Inbound Marketing Trends: From Blogs to Chatbots

“Get yours now! Don’t miss this incredible chance!”. In traditional advertising, the sale came first and it was what mattered the most. That sort of bombardment slowly fell into disuse with the advent of the digital market, the new client profiles and the huge competition that took place in new marketplaces where it was fundamental to seduce the users through relevant content that would make them want to establish a relationship with the brand and make a purchase. There, inbound marketing or attraction marketing began its journey.

Why’s Inbound Marketing a Good Idea?

Attraction marketing puts users at the centre of the experience, which allows them to feel important and build trust in their interactions with a company. Their needs and problems come first. Companies seek to amuse, entertain, inform or help their clients. They make an effort to speak their language and carry out research in the channels in which the users move and consume. And this all translates into reputation and trust in brands.

The inbound marketing cycle includes these main stages:

• Attract: In this initial stage, it is important to find users, spark interest in them with useful content and catch their attention with answers that will clear any doubt they may have.

• Convert: Once they’re hooked, they enter the orbit of a possible sale. It’s necessary to keep on reinforcing their interest and to continue to build trust through knowledge and relevant content.

• Close: In this stage, the sale is closed, completing our initial goal for which we offered quality content. During the purchase, we answer both rational concerns as well as emotional considerations.

• Loyalty: If we pay attention to the whole journey, we will optimise a complete and satisfactory experience, gaining a loyal client that will return to our brand and become a brand advocate.

These Are Some of the Channels that Are Booming in Attraction Marketing.

As we have seen, content comes first in inbound marketing: quality content, unique, different and useful; content that sets our brand apart and that is, most importantly, attractive and interesting for users. In this context, some channels have experienced a greater boom than others:

• Social Networks: It doesn’t matter if it’s LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, etc. That will depend on a company’s goals and its buyer person. Social networks are currently an essential part of marketing strategies. They offer a direct and intimate approach to the target audience and they allow us to know their interests and to interact with them.

• Blogs: Whether inside our own company or in related sites, blog content has experienced a comeback. No! Blogs are not a thing of the past! Blogs have been reinforced and refined with content that is more editorial than purely commercial. Precisely, LinkedIn and Twitter are social networks that work to perfection when it comes to getting your blog content to have more and better visualisations and segmenting your target.

• Podcast: It’s one of the newest additions to the sales cycle. It approaches potential customers in a more amicable and humanised way, with fresh and elaborate content, showing the ideas, inspirations and goals of a brand.

Keys to Succeeding in the Sales Cycle

• Put yourself in the user’s shoes.

• Pamper the content.

• Analyse the data that your clients offer you.

• Don’t be scared of trial and error.

• Dare to experiment with new formats.

• Identify the channels that work best for you.

• Personalise interactions and customer experiences.

• Get all departments involved in your marketing strategy.

    
  Main Trends that Will Drive the Future of Inbound Marketing

  The future of marketing, like many other commercial environments, will be marked by the development and innovation in the field of AI. A practical example is that there is a forecast of growth and improvement of chatbots that tells us that they will be able to give answers and offer experiences that are much more human and friendly.
  We are moving towards a goal of target audience hypersegmentation as a means to offer a direct and unique experience to each customer. And constantly improving digital channels functionalities will play a major role in this.

  Attraction Marketing seeks to spark interest and attract clients by offering quality content that is useful to them and that will help them close a sale. Being extra careful of this content, identifying interesting channels and offering an increasingly personalised experience is the key to succeeding.

  Article written in collaboration with Jocelyn Márquez, Julie Villarreal, Johana Quiñonez, Michiel Das.