On Thursday, July 9, 2020, Francisco Revello, who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management and Administration from Universidad ORT Uruguay and currently serves as Digital Marketing Manager for EMEA at Looker (Ireland), gave a presentation on inbound marketing—a method for attracting customers through useful and relevant content that adds value to the customer journey.
Digital marketing is a trend that has taken the world by storm in recent years. This tool, which has revolutionized the world of marketing, is rapidly evolving and offers endless possibilities.
In this context, Francisco Revello, who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management and Administration from Universidad ORT Uruguay, a Master’s degree in Digital Marketing from the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, and currently serves as Digital Marketing Manager, EMEA, at Looker (Ireland ), delivered the webinar “Inbound: Non-Intrusive Digital Marketing” on Thursday, July 9, 2020. The event was part of the Management and Business Lecture Series.
Inbound marketing: What is it?
Inbound marketing is a marketing methodology that emerged as an alternative to outbound marketing. The main difference from the latter is that, instead of “pushing a message toward the audience,” it seeks to organically attract customers’ interest.
Typically, through traditional digital marketing channels, marketers capture the attention of their potential customers by interposing themselves between the customers and whatever is currently capturing their interest. The appearance of pop-ups when we visit websites is a clear example. Inbound marketing is diametrically opposed to that approach:
“We’ve gone from interrupting people’s attention to becoming the very thing they’re paying attention to,” Revello explained.
One of the most important components of inbound marketing is voluntary engagement: “We connect only with people who are interested in our product or service,” the expert noted.
The Four Stages of Inbound Marketing
To implement a marketing strategy of this kind, it is necessary to develop a process consisting of the following phases: attraction, conversion, closing, and retention: “In these four phases, we move from working with strangers to eventually gaining brand advocates,” said Revello.
The first phase is the conversion phase, in which the goal is to turn strangers into qualified visitors, as Francisco Revello explained: “It’s not about generating traffic just for the sake of it, but rather about specifically attracting people who may be interested in our content.”
Subsequently, in this conversion phase, the goal is to transform those qualified visitors into contactable individuals through calls to action or landing pages that encourage them to take a specific action.
The closing phase is the “one-on-one” phase. In this phase, the goal is to engage the contacted individuals in a personalized way to establish a business relationship: “It’s important to conduct a follow-up to notify the sales executive if there is a potential customer,” explained the current marketing manager at Google Ireland.
Finally, in the loyalty phase, the focus is on people who have already made a purchase but who can become brand advocates: “The goal is to maximize post-purchase customer satisfaction to the point of turning them into future tools for attracting new customers,” Revello noted.
Communicating with the customer throughout the customer journey
To explain the type of content that should be created in each case, Revello introduced the concept of the “buyer persona”: “It’s a way of personifying an individual who represents our ideal customer. This person has feelings, motivations, and frustrations, which serve to fuel our content strategy.”
Based on this fictional person, a buyer journey is mapped out, which is the customer journey leading up to the final choice of a service or product. In this way, Francisco Revello explained that the key is to combine the buyer persona with their buyer journey to create a framework that allows us to communicate with each client at any time.
Final Conclusions
The digital marketing expert explained that there is likely no company that relies solely on inbound marketing strategies. However, this tool is becoming increasingly valuable.
“The best approach is to use a mix of inbound and outbound marketing,” Revello said, “but inbound marketing will continue to gain ground because it can deliver steady, consistent results and allows for long-term growth.”