by Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach that focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting potential customers by delivering valuable, relevant, and helpful content.
The Inbound Methodology: Attract, Engage, Delight
- Attract: Draw in the right audience with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor.
- Engage: Present insights and solutions that align with your audience’s pain points and goals, increasing the likelihood of taking a desired action, like purchasing.
- Delight: Offer help and support experiences to empower your customers to find success with your product, fostering loyalty and advocacy.
The Flywheel Model: Driving Business Growth
The flywheel is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum you gain when you align your entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer service. The flywheel model places customers at the center, using their experiences to generate momentum for your business. By focusing on attracting, engaging, and delighting customers, you create a self-sustaining loop that drives growth.
The flywheel doesn’t eliminate funnels within your company, it complements them. It provides a broader framework to understand how your funnels fit into the bigger picture, aligning all teams around a shared goal: your company’s growth. While the flywheel represents your business as a cohesive system, you’ll still use funnel-shaped charts and graphs to measure the performance of specific processes. The key is to ensure these funnels work together to fuel your flywheel, creating momentum and driving sustainable growth.
What possible funnels exist within your flywheel? Here are three key examples:
- Marketing Funnel: This funnel attracts and excites potential customers by delivering engaging, educational, and valuable content. By building awareness and trust, the marketing funnel brings prospects into the flywheel, setting the stage for sustained engagement.
- Sales Funnel: Once prospects are engaged, the sales funnel takes over, converting them into paying customers. A well-optimized sales process builds on the trust and interest established during marketing, effectively transitioning prospects into loyal customers.
- Customer Success Funnel: After the sale, the focus shifts to ensuring that customers achieve success with your product or service. Delivering exceptional support and value turns satisfied customers into advocates who promote your brand, delighting them and driving further momentum in the flywheel.
Creating a Company Purpose
Inbound marketing is about helping your ideal customers find you when they need your solutions. To achieve this, you first need to understand the core purpose of your business. Why was your company founded? What mission is it here to fulfill? This is where concepts like The Golden Circle and Jobs Theory can provide valuable insights.
The Golden Circle, developed by Simon Sinek, emphasizes starting with “why.” Instead of focusing solely on “what” you do or “how” you do it, identify your deeper purpose, the reason your company exists. When you communicate your “why,” it resonates with your audience, building trust and loyalty. People don’t just buy what you sell; they buy why you sell it.
Jobs to Be Done (Jobs Theory), on the other hand, focuses on understanding what “job” your customers are hiring your product or service to do. This theory encourages businesses to look beyond demographics and instead understand the functional, emotional, and social needs driving customer decisions. By identifying the specific problem your business solves, you can position your solutions more effectively to meet those needs.
To apply the Jobs Theory, ask 10 to 12 of your costumers:
- Why did they buy your product or service?
- How long did they think about it before they made the decision?
- What was it that made them finally go through with the sale?
- Had they thought about buying before and not done it?
- Were they making do with something else (or nothing at all)?
- When did they realize they didn’t have to make do anymore?
- What were the series of events that transpired from that first realization to the time they became your customer?
After this, try to come up with a story that describes them all equally well. Once you have your story, ask yoursel:
- Why are people going through this story?
- What job are they trying to get done?
The answer will be their Job to Be Done.
Example of Job Story:
As a (who the person is),
when I am (the situation that person finds themselves in),
I want to (the motivation or action),
so that I can (the desired outcome).
After this, dig into the functional, financial, personal and social aspects of using your product. Once this has been done, compare your customer’s job story to your company’s purpose as it’s understood internally. If they don’t match up very well, your best way is to change the way you think and operate internally, to match the way your customers view you.
Identifying your company’s purpose is only the first step in the much larger challenge of rallying your company around that purpose.
Together, these frameworks help you clarify your company’s purpose. A clear purpose not only guides your business decisions but also defines your mission, values, and the unique value you offer. This foundation strengthens your marketing efforts, making it easier to attract the right audience and build meaningful, lasting relationships.
Setting Business Goals
Setting objectives and key results (OKRs) is essential for directing your inbound marketing strategies and measuring success. While both are important, they serve distinct purposes:
- Objectives are clear, specific, and qualitative sentences that describe what you want to achieve. They align with your company’s purpose and provide direction for your efforts.
- Key Results or specific objectives are measurable outcomes that show how you will track progress toward achieving your objectives. They are specific, time-bound, and quantifiable, ensuring your goals are actionable and results-driven.
By combining objectives with SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) key results, you create a structured framework that keeps your team focused, aligned, and accountable. This approach ensures your goals are both aspirational and achievable while staying aligned with your company’s mission and audience needs.
Keeping the main objective in focus can be difficult, especially when balancing the demands of today with the need to plan for the future. The Three Horizons Framework simplifies this challenge by structuring objectives across three timeframes: Horizon One focuses on short-term stability and profitability by optimizing the core business, Horizon Two targets medium-term growth by exploring adjacent opportunities, and Horizon Three emphasizes long-term innovation and transformation through disruptive ideas. By addressing all three horizons simultaneously, companies maintain their current performance while preparing for sustainable growth and future success.
Creating Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers, created using real data from market research, combining data with educated assumptions or specialists opinions. These data can be gathered through sources such as internal or external historical databases, customer interviews or educated guesses. Buyer personas help you better understand your customers’ needs, behaviors, and challenges, enabling you to tailor your inbound marketing strategies more effectively.
When creating your buyer personas, it’s important to gather input from as many perspectives within your company as possible. For example, your sales team can analyze past sales data to identify the types of customers most likely to buy from you and those who are easiest to work with during the sales process. Your customer service team can offer insights into the characteristics of your happiest, most loyal customers. Even back-office teams can provide valuable contributions. Finance might highlight the types of customers who are most or least likely to meet their financial commitments, while the legal team could identify patterns among customers who frequently violate your terms of service.
The more viewpoints you can include in the persona creation process, the better the final personas will be. By involving all relevant departments, you can build well-rounded personas that reflect a comprehensive understanding of your ideal customers.
Here is the step by step to create your buyer persona:
- Define the informations about your persona that should be included through your company purpose.
- Find what traits are hight correlated with success or dissatisfaction using your products.
- Have marketing, sales, and customer service list out the questions they need answered in order to serve each persona.
- Identify the best sources for those informations.
Once you’ve created a buyer persona, it should guide all activities across your customer-facing teams. Your marketing team can use it to craft and position content that resonates with your audience. Your sales team can rely on it as a benchmark for qualifying leads and understanding individual customer contexts. Finally, your service team can leverage it to deliver tailored support and ensure customers have the best possible experience with your product.
Creating buyer personas is not a one-time task, it’s an ongoing process. The world is constantly evolving, and so are your customers’ needs, behaviors, and challenges. Market trends shift, new technologies emerge, and customer expectations change. To stay relevant, your personas must be regularly reviewed and updated with fresh data and insights. By keeping your personas up-to-date, you ensure that your marketing, sales, and service strategies remain aligned with the realities of your audience, allowing you to maintain meaningful connections and drive sustainable growth.
Developing the Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s jouney is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. It’s called a journey because each of the prospective customers will be at different points in their journey toward a purchase. By understanding your buyer jouney, you can give those prospects the information they need to move towards making a purchase. Using the buyer’s journey will help you attract, engage, and delight your costumers by meeting them where they are and providing the needed guidance and value they’re seeking.
The buyer’s journey consists of three stages:
- Awareness: The prospect realizes they are experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. This does not mean that the prospect is now aware of your business. It only means that they’re aware that they have a problem.
- Consideration: The prospect has clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity and researches options to solve it. They’re committed to researching and understanding all the available approaches or methods to solving their defined problem or opportunity.
- Decision: The prospect has decided a strategy, method, or approach to solve their problem. They want reassurance that once they make this decision, they’ll be able to solve their problem and continue to grow.
These stages align closely with the inbound methodology of attract, engage, and delight. To effectively connect with your potential customers, you need to understand where they are in their buying process. This knowledge allows you to create content that meets their specific needs at each stage, guiding them smoothly toward a purchase decision.
For service professionals, customers also experience a type of journey, especially when you’re trying to upsell, resell, or cross-sell. In these cases, it’s important not to send customers back through the entire buyer’s journey from the beginning. Instead, focus on understanding their current stage and tailoring your approach to meet their immediate needs. This perspective helps refine your customer journey and ensures a more seamless and satisfying experience.
Here is the step by step to create the journey for your buyers:
- Understand your buyer persona.
- Develop each buyer’s journey stage around your business’s specific needs and persona’s intent.
By understanding the buyers unique process of becoming aware of their problem, considering solutions, and deciding on the right solution, you’ll be able to create an effective inbound strategy. Remember that inbound is all about building trust and creating experiences throughout the stages of the inbound methodology.