Are you looking to increase qualified leads and drive business growth? Inbound marketing may just be the answer.

Inbound marketing is the art of attracting customers through the creation of carefully targeted, entertaining and educational content. Inbound interactions are relevant and helpful to your audience, rather than being interruptive.

Following the four stages of the inbound methodology, you can capture new traffic, convert visitors in to leads, close a sale and cultivate an army of repeat customers and brand advocates, driving real business growth.

Stage 1: Attract

One way to increase revenue and drive business growth is by expanding your customer base. A great starting point for acquiring new customers is driving the right type of traffic to our websites. People who are interested in what we’ve got to offer are most likely to become leads (and customers). Start attracting the right people to your website by having your buyer persona always in mind.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character made up of the goals, challenges, pain points, personal and demographic information shared among members of a particular customer type - your personas then are your ideal customers.

By creating high quality content (such as website copy, blogs, social media posts and ebooks), which is highly targeted to the needs of your ideal customers, you’ll engage your audience. You’ll also rank higher in the results pages of search engines when they’re researching online, thus attracting higher volumes of qualified visitors to your website.

Stage 2: Convert

To grow a business, it’s not enough to simply attract potential customers; we need to convert these visitors into leads. An excellent starting point is to capture the email addresses of your visitors.

In order to capture contact information from your website visitors, you must provide them with something they will see value in, like ebooks, whitepapers, checklists or tip sheets. Whatever information you provide, make sure that it is written to appeal to your buyer persona.

Visitors will be happy to provide basic information - such as their name and email address - in exchange for valuable and educational content. The higher the perceived value of the content or offer, the more information you can ask for.

Stage 3: Close

So, you’ve attracted the right people to your website and you have their email addresses - now what?

Add your new contacts to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. By keeping all contact information in a central location, you can have quick access to your database and use it to understand and talk to your leads.

Create a series of relevant email marketing campaigns which will nurture your leads, providing them with the content they need to make informed decisions, drive sales and grow your business. If one of your leads has downloaded your whitepaper on a specific topic, you should send them a series of related emails which reflect their interests.

So; you just acquired a new customer… but inbound marketing doesn’t stop once you’ve accepted payment. There’s still one stage to go to help drive your business growth.

Stage 4: Delight

Inbound marketing is all about providing the right people with the right content in the right way - whether those people are visitors, leads or existing customers. Don’t stop engaging with your customers because you’ve made a sale. You should continue to build and maintain relationships with your customer base, delighting them with more high quality, relevant content. Thus, you can turn them into an army of repeat customers and promoters, happy to shout about your brand and your products or services.

If you’re not sure how to delight your customers, design a simple customer satisfaction survey to ensure that you are providing customers with the information they’re looking for and the service that they expect from you.

Drive Growth For Your Business

Using the inbound methodology, you can capture new traffic, convert web visitors in to leads, drive sales and increase both repeat custom and brand advocacy. By growing your customer base, building brand loyalty and using a successful content marketing strategy to establish yourself as an expert in your field, you can drive real business growth.

Check out our eBook to find out more about how inbound marketing can help drive growth for your business.