5 Major Inbound Marketing Trends to Consider Implementing

As a brand you love to build strong and meaningful relationships with your customers and prospects. However, this can be real challenging since there’s so much competition these days.

As a result, people get overwhelmed with all kind of messages from a plethora of brands. Many of these messages aren’t tailored to the receiver’s situation. This often causes mixed feelings towards these certain brands.

Outbound marketing vs. inbound marketing

Brands who decide to send the same message to as many people as possible, make use of outbound marketing. The goal of outbound marketing is to attract as many people as possible by sending their message to a very large audience.

These kind of messages typically focus more on the brand and/or its products in order to sell more.

Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing takes the customer needs into account when sending messages. Since these messages are tailored to the customer’s situation, they tend to attract attention more easily. Inbound marketing wants to create a seamless brand experience by pursuing customer-centricity.

To achieve this, brands need to create valuable content in the first place to attract the right people. Once you have the people’s attention, it’s important to keep them engaged by e.g. telling them how to solve their problem. To end, you need to delight your customers to make sure they stay happy. Even after purchasing your brand.

Inbound Marketing Trends

Over the last years, inbound marketing has become more and more popular. Let’s take a look at five of the most popular inbound marketing trends of 2020.

1. Social Messaging

More and more brands stay in touch with their (potential) customers through social messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The main goal of this, is to support everyone who interacts with your brand at any given time.

You can for example inform people about what product would fit them best, or guide them through the after-sales process if they have a problem with their purchase. People must feel comfortable connecting with you for any reason.

At this point, social messaging is being used by larger companies but it’s predicted that more and more (smaller) companies will implement this in their content marketing strategy.

2. Marketing Automation

A marketing automation tool helps you to send the right message, at the right time, and this through the right device. It’s all about being of relevance to your customers at that given time by using your customer data the right way.

This leads to more relevant and personalized content that may accelerate the buying process.

Want to know more about how marketing automation can step up your inbound marketing game? We have summarized the basics of marketing automation in this article for you.

3. Chatbots with Artificial Intelligence

AI has made chatbots smarter than ever before. Chatbots can usually be found on websites to guide visitors if they have any questions.

Since the capabilities of AI have strongly expanded over the years, chatbots have more of a human aspect and people don’t feel like they’re just talking to a robot. The bots understand complex questions and try to interact with the visitors by understanding their intent.

Social messages through such as Facebook Messenger can be replaced by a chatbot. In that case, people’s questions will be answered by a computer instead of a human. However, as mentioned before the humanization of the chatbot will only continue to grow.

4. Video Marketing

Video marketing has become very popular. One main reason for that, is that it’s an easy and almost effortless way for people to absorb information.

A video can be very entertaining and engaging. This always attracts people’s attention. Besides that, creating video’s is easier than ever due to improved smartphone camera’s and video platforms like for example TikTok.

5. Blog posts

When people are looking for information or tips about a specific topic, they tend to look for blog articles about it.

More and more brands understand this and start to create blog content in order to delight their audience with all kind of information.

As a brand, it’s important to keep some things in mind when writing blog articles. For example, you can add trending keywords to your text, integrate a few call to actions and/or link to another article to your blog.

Conclusion

Incorporating inbound marketing strategies into your overall marketing strategy helps you to stay in touch with your audience on a personal level. This will result in more meaningful relationships than ever before.

Of course there are many more inbound marketing trends you can implement, but the five mentioned above will get you started.

To clarify, inbound marketing can perfectly be combined with outbound marketing. The two marketing techniques can complement each other.