Marketing

5 Examples of Excellent Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Team Pepper
Posted on 23/12/216 min read
5 Examples of Excellent Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Table of Contents

  • What Is Inbound Marketing?
  • Importance of Inbound Marketing 
  • Benefits Of Using Inbound Marketing
  • Some Examples of Inbound Marketing?
  • 5 Real-Life Examples of Inbound Marketing
  • Key Takeaways
  • Conclusion
  • FAQs

An essential part of any business is to acquire new customers. Till recently, most businesses relied on outbound marketing to obtain their customers. However, consumer behavior is continuously changing today, and using outbound marketing strategies can sometimes turn customers away.

Using inbound marketing strategies for your business helps build loyalty and establish a relationship with your customers. So, instead of chasing customers as is done in outbound marketing, inbound marketing strategies focus on getting customers to approach you. If you’re planning to start inbound marketing strategies for your business, then here is all the information you need about inbound marketing. We also give you the five best inbound marketing examples that you can use to pull in customers.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Before diving into the best inbound marketing campaigns, let’s define inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is a smart strategy that you use to drive potential customers to your business rather than advertising your services and products to them. It’s designed to help businesses attract, engage and delight customers while at the same time driving growth.

The main idea of inbound marketing is to familiarize customers with your brand and its offerings. It focuses on making a good impression and has higher chances of prospects going with your services or products.

Importance of Inbound Marketing

You should use inbound marketing for your business because it helps you build trust with your leads who show interest in your services or products. This is very important if your brand has long sales cycles where prospects take the time to research or look at the advantages and disadvantages before buying a product.

Let’s say you’re selling social media management software. Customers use the platform to schedule tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram posts. It’s an investment they are going to make. So, although your pricing is competitive and fair, customers will make sure to research competitor pricing and educate themselves about all the options available before making the purchase. 

Take a look at some great inbound marketing examples online before developing your own to understand how inbound marketing is done right.

Benefits of Using Inbound Marketing

Instead of using traditional outbound marketing strategies such as email lists, generating leads, and purchasing ads, use inbound marketing that focuses on quality content to drive traffic to your website.

Some of the main benefits of inbound marketing are as follows:

  • Increases brand awareness
  • Cost-effective
  • Increases customer conversion
  • Helps to build long-term relationships with your customers
  • Drives high-quality leads
  • Educates prospects

Some Examples of Inbound Marketing

You can use several unique tactics when it comes to inbound marketing. Some examples of inbound marketing tactics are as follows:

Blogs

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When it comes to inbound marketing, a blog is one of the best ways to answer customer questions. According to HubSpot, marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to receive a positive ROI. So, the more value your blog adds and the more consistent you are with updating your blog with fresh, valuable content, there is higher the chance of you becoming a trusted brand.

Infographics

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Written content is a great marketing tool. But, people do not always have the patience and time to read long-form content. Sometimes, they just want to go through insightful data presented in an acceptable format quickly. So, if you share information in the form of infographics, there’s a great chance that it may generate a lot of buzz.

Whitepapers

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Whitepapers are well-researched pieces of educational content that are in-depth and add a lot of value. It has a more formal tone than a regular blog post. Prospects who download whitepapers are always expecting to get higher degrees of depth, rigor, value, and originality.

Ebooks

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The benefits that come with an ebook are similar to a whitepaper. It’s another excellent opportunity to develop your brand. An ebook is usually exchanged for customer contact information and is free of charge. If you are looking to use an ebook in your inbound marketing strategy, then make sure to take the task seriously as you will be writing a book. This implies a high level of sophistication. You must use the ebook content format for your best material.

5 Real-Life Examples of Inbound Marketing

Here are 5 of the best inbound marketing campaigns you must consider before using inbound marketing for your business.

1. Dell

The first one on the list of inbound marketing campaign examples is Dell. Dell is a successful player in computer marketing. For years, the company has been using inbound marketing strategies to encourage customer participation and feedback for product development. 

The brand’s marketing team engages with its customers by building brand trust by answering customer queries and sharing in-depth videos and articles to provide quality content to their audience. It’s one of the best examples of inbound marketing tactics brands could use to grow their business. 

2. Cisco

Cisco, the market leader in IT and networking in the United States, launched a campaign in 2016 that showed how the brand is making a change in the world of work. It featured customer success stories and highlighted how the brand drives innovation in various fields. By using inbound marketing, Cisco reinforced the brand’s value and was also able to create valuable content for the audience.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the number one leading social B2B network globally, with around one billion active monthly users. Since it’s on the top, LinkedIn constantly has to create informative and interesting content daily. LinkedIn’s content includes guides for LinkedIn campaigns, infographics, webinars, tips for all types of businesses, SlideShare presentations, and e-books.

In 2016, it launched the Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn, which was downloaded 10,000 times within just the first 30 days. LinkedIn converted more than a third of its readers to customers through this. There were about 3,000 new registrations as well after the seminar. 

4. SAP

One of the largest software companies globally, SAP serves around 400,000 customers in about 180 countries. Since it has a diverse clientele, the company needs to provide a wide range of content that fits each customer. 

SAP uses inbound marketing strategies for all customer groups while maintaining a consistent feel and look. They created bespoke messages for every industry, allowing them to appeal to all their customers.

5. Salesforce

Even Salesforce, the popular CRM company, had problems maintaining steady leads and traffic. This is one of the reasons they had to put in place an inbound marketing strategy to increase the search results. Their content marketing tactics included creative marketing and sales videos, the first stop-motion Slideshare, and a Prezi presentation on a customer success story.

Key Takeaways

  • Inbound marketing is a strategy used to drive potential customers to your business rather than advertising your services and products to them.
  • It’s designed to help businesses attract, engage and delight customers while at the same time driving growth.
  • You should use inbound marketing for your business because it helps you build trust with your leads who show interest in your services or products.
  • Inbound marketing is critical if your brand has long sales cycles where prospects take the time to research or look at the advantages and disadvantages before buying a product.
  • Some of the main benefits of inbound marketing are to increase brand awareness, cost-effectiveness, increase customer conversion, help to build long-term relationships, drive high-quality leads, and educate prospects.

Conclusion

These are some of the best inbound marketing examples that you can use for your business. However, it’s essential to keep in mind that not all tactics work for every type of business. You will notice that one or two of these tactics may fit your business needs. The key is to understand your customer’s needs and develop an inbound marketing strategy that works best for you.

FAQs

1. How to create an inbound marketing strategy?

You can create an inbound eCommerce marketing strategy in the following way:
– Building buyer personas
– Set your inbound marketing strategy objectives
– Outline your customer’s marketing triggers
– Create a list of keywords
– Align content to the buyer’s journey
– Create a lead nurturing process
– Conversion-focused blogging
– Build a team of inbound marketing strategy experts.

2. What is the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing?

With outbound marketing, you proactively reach out to consumers to get them interested in your services or products. However, you create the right content with inbound marketing and distribute it smartly to pull consumers to you.

3. What are the four stages of inbound methodology?

The four stages of inbound methodology are to attract, convert, close, and delight.

4. What are examples of inbound marketing?

Some examples of inbound marketing are topical blogs, social media campaigns, Ebooks, search engine optimized website text, viral videos, and web-based seminars.

5. What are the four types of marketing strategies to spice up your campaigns?

The 4 types of marketing strategies to spice up your campaigns are cause marketing, relationship marketing, scarcity marketing, and undercover marketing.