In one of our previous workshops, a participant raised a question if email marketing is relevant in today’s marketing approach.  Another question asked was if attempts of email marketing are destined for failure as many perceive email from service providers or businesses as spam.

Before we dive into ways to effective inbound strategy with email marketing, let’s first look into if email marketing strategy is at all fitting for you. This is to clear doubts that you have which are similar to our participants. We truly believe that acknowledging consumer patterns are important. What may work in US or Singapore, may not work locally. This is due to many factors such as internet literacy, internet usage proficiency, and marketing technology adoption rate.

We hear of content marketing more frequently now than we ever did before. No, it’s not new in the world of marketing but a rise in popularity is clearly observed, especially in the past 10 years. In Malaysia particularly, more and more businesses are paying attention and putting in increased intention into their content marketing efforts.

Do you ask yourself if your business requires content marketing? If energy and resources should be invested to create a content marketing strategy? If so, where do you even start?

Are you hitting a brick wall when it comes to generating new ideas? Well, you’re not alone as running dry is a dilemma for many content creators. Maybe you’re uninspired or maybe you’ve run out of topics to create content from. Whatever the reason may be, fret no more as we’ve compiled this guide on how to never run out of ideas.

Traditionally, one may understand marketing as a process of interesting prospects to buy a product or service offered. Here in Launchpad, we are believers in executing marketing the ‘inbound way’. Inbound marketing has a prime objective of creating a one-to-one relationship with its’ prospects by crafting content that aligns and fits the needs of prospects. Why is this necessary? Personalization is not just a fad but a necessity in ensuring the success of your marketing efforts. 

Inbound marketing is a great methodology to establish your business’ branding, generate qualified leads for your business, and to start a conversation with your audience and customers, among others.

Inbound marketing can be done by creating meaningful blog posts, infographics, and podcasts, establishing a strong social media page, search engine optimization and even by sending warm emails.

Before you embark into this form of marketing however, consider the following questions:

Laura Fitton, HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Evangelist, describes inbound marketing as

the art of marketing to make people actually want to consume your promotional material. It is focused on gradually building a lasting relationship with your target audience or content consumers to nurture towards making a purchase.

The benefits of inbound marketing to business publicity, lead generation and customer retention make it a highly effective marketing strategy. When implemented properly, inbound marketing can raise a business’s status from “little known” to the “go-to resource” in their respective industry. 

If you want to build a strong brand with inbound marketing, you should consider implementing the following tips.

There are two fundamental marketing techniques that every business adopts in their operation: inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

Inbound marketing involves attracting and engaging new clients through quality content (e.g. blog posts), establishing a social media presence, using SEO to rank up the company website and more.

Outbound marketing on the other hand, is a more traditional form of marketing; methods range from television ads to company calls and cold emails are a part of outbound marketing.

Both of these techniques have its benefits and drawbacks. Read on to find out more:

Lead nurturing best practices are often overlooked.

Lead nurturing is the act of guiding a lead to becoming your customer. To nurture a lead is to build rapport with them and show them that you are in fact a company that they can trust and expect a gain when they become your customer. Lead nurturing is an integral part of inbound marketing.

Before you start generating out content to your buyer personas, you need to understand the Buyer’s Journey and match your contents to each stage of the journey.

If you are not mapping your content to each of your buyer personas, you are missing a critical element in successfully understanding, organizing, and presenting your marketing content to your buyer personas.

Content mapping is a process of planning and organizing a library of marketing and sales content according to each of your buyer’s personas and the stages that they are in in the Buyer’s Journey. 

While content creation has its time in the limelight, organizing content is pivotal to any content creation strategy.