What is inbound marketing?
Marketing strategy is a balance of push and pull.
Traditional marketing methods – like promotional advertising or direct mail campaigns – are examples of outbound marketing where you “push” your business in front of customers. While important, it is more costly and can damage your company’s reputation if done poorly (think annoying cold calls or telemarketers – yikes!).
Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on “pulling” customers to your business through more natural customer exploration. Inbound marketing involves creating content or other valuable experiences at all stages of the customer journey. Instead of crafting the perfect sales pitch or pithy tagline, you focus on the needs of your customer and how you can start building a relationship built on trust and understanding.
What questions are your customers asking?
What concerns do they have?
How can your business help address those questions?
Through a well-planned content strategy answering these questions, you will organically attract more qualified customers to your business for less cost.
What is the sales funnel?
Speaking of attracting leads, we would be remiss to not explain the customer sales funnel.
For every purchase, customers move through a three-step journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. Some purchases – like deciding to buy a candy bar at the gas station – are quick with very little time spent in each phase. Customers are aware of candy brands ahead of time or exposed in the moment at the gas station, consider their purchase based on availability and past experience/word-of-mouth, and decide which candy bar to purchase in a matter of minutes.
Compare that to the customer experience when buying a car. A customer will do extensive research about makes and models over the span of days, weeks, or months. They will narrow their consideration set to a few cars that meet their criteria before eventually making a decision after weighing all their options.
So how does the sales funnel connect to inbound marketing?
These three phases – awareness, consideration, and decision – inform what content you should create to engage and move your customers along. Here at The Marketing Department, we use the acronyms TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU to describe the process.
TOFU: Top-of-funnel
MOFU: Middle-of-funnel
BOFU: Bottom-of-funnel
Over the next few weeks, we will guide you through the content and strategy behind each of these acronyms starting with the first course: TOFU.
TOFU Defined
The top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) focuses on marketing activities that drive awareness about your company or product. The goals of TOFU are:
Create brand/product awareness
Demonstrate your value and build credibility
Collect qualified customer leads
TOFU content should be accessible to a wide swath of people. The idea is to cast a large net, collect customer information, and advance high potential customers further down the funnel. Sounds like a job for traditional advertising, right?
We beg to differ.
Traditional advertising also aims to bring awareness to your brand and achieves that through screaming into the void. But TOFU content is structured so that your business is found when the customer is most receptive to listening.
More than 80% of consumers will do an online search before making a purchase decision. So even if you blast the airwaves with commercials about your services, the majority of customers will still end up Googling to solve their problem.
The key to TOFU is being the company that shows up with the answers.
TOFU Examples
TOFU marketing content is educational and non-promotional. You’re exposing potential customers to your brand by giving them something of value without pressuring them to make a purchase.
Examples of content in the TOFU stage:
Blogs
Social media
eBooks
Infographics
Podcasts
Are you feeling skeptical that giving away free content is the secret to business growth?
Look no further than the success of Montrose-based company Elevate Internet. After analyzing customer online behavior and researching competitive search keywords, Elevate published a blog series and corresponding social media posts to answer frequently asked questions by their customers. The blogs, “Bits versus Bytes: What does it all mean” and “So you lost your remote,” continue to drive thousands of website visits to the company every month.
And to toot our own horn a little bit, Rachael won a national gold award from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association for the strategy!
How to create TOFU content that converts
TOFU marketing content should show that your business is an expert in what you do. When done well, it will help you attract a larger pool of potential clients and grow your business.
To create TOFU content that converts, you’ll want to study the search terms that your customers are using, develop content in the format that resonates, and collect customer information to continue the conversation.
Overwhelmed thinking about how you’ll write blog posts, become a Google search expert, and create a viral-worthy infographic while also running your business? That’s where The Marketing Department can help.
You’re an expert at what you do. We’re experts in inbound marketing.
Reach out to our team for a 30-minute discovery call and keep your eyes on our blog to learn more about the other two content steps in the funnel: MOFU and BOFU.
