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Inbound marketing

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the strategy that makes your target audience come to you instead of the other way around. You achieve this by offering added value in the form of relevant content. It is the opposite of outbound marketing, with which you target a wide audience in the hope of reaching the right people. Terms that also indicate the difference are “push” (outbound) and “pull” (inbound).

The philosophy

We see inbound marketing more as a philosophy rather than a marketing tool. If you want to get started with inbound marketing, then all those involved must have feeling for the philosophy of thinking from the perspective of the target groups’ information needs. Everything should revolve around providing relevant content for the patient, the healthcare professional or the corporate target group. Only if everyone in the marketing department is on the same page will inbound marketing be effective.

The objectives

An inbound marketing philosophy can serve multiple purposes. It is very suitable to distribute relevant content to collect potential leads. To give an instance, a study indicates that an oncologist needs a practical manual that helps him educate his patient. By offering this in a downloadable whitepaper in exchange for contact details, you create the start of a lead generation process.

Another possible goal is to work towards the thought leader status in a particular industry. If you make yourself a source of relevant information and, for example, always come out with the first news in the sector, you work on thought leadership. This is a long-term process, but it can be of great benefit. Inbound marketing can contribute enormously to this.

The customer journey

With an inbound marketing strategy, a potential customer is supported with relevant content during every step in his customer journey. You can imagine that an HCP lead needs different content in the initial phase of their journey than in the final phase. Examine carefully what the information need is at a certain moment and respond to this by offering exactly the required content.

The essential techniques

There are four online marketing techniques that are indispensable in an inbound marketing strategy. These are content marketing, marketing automation, lead nurturing and SEO. Content marketing speaks for itself; and to avoid having to send all that content to the right people manually, marketing automation is essential. We call the entire process of stirring a lead (based on automated content distribution) lead nurturing. And finally, public texts (and websites) must be SEO-optimized, so that relevant search positions in Google can slowly be built. This in turn contributes to, for instance, thought leadership.

The advantages

The main advantage of an inbound marketing strategy are the higher conversions you get from leads. Moreover, the costs are often lower compared to traditional channels and techniques, because you immediately know that a lead is interested after getting his contact details; he downloaded your content of his own accord.