Building Customer Relationships Using Inbound Marketing

The importance of creating and maintaining relationships with your customers is highly essential in scaling your business long term. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through the use of inbound marketing. Adopting inbound marketing into your business marketing strategy allows for experiences to be more tailored to the pain points of your audience. This will also bring in prospective customers which can then be nurtured into loyal advocates of your products and services.

What is inbound marketing?

The tactics that can implemented through successfully using inbound marketing help bring in customers who are guaranteed to interact consistently with your business and your content. Various strategies can be used, including SEO, email marketing and paid media advertising. It is key to provide value to both prospects and customers at every stage of the user journey from awareness to decision.

Importance of Customer Relationships

When done correctly, creating a strong relationship with your customers will result in improved loyalty and increased positive reviews and referrals. Creating advocates for your brands stems from having satisfied customers who are happy with your service and are willing to share their experiences with others. Focusing on your customers’ needs continuously will help with the inception of these relationships.

Building Customer Relationships

1. Know Your Audience

The key to inbound marketing is knowing your audience inside out, which can be easily achieved through the creation of several detailed buyer personas. These personas need to represent what your ideal customer looks like from their demographics to their paint points and the way they interact with your content. By creating personas you are allowing yourself fro more tailored content that will answer the wants and needs of your audience.

2. Create Valuable Content

Content has always been seen as king when it comes to marketing strategy. By developing a vast library of high-quality content that not only answers the question posed but also can entertain your audience. Content formats that are commonly used to achieve this include e-books, infographics, case studies, and webinars. You need to ensure that all content is tailored to both your audience but also each stage of the buyer journey.

3. Optimise for Search Engines

The importance of SEO in allowing your content to be seen and rank highly is crucial. Conducting extensive keyword research for what your target audience is looking for which can determine the position in which you optimise your content. The use of keywords must come across naturally in your content alongside the choice in metadata and primary and subheadings.

4. Leverage Social Media

The use of social media platforms allows you as a business to build a strong presence and relationship with your audience. By creating engaging content they want to interact with and act as a conversation starter with your business. Social media should be used to listen to your customers while also addressing their issues which will build trust in your brand. 

5. Use Email Marketing Strategically

When used correctly email marketing is an important element of any marketing strategy that can be used to nurture leads to customers but also allows the maintaining of relationships with existing customers. Once your contacts have been segmented correctly you can send personalised emails to each segment of your audience. These segments should be regularly updated so that the messaging is always relevant to your brand.

6. Implement Lead Nurturing Campaigns

The tactics associated with successful lead nurturing all have the formation of the last relationships as the final result. Engaging at every stage of the buyer journey and using automation tools to support this will allow email campaigns to be created that are targeted to the right buyer persona. This will strengthen your leads being moved correctly through the funnel further increasing your chances of conversion from lead into customer.

Using inbound marketing to create lasting customer relationships can be utilised as a key part of any business strategy. Once you understand the pain points and needs of your audience you can then begin to create valuable content that can be optimised via SEO and shared across social media platforms. Once you have leads that are ready to be nurtured then email marketing can be used to nurture them across the sales funnel until they are ready to become customers.