Your date for Valentine's Day: Inbound.

What Valentine's Day teaches you about inbound marketing.

It's almost Valentine's Day again! The day of love, when you put your loved one in the limelight and give them that extra something they crave. This famous or - to some - infamous day can teach you a lot about inbound marketing. Whereas in your relationship, you sometimes need to go the extra mile and keep your relationship right, the same is true in business. Let that be what you achieve with inbound! How? You'll find out in this blog!

What is inbound?

Inbound is a strategy that helps you and your organisation build valuable, long-term relationships with your target audience, leads and customers. How? By discovering their journey and helping them achieve their goals at each step of the experience journey.

The inbound methodology consists of four steps: attract, convert, close and delight. Each of these steps follows one another endlessly, because when your customers experience success with you and share this with others, they in turn attract new interested parties. And that is exactly why the flywheel fits in so well with the inbound method.

What is the flywheel?

These four inbound steps parallel the experience journey your leads and customers go through and the funnel models you apply within your organisation. And your marketing, sales and service teams align with this in turn as they add strength to the flywheel. And so your teams collectively ensure that the flywheel keeps spinning, transforming leads into customers and customers into true fans who in turn attract new leads.

This all sounds very nice, of course, but how do you go about applying this specifically and what can you learn from Valentine's Day in this? We explain that below.

Nice to meet you, I'm inbound.

As we mentioned earlier, inbound methodology consists of four key steps: attract, convert, close and delight. And here's what these four steps entail:

Attract

It all starts in the attract phase. You're walking down a shopping street, standing in the pub or swiping through your Tinder profiles. Suddenly, you come face-to-face with HIM (or her). You know immediately: you are a perfect match. But how do you make sure he or she sees you too?

The attract phase is entirely focused on attracting the right visitors. Within inbound, this rests on creating interesting and relevant content in every step of the experience journey. And because you have created personas to define your target audience, you know exactly what questions and challenges they have in each step of the journey and thus what content they find interesting. And you can incorporate this in turn into (knowledge) blogs, specific landing pages or extensive pillar pages.

Get started creating relevant content yourself? Download our experience journey framework

Convert

Once you've caught the attention of that cute guy or girl and started the conversation, it's time to find out more about each other. How old are you? What hobbies do you have? Do you have any siblings? And where do you live? By both releasing a bit about yourselves, you will get to know each other better. You exchange phone numbers so you can talk to each other even more. The start of a serious relationship has begun.

Within inbound, the convert phase is entirely focused on gathering information from your website visitors. Who exactly are visiting your website? Are you attracting the right people? By locking interesting e-books, whitepapers and webinars behind a form, you make sure you learn more about your website visitors. In exchange for this information, they get access to e-books, whitepapers, fact sheets, masterclasses and webinars that tell them even more about those interesting topics (and let that be just the topics they were looking for).

Please note: Just like a form, you can't lock in the right people.

Please note: As with dating, a one-off action is often not enough to really get to know each other well. Following up on interesting leads is necessary to stay top of mind and, of course, to find out even more about each other. Therefore, follow up your leads by sending one or more e-mails with even more interesting and relevant content. Not only does this build your relationship, but it also shows that you have the knowledge to help your target group with their challenges.

Close

After a few dates, you know for sure: he's the one! It's time to make it official; you're in a relationship.

This is the phase where you transform your lead into a client. After talking to each other several times and clearly establishing what you are looking for in a relationship, your organisation and your client are a match made in heaven. The customer has built enough trust in you that he is ready for to sign the deal. You partner up, and the real work can begin: you start creating the solution to your client's challenge.

Delight

You naturally want your relationship to be a success and to last as long as possible. And that's hard work. That's why sometimes it's necessary (and of course super fun!) to spoil each other. And Valentine's Day serves itself perfectly for that. You come home with a bunch of flowers, go out to dinner together or cozy up to a movie. Your luck can't run out: this relationship is forever.

The delight phase is perhaps the most important phase in the inbound principle. After the deal is done and you and your customer have entered into a relationship with each other, it doesn't stop there. Keep surprising your customers with your knowledge by sharing interesting e-books and blogs or inviting them to master classes as well. Meet regularly to discuss further challenges and ideas or send a nice little something.

Only by immersing yourself in your customers can you ensure that you build that valuable long-term relationship with each other. And that long-term relationship can provide many surprises.