In the modern world, customers can choose to receive a variety of communications. Traditional B2B marketing tactics such as TV, radio, telephonic, booth, and email advertising are no longer as effective as they once were. Mr. Sitthinan Polvisutsak, Co-Founder Content Shifu reveals all the science of Inbound Marketing, an important marketing strategy that B2B businesses must do today.

Inbound Marketing delivers value to the right customers, the right place, and the right time.

Originally, businesses would send sales messages, promotions to offer to customers. Inbound Marketing is to deliver value to customers through content, send more and more until gaining trust from customers Make the business go well. Therefore, the principle of Inbound Marketing is to create valuable content. Delivering to the right people at the right time brings sustainable business results. Khun Sitthinan emphasized that getting business results back is important. Not just doing content, but not getting anything back.

Khun Sitthinan mentioned 3 reasons that make the Inbound Marketing strategy effective because

1) People don't like being sold. But people like to buy without being pushed a lot

2) Advertising is everywhere. But less efficiency and higher price

3) Inbound Marketing will build a long-term business by sharing business knowledge with customers, will make us become experts who are trusted by customers

Inbound Marketing Flywheel Concept

At present, marketing has shifted from the Funnel concept, screening the target audience to become customers, to the Flywheel concept, where the customer is the center of the wheel that consists of Marketing, Sales and Service, and has a process to meet their needs. of customers as follows:

- Attract and Engage: Getting customers to find our business attract customers to come to us online collect customer information Foster strangers (Stranger) who have just come to know our business. turn him into a potential customer Ready to buy (Prospect), then create interactions (engage) to become customers (Customers).

- Engage and Delight: Interaction It's not a sales pitch that annoys customers. But talking to customers when they are free and managing to talk to customers in large quantities.

- Delight and Attract: Delight, make customers become promoters, persuade new strangers to become new customers. This keep spinning the faster the wheel spins. The customer base grows accordingly, and most importantly, Inbound Marketing focuses on helping customers solve problems by themselves through various Knowledge Bases. as well as having a large number of customer care management systems including measuring customer satisfaction

Pros and Cons of Inbound vs Outbound Marketing

In Khun Sitthinan's opinion, Inbound and Outbound marketing have different advantages and disadvantages. Inbound Marketing is the content creation to deliver value to customers. Doing it in the beginning requires investing without seeing immediate results. But over time, more and more results will be obtained. while the cost remains the same. In contrast, Outbound Marketing is the purchase of various forms of advertising. The result will be according to the amount of advertising paid.

The advantage of Inbound is lasting results. While the disadvantage is that the results are not always financially variable, the results are slow (6 months-1 year depending on the industry). You can guess according to the budget that goes down. The disadvantage is that the results are not sustainable. If you don't pay, the results will be lost.

However, businesses may choose to use Inbound and Outbound marketing according to the situation such as new business openings. with not long hemp If you want fast results, start with Outbound first, and when you start getting leads from people who are very interested, you start doing Inbound that will help your business grow sustainably.

What is the difference between Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing?

The similarity of these 2 strategies is to create valuable content for customers. The difference is that Inbound Marketing focuses on winning business with content, while Content Marketing focuses on grabbing people's attention with content. Khun Sitthinan sees that Content Marketing is a part of Inbound Marketing. Another difference is that Inbound Marketing will bring a lot of technology to help. Content Marketing will depend on knowledge and creativity.

Things to know before starting inbound marketing

- Know our own business: understand that our business How do you exist in the online world? The data can be searched through various online tools such as SEOptimer, Search Console, Google Analytics, Social Analytics.

- Understand customers: who our customers are, their backgrounds, likes and dislikes. Who are the stakeholders? What's the problem or need? Then make it out as a persona through interviews with customers. Interview Sales Use Google Analytics to get the team on the same page. and be able to accurately convey messages to each customer in an appropriate manner

- Study competitors: Who are the competitors? do something good or bad Can be viewed through online tools such as Similarweb, etc.

Summary of 3 Principles of Inbound Marketing

- Website: In doing Inbound Marketing, the website is the most important. Because the website is our real property. Can be customized to suit your business and used as a storage for the content that we created by providing Search Engine, Social Media links to find the difference between website content and social media is content ownership that we own the content on the website. But if we do social media We do not own the information on the Platform. More importantly, having a website makes your business look credible. And it is found on Search Engines. This is because social media is not used to search. but is used to create interactions. As a result, your content will deteriorate over time.

- Content: There are many types of content. which to choose what kind of content to do Use the principles of FCB Grid and Content Matrix theories. Choose to create content formats that meet your business needs and communication goals, such as B2B businesses, which are mostly classified as High Involvement Thinking as products and services that are difficult to understand. Made to solve problems Information is essential for decision making. Therefore, we choose to do educational content (Educate) such as E-Book, Report, Infographic, Article, Video, Resource Review, etc.

- Content Promotion : Can be done through Search (On-Page/Off-Page SEO), Social Media. By choosing a platform that is suitable for the business model, offline channels such as seminars, events, book releases, etc., and the Search Ad, which offers solutions to people who are having problems who come to Search Google to find a solution. It is an advertisement that does not interfere with users.

In this regard, when doing Inbound Marketing, attracting people to collect Lead, information of interested people by stimulating interest in people to do something such as Subscribe / Click via landing page and use various Lead Generation Tools, then have to convert to create business results which Lead. Customers who have become customers with purchasing power. but may not be ready to make a purchase right now Therefore, it is necessary to nurture those customer leads with Marketing Automation tools and processes until the customer finally decides to buy products and services from us.

Interested in Inbound Marketing, learn more at Content Shifu's website.

https://contentshifu.com/pillar/inbound-marketing

Source: Webinar, SCB IEP project, version 17 B2B Digital Commerce: open the game to invade online, increase B2B business sales on May 12, 2022