What is inbound marketing? One quick definition we use is to think of outbound marketing as “push” marketing and inbound marketing as “pull.” Rather than interrupt customers with disruptive ads or unethical sales tactics, you attract them via valuable content that helps them accomplish their goals.

To further elaborate, it’s about three pieces:

• Attract
• Engage
• Delight

You attract prospects and customers to your website and blog through relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat and by promising continued value. Finally, you delight them by continuing to act as an empathetic advisor and expert. The inbound methodology isn’t specific to marketing, by the way. The same process and mindset can be used in sales and services, too. So, how do you actually do inbound marketing?

Inbound 101: The basics for getting started

There have been many books and courses on inbound marketing, so we won’t be able to comprehensively cover the idea here. Rather, we’ll give the 80/20 so you can start to take action. After you get your wheels on the ground, you can always go back and learn more about the methodology.

So what are the basic steps for getting started?

• First, map out your ideal audience, aka your target market. Who do you want to sell to?
• Second, map out the channels you can use to attract, engage and delight your customers. Where do they hang out and how do they communicate?
• Finally, begin crafting content and messaging that will be used to attract, engage and delight customers. Make sure you have analytics in place, because you’ll need to constantly learn and update your strategy based on the results you get.

Let’s dive into each one of these individually.

Know your personas & target markets

It’s possible you know your target market and have already built your buyer personas, but even if that’s the case, it never hurts doing this work again and learning more about your customers. The more you know about your customer, the better you can craft your messaging and strategy. In defining a target market, you narrow down your audience to the level that you can choose correct marketing channels and start to define a buyer persona for messaging.

In building a buyer persona, you create a representative model of your prototypical customer. As in machine learning, you need to split the difference between perfect accuracy and perfect utility. In other words, you should gather enough data and information to make a buyer persona largely accurate to the real world, but you shouldn’t gather too much information and make it too complex.

How do you gather data to inform your buyer persona? There are many ways, some easier, some harder, depending on the stage of your company:

• Customer interviews (phone or in person)
• Digital analytics
• Surveys (on-site polls like Qualaroo and customer surveys)
• User testing
• Live chat transcripts and intelligence via sales and service teams

You’ll want to answer core questions about your ideal buyer, such as:

• What are their motivations and fears?
• How do they prefer to make purchases?
• How much research do they do and what kind of content is useful to them?
• How do they interact with brands? What do they prefer the relationship to look like?
• Who do they look to when they’re making decisions? Who influences them?
• Where do they hang out? How can you reach them?
• What type of language do they use?

All of these things will help you a) choose channels and b) craft messaging. Just don’t create a silly made-up buyer persona with a cute name just to go through the motions. Also, it probably doesn’t matter what your buyer persona’s favorite color of car is unless you’re selling paint or used vehicles. Stick to the stuff that’s important and knowable.

Map out your channels and tactics

When you have a target market and buyer persona, you can look into different channels. There are only so many inbound marketing channels:

• Blogging
• SEO
• Social
• Facebook Ads (suggested reading: Are ads inbound?)
• Branding
• Referral
• Virality

Some channels won’t work for your business no matter how hard you try. For example, virality probably doesn’t make sense if you sell dish soap. Similarly, some channels could potentially work but will take so much effort and risk to pull off, that you should probably table them for the time being in favor of higher impact channels. For example, if you’re a LawnStarter (lawn care) or ProTranslating (translation services), social media may not pay off.

To identify your best channels, use this heuristic: “how does a customer buy this type of product?” In the case of lawn care, it’s usually when their lawn grows too long and they need someone right away. SEO and search ads are perfect to capture this type of demand. Some products, such as Chubbies or Airpods, are naturally viral. Just optimize the viral components and add a little wind to the sail.

Others make a perfect fit for content marketing, such as B2B software companies like Wordable or Mutiny. These products tend to require a little bit of upfront education, and their target customers are accustomed to learning via blogs, webinars and ebooks. In any case, just think about it and discuss with your colleagues before jumping into a channel. Don’t simply join a channel because your competitors have or because it’s new and buzzworthy. We don’t need more gurus or businesses trying to make it big on Snapchat, and we especially don’t need more businesses trying to go viral on Reddit. Do what makes sense for you.

Create content and execute on the playbook

Any inbound channel—nay, any marketing channel—will require some sort of messaging strategy. How you execute on messaging will largely determine how effective the channel becomes. Let’s say, for example, we want to use blogging and SEO as our inbound channel. This usually forms the basis of such efforts, as it’s an owned channel, and you can generally compete with very large players and win some or much of the time on quality and 10x content. Now, what do you blog about? While you can answer this question many ways with some degree of validity, we like to follow the Pillar + Cluster model.