What is Inbound Marketing and how do you apply it?

Inbound marketing is doing business in a humane and helpful way. The customer is central to this. The goal of a company is to solve the customer's problem. This customer-centric approach cannot be properly represented via a classic marketing funnel, but it can be represented via a flywheel or flywheel. We explain how it works.

How does the flywheel work?

Satisfied customers lead to more customers and dissatisfied customers lead to fewer customers. It is precisely because of the many online review options that the satisfaction of your customers has a major influence on the acquisition of new customers. A classic funnel cannot reproduce this effect: a flywheel can. The energy that goes out on one side comes back in on the other. Satisfied customers lead to more satisfied customers. As a result, the marketing flywheel can keep itself spinning, unlike the marketing funnel.

The marketing flywheel consists of three steps: attracting potential customers, retaining customers and making customers happy. In English terms: attract, engage, delight. By making customers happy, you attract new potential customers. In inbound marketing, for example, the customer is central. With this vision, inbound marketing is opposed to outbound marketing or traditional marketing. In this, this effect is overlooked and is not part of the marketing strategy.

Attract customers with relevant content

You do not only attract, bind and make customers happy with the product or service you provide. You can do this by offering relevant content on your website. This content gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with your potential customer, build trust and become a thought leader in your field. So share your knowledge. In this way, your company page becomes a source where customers can go with questions and where they may also send others. You can see this as an extensive form of content marketing.

Here we discuss the question of how you can ensure that you attract customers through that content. There are three important components for this: SEO, topic clusters with pillar pages and buyer personas.

SEO

SEO increases your online findability and ensures that your website is higher in the organic search results. Various things play a role here, such as the speed, structure and security of your website. More content oriented are meta tags and internal links, but most importantly are keyword intent en subject authority.

Keyword intent is about not using tricks to mention a keyword as often as possible, such as keyword stuffing. Instead, write heartfelt lyrics on the subject. Topic authority means that search engines see that you are an expert in a certain area. You can ensure this by writing a lot about that particular topic.

Read more about SEO in us complete manual about this subject.

Pillar page

Topic authority can be obtained through so-called topic clusters. This is a cluster of web texts on a specific topic. It consists of a main page or pillar page. This forms an umbrella for about twenty blogs with subtopics. The pillar page is 1500 to 3000 words long and contains relevant information for your buyer persona. It's an in-depth text and is often titled 'the ultimate guide to A/B testing'.

This ultimate guide answers the question of the person who entered the keyword 'A/B test'. Of course you only create a pillar page for keywords with an adequate search volume† A page about A/B testing makes sense, a page about adaptive testing does not. The pillar page usually starts with a table of contents. This allows the reader to easily navigate to the different parts.

This pillar page is complemented by about twenty blogs on subtopics such as A/B tools or A/B testing for your app. You can generally find the topics for your blogs very simply by googling 'what', 'when' and 'where' in combination with your keyword.

topic cluster

Blogs and pillar page are linked by links. In this way they form a real cluster. You obviously use a content calendar to create your topic cluster. Here you provide an overview of titles, topics, SEO keywords, date of publication and more. Also don't forget to measure the results of your topic cluster.

Topic clusters improve the architecture of your website. Navigating the website is easier because you can move on from one relevant article to the next. Topic clusters also improve SEO impact, as search engines will notice that you are writing a lot of relevant content on a specific topic. This way you can bring in more potential customers.

Of course, the clusters also help with customer loyalty. After all, the clusters make your website an important source for your customers. The topic clusters are an important part of your inbound marketing in several ways.

Buyer Person

Although the pillar page and associated blogs are good for your SEO, you basically set up these topic clusters for your customers. Always keep the target audience in mind when writing your content.

This is best done by creating a buyer persona or several buyer personas. This is a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer based on data, customer interviews and common sense. You put together the buyer persona for your company based on input from as many employees as possible. Use the purpose of your company as a basis to create a profile of the ideal customer.

Keep the buyer persona in mind when writing and creating all your content. This way you not only ensure that your content is relevant to your customer, but also that you can write empathically more easily. You do not have an abstract target group in mind, but a concrete persona.

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