a comprehensive strategy, which needs to be adapted to your company and your ambitions. It's well worth the effort, as many companies have succeeded thanks to a well-thought-out inbound strategy.

MRC Groupe, for example, has increased its sales by 50% in three years, thanks in particular to the development of its content marketing and the improvement of its SEO. The group, which assists companies with their compensation policies, has thus achieved a significant increase in its visibility on the web.
Apartment rental company Azur Online, for its part, also relied on inbound marketing to raise its profile, particularly via social networks. Thanks to the development of interactions with its customers, the company has been able to improve its offer.
Finally, let's mention iAdvize and its messaging platform. The company was able to offer increasingly relevant content to its audience, thanks to in-depth work on its personas and the implementation of A/B testing.

Inbound vocabulary: a language specific to digital marketing

To help you feel more at ease with inbound marketing, we've listed the main terms and their meanings below.

Persona

The term persona defines your ideal customer, as well as your different customer profiles (segment to sell better, always). It's also known as the buyer persona.

The main idea is to imagine one or more human characters, so you can get under their skin: find out their socio-demographic characteristics, and imagine the problems they face, so you can better respond to them. This practice has proven its effectiveness, even in the e-commerce sector.

Example of persona marketing:

Content marketing

Also known as content marketing, content marketing involves implementing an editorial strategy.

It's all about attracting your prospects with quality content, using a variety of formats to capture their interest and build audience loyalty: blog articles, infographics, white papers, instructional guides - these are all opportunities to distill your advice, demonstrate your expertise, and respond to the problems your potential customers face.

Natural referencing

Quality content is also designed to meet search engine requirements, i.e. optimized to be easily found on the web.

Customers type a query, a key expression, into a search engine like Google. Your goal is to appear in the first results that appear, so that your pages are more likely to be consulted by your potential customers. This is the objective of a natural referencing strategy, also known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Social media

In order to connect with consumers, your company also needs to be present on at least one professional social network (or social media) such as Linkedin, or other social networks like Twitter or Facebook... to name but the best-known!

Inbound marketing involves identifying and acquiring the audience present on these platforms, encouraging their engagement and directing qualified contacts to your website.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation, as the name suggests, automates a large number of marketing actions. This saves valuable time and improves team productivity.

Marketing automation actions are made possible by the use of dedicated software. For example, analytical tools can be used to intelligently segment communication targets (personas), thus stimulating prospects more effectively.

Lead generation

Lead generation refers to the interest shown in you by the web user: request for information, completion of an online form, newsletter subscription, etc.

Combine content marketing and marketing automation to accompany the surfer through each stage of the inbound marketing conversion funnel. This is sometimes referred to as the conversion tunnel.

Several tools become indispensable and must be compatible, intelligently interwoven with each other to refine all questions of prospect behavior analysis, data, etc. The aim is to perfect your marketing strategy. The aim is to perfect your marketing strategy and improve your conversion rate.

To broaden your field of vision, we list below a few relevant solutions for your customer relations.

🛠️ Professional emailing software :

GetResponse
SendinBlue
Message Business

🛠️ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) :

Team Leader
CRM Initiative
Sellsy

🛠️ Lead generation software :

Datananas
Webikeo
Sparklane

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing refers to traditional communication and marketing activities.

This includes all forms of advertising, as well as so-called " push" actions, where the company goes out to meet its prospects by sending them its commercial proposition, as in a classic direct marketing mailing, for example.

On the web, you've already come across this type of advertising: banner ads, adwords or Google adwords, sponsored links, and so on.