It is becoming ever harder to reach customers with some traditional marketing techniques, prompting the emergence of strategies such as inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is a process aimed at attracting the customer with various approaches such as useful and educational content, meant to help those who read it. This kind of strategy does not fight for customers’ attention, in contrast to outbound marketing.
These strategies are commonly associated with ways to reach your customer without direct costs and most of them are actually free of a financial cost, but keep in mind that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch — it takes some time to reach your customer and build a small community.
- Newsletters and emails
Newsletters and emails are two tools that are very important for customer retention, by keeping the customer up to date.
Emails and newsletters are supposed to help the customer, providing information on new blog posts or new products and generally keeping the customer engaged; they should not be strictly commercial because that only increases the probability of a user unsubscribing from the email list.
- Video
Video can be hard to record and expensive when done by media companies. Fortunately, there are simple-to-record movies that can be shared with your customers such as screen recordings of usability, which helps them to understand the various functionalities of a specific platform.
Video content is becoming more and more popular amongst consumers and, according to Cisco, in 2021 almost 17,000 hours of video content will be sent over the internet every second.
- Blog
Blog posts are extremely useful to help your customers, educate them and ultimately explain why your product is extremely useful for them.
As with other kinds of inbound marketing, it takes some time to build a reputation, engage with customers and get noticed as well as maintaining a good level of service, providing regular content to the user.
- Social
We already discussed various social networks and the way they work to target different groups in our previous post, 4 channels to reach your customer, but social media offers a couple of features that are more or less common to the various networks and useful in building a community around your brand, such as creating a page and sharing that page in your social media feed, inviting friends to like that page, and other strategies to promote it free of charge.
Companies with big teams can build big communities with this kind of strategies after all when their employees are happy, they are interested in the topics discussed and are likely to share the content posted on the page with their followers, so building an even bigger community.
- Social media groups
Creating a group on social networks for example, “Shoe retailers Portugal” or “World’s best shoes” is extremely useful in building a community. There is one thing that all the group’s members have in common, namely an interest in shoes, and group administrators may take advantage of this fact, once the group is big enough, by exposing the members to their products in a non-intrusive way.
Allowing different members to post interesting content in this kind of group gets them engaged in the group itself. Make sure you have both consumers and sellers in the group otherwise it will just be a group of people trying to sell their products to other sellers.
Usually this kind of marketing is used together with PPC campaigns to build a strong base of acquired customers to work with. Having a considerable number of users will get more attention for your blog posts and other kinds of content, possibly attracting more customers.
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