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Inbound Marketing - A New Concept in Digital Business

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 SELTH 2015 - International Scientific Conference of the Romanian-German University of Sibiu

INBOUND MARKETING - A NEW CONCEPT IN DIGITAL BUSINESS

Zlatko Bezhovski 1
1
“Goce Delcev” University, Krste Misirkov No.10-A, Stip, Macedonia,
zlatko.bezovski@ugd.edu.mk

Abstract: The Inbound Marketing, as an Internet marketing concept or a strategy, found its
roots in permission marketing and content marketing. As a holistic approach it also
incorporates other acknowledged online marketing techniques like search engine
optimization (SEO), social media marketing, e-mail marketing, CRM, web automation etc.
The main idea behind Inbound Marketing is to attract visitors to a website by creating and
distributing useful content, convert those visitors into leads, earn their trust and then turn
them into loyal customers. This approach is focused on pull marketing techniques rather than
push techniques that interrupt the internet users with an advertising message. Therefore,
essential for this strategy is to develop high quality and targeted content, make it available
on a search engine friendly web site and share the information on the social media and by
other effective means. In order to convert the incoming visitors to leads, the website should
exchange free useful content (eBooks, videos, data, software, subscription, etc.) for the
visitors’ contact information including their email. The marketing effort is then reinforced
using e-mail marketing in order to earn their trust, increase the brand awareness, make
initial sales and convert the buyers to loyal lifelong customers addressing to them in every
critical stage in the buying cycle. Since the outbound or push marketing techniques are less
and less effective many internet marketers are focusing on pull marketing methods including
Inbound Marketing as a holistic strategy. The innovativeness of Inbound marking lies in the
idea of bringing together all noninterruptive, pull and client centric marketing techniques
under one term defining a new industry and also the effort to practice these techniques
simultaneously in order to achieve the best synergetic effects.

Keywords: internet marketing, content marketing, permission marketing, consumer decision

journey, Search engine optimization

JEL (Journal of Economic Literature) Classification: - M31, M37, M15

1. INTRODUCTION
Since its introduction, the Internet brought many changes to the way the business is done.
Especially, the rapid growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) as dominant part of the Internet,
brought revolution in the field of advertising and marketing during the last decade of the 20 th
century. We may believe that the basic principles of marketing didn’t change, but it is evident that
many new marketing practices are introduced (Sterne, 1995, 2001) and that there is a significant
change in the customers’ behavior regarding their buying decision. (Court, Elzinga, Mulder, &
Vetvik, 2009; Edelman, 2010).
Some forms of Internet marketing and advertising were practiced since the first days of the
Internet and these marketing techniques constantly add up and evolve through time. First of all,
the web technology enabled the companies to present themselves and their products on a new
platform never seen before. The website (Constantinides 2002) might be similar to a newspaper
or a catalog but it enables many new features like worldwide accessibility, quick updates,
communication with the visitors, hosting different content like text, images, audios, videos and
even interactive elements as chats, forms, quizzes, games and similar. The web technology also

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 SELTH 2015 - International Scientific Conference of the Romanian-German University of Sibiu

enables selling goods and services online, receiving payments and also instant delivery of digital
products.
At the beginning of the web era the most popular forms of online advertising were e-mail
and the banner advertising (Sterne & Priore, 2000). Unsolicited e-mail advertising grew to an
enormous proportion and became known as SPAM. On the other hand, e-mails send with a
permission given by the receiver are still one of the most effective internet marketing techniques
(Jenkins 2009; Ryan, 2014; Singal, 2015). The banner advertising at the beginning was very
popular but, while still in use, it became less and less effective. With the rise of the search engines
the webmasters developed certain techniques in order to gain good positions in the search results
and draw web traffic to their websites. This set of techniques is now known as search engine
optimization (Sullivan, 2002) and is still actively employed by many internet marketers. Along
with search engines arrived the paid search marketing that serves ads alongside the search results
when the user is actively searching using keywords. Paid per click advertisement (PPC) on search
engines is still one of the most popular forms of paid online advertising. Another form of marketing
and advertisement that is still in use came in practice with the popularization of the social media
(Evans, 2008). The social media generally enable two different forms of marketing that as well
can be implemented simultaneously. The firs approach is to build a social media profile, share
contend and communicate with the Internet users. The other option is to advertise using precise
targeting based on demographic data as location, age, gender, family status, education, income,
interests etc. A new era in the internet marketing begins with the rapid growth of the mobile
technology and the use of the mobile applications.
The above mentioned internet marketing techniques (including many others) can be
roughly divided in two types of marketing strategies: push and pull (Miller, 2015). The pull
marketing is used to generate demand for a product or a service. On the other hand the push
marketing is a strategy intended to sell out an existing supply of a product. The push techniques
are also known as interruption marketing or outbound marketing since the company initiates the
communication by sending the advertising message to the potential clients. Most of the traditional
advertising methods as TV commercials, radio commercials, print advertisements etc. belong to
the outbound marketing. Regarding the digital marketing techniques we may classify unsolicited
e-mails and most of the advertisement as outbound techniques.
In general, the outbound techniques are simpler to implement and are a faster way to reach
the potential customers. Anyway, as online competition grew and the internet users became
reluctant to interruptive online messages, these methods became more expensive and less effective
than before. Therefore, many internet marketers started to focus on methods that gave more
freedom to the potential customers to choose when and how they will consume the marketing
message the company creates.

2. EMERGENCE OF INBOUND MARKETING

For the first time the term “Inbound marketing” was used by Brian Halligan in 2005 (Halligan
and Shah, 2009; Pollit, 2011). The term inbound implies to attracting, drawing in customers.
According to the pioneers of inbound marketing, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the need for
such holistic approach aroused from the fact that the marketing tactics used successfully in the
past didn’t produce the desired results any more (Halligan and Shah 2014). As they noted, Shah’s
blog for startups, while he was still a graduate student, managed to attract more visitors than
websites owned by companies with professional marketing teams and large budgets. Their
conclusion was that “People did not want to be interrupted by marketers or harassed by
salespeople. They wanted to be helped”.

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 SELTH 2015 - International Scientific Conference of the Romanian-German University of Sibiu

The idea behind the Inbound marketing is to use marketing tactics that will try to earn the interest
of the prospects and pull (bring) them to the company (the company’s website) rather than trying
to push the advertising message to them and wait for their reaction. The attention of the potential
customers is earned by development of high-quality content and making that content available
(sharing it) through multiple online channels including search engines and social media. The term
‘content’ in internet marketing refers to a variety of formats, including but not limited to news,
web articles, videos, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, photos, etc.
One of the main elements of the inbound concept is the company’s website where the
visitors are converted into leads by optimizing landing pages and subscription forms, and offering
content baits in return for the contact information. The leads further are converted to customers
and the customers to long term loyal customers by using email marketing and sound customer
relationship management systems (CRM).
Having the basic principles of inbound marketing in mind, we have to be aware that the
concept is not exactly new. It rather enhances and combines several previously acknowledged
online marketing tactics like content marketing, search engine optimization, opt-in email
marketing and several others.
First of all Inbound marketing is very close and similar (if not the same) to an earlier
marketing method known as “Content marketing” (Cannon, 2000; Scott, 2005). The concept of
content marketing can also be associated with the “storytelling in marketing” (Smith & Keyton,
2001) practiced for a long time before the Internet came along. The “Content marketing is
marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to
attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective
of driving profitable customer action.” (Pulizzi, 2012)
According to proponents of Inbound marketing, the content marketing is just one part (an
important one) of the holistic Inbound marketing strategy (Eridon, 2011; Jarvinen & Lipiainen,
2015). On the other hand proponents of the “Content marketing” believe that complete content
marketing strategy would incorporate inbound marketing principles (Pulizzi, 2011) to draw in
visitors. Regardless of the dispute, both approaches emphasize the importance of the high-quality
content and the idea of being found by prospects that have interest in that content.
The search engine optimization as an inbound technique was successfully practiced long
time before the concepts of content marketing and inbound marketing put their roots online. The
aim of SEO is to increase the number of visitors that come from search engines by improving
onpage and the off-page ranking factors of a website. Anyway, the SEO evolved significantly as
search engines improved through time. At the beginning the keywords and the meta tags were the
most important elements to rank high. When Google was introduced in 1998, inbound (incoming)
links become the major factor for good rankings in search results. The importance of high quality
content for better rankings in search was significantly increased after some major Google
algorithm updates took place. These updates include but are not limited to: Florida update in 2003,
Panda in 2011, Penguin in 2012 and the Hummingbird update in 2013 (Reddy, 2014). After all
this updates that denounce suspicious techniques and highly apprise the content quality and
especially after the rise of the competition SEO became very difficult task if practiced in isolation
of other internet marketing techniques and channels. Previously used tactics to rank well in the
search engine results pages no longer work. Here is where Inbound marketing comes in place. As
Rand Fishkin says „SEO is a tactic. Inbound marketing is a strategy” (Fishkin & Hogenhaven,
2013) and therefore the companies should have more holistic and strategic approach for the
Internet marketing.
Another important element of the inbound strategy is the e-mail marketing. Sending
newsletter, articles, or other type of content through e-mail in order to reinforce the marketing
effort should be based on a permission given by the visitor (acquired lead or a customer). This
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type of marketing is known as permission marketing, a concept originally developed by Seth

Godin (1999). Opt-in e-mail, where Internet users sign up in advance for certain information,
content or a product is just one example of permission marketing. This concept mainly focused on
the permission given by the prospects and the email strategy without offering a sound strategy how
to attract the visitors to the website where they will opt-in to receive e-mails. Since it is important
to get permission in order to run successful e-mail campaigns Inbound marketing adopts
permission marketing in its philosophy and enhances it with strategy to draw in visitors.
In the figure below (Figure 1) we can note how the relative popularity of the terms “Email
Marketing” and “Search Engine Optimization” declined over time while the terms “Content
Marketing” and “Inbound Marketing” gained in popularity. In other words, it is evident that
isolated marketing techniques lose their popularity among internet marketers since they need more
holistic approach as a part of an sound marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Search Engine Optimization

Content Marketing

Inbound Marketing

Figure 1: Search trend comparison (Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization,

Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing) 2009 – 2015
Source: Google Trends (09.10.2015) https://www.google.com/trends/

3. INBOUND MARKETING METHODOLOGY

HubSpot, an Internet marketing company founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah
defines Inbound Marketing as a “holistic, data-driven approach to marketing that attracts
individuals to your brand and converts them into lasting customers.” (HubSpot, 2014)
The central position in the Inbound strategy is given to the creation and distribution of
high-quality and targeted content. Regarding the content creation it is important that it appeals to
the targeted customers and answers their basic questions and needs trough the different phases of
the inbound process. As the company learns more about the prospects, it is also important that the
marketing message and the content are more and more personalized to customers’ needs. The
distribution of the content goes through multiple channels depending of the accessibility and the
expectations of the prospects or the acquired clients.
In order to guide the prospects from complete strangers to loyal customers and ultimately
to promoters of the business the Inbound marketing process consists of four phases or actions:

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 SELTH 2015 - International Scientific Conference of the Romanian-German University of Sibiu

- Attracting visitors
- Converting visitors to leads
- Closing sales
- Reconverting customers to loyal, lifelong customers and brand promoters

The goal of the first phase is to attract visitors to the company’s website using proven
inbound tactics like blogging, SEO, social publishing, RSS feeds, creating link baits, guest
blogging, nurturing attractive content etc. This phase heavily relays on high-quality content
creation.
After the visitors arrive to the website for the first time the second phase of the process
begins. The goal here is to convert them to leads by gathering their contact information. Since
internet users are not easily giving their email addresses and their permission to be contacted, the
company needs to offer them something in return like eBooks, newsletter, free tips, free software,
membership, a trial, tutorials, webinars and other valuable content. In order to achieve this goals
the landing pages and the submit forms should be appropriately optimized. The collected leads are
valuable asset to a company and therefore they should be handled (managed) appropriately.
The next phase is the closing phase, or the phase where leads are converted to sales. This
is the phase where the email marketing comes in place. Usually the leads are not willing to make
the purchase right away. Instead, a series of emails focused on useful, relevant content can earn
their trust and make them become more ready to buy. Since some companies may have large
number of leads, CRM and email automation could came handy during this phase.
Earning a customer is hard, keeping a customer is harder and turning a customer to a
promoter is the hardest goal in marketing. The last phase of the Inbound marketing process is all
about achieving that. So, the marketing effort does not stop when the customer is acquired. The
company should further nurture the client with engaging content, superior client service and should
also listen to their feedback. Only in that case the customer will be satisfied, will return and will
promote the business further.
The four defined phases of Inbound marketing are closely related to the four stages of the
“Consumer Decision Journey” CDJ introduced in the June 2009 issue of McKinsey Quarterly
(Court, Elzinga, Mulder, & Vetvik 2009). These stages are: consider, evaluate, buy, and enjoy,
advocate, bond. This concept argues the popular purchase funnel where it was believed that
consumers started with a large number of potential brands in mind and methodically winnowed
their choices until they decide which one to buy. After purchase, their relationship with the brand
typically focused on the use of the product (or service) itself (Edelman, D.C. 2010). The new
concept, based on an empirical research, showed that rather than narrowing their choices,
prospects add and deduct brands under consideration during the extended evaluation phase. After
purchase, they often engage into an open-ended relationship with the brand, sharing their
experience online. The phases in Inbound marketing correspond to the stages of CDJ and the
employed marketing tactics during all four phases help the customers go through the decision
journey.

4. DISCUSSION
Since the concepts and techniques used in Inbound marketing are not previously unknown
and new then a question arises what is innovative in this concept?
First important novelty regarding the Inbound marketing is the effort to bring several
successful online marketing techniques under one name in order to define a specific industry in
the field of the internet marketing. If we investigate the current internet marketing landscape we
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could find different terms used to describe these online marketing techniques used simultaneously
in a single strategy. Besides Inbound marketing, there are terms like “organic marketing”
(Kennedy, Beld, Hauksson 2015), “holistic SEO” (Portney 2014) or as mentioned before “content
marketing”. Anyway, two terms most seriously pretend to give the name to a such holistic internet
marketing strategy that is becoming more and more popular among internet marketers. These
terms are “Inbound marketing” and “Content marketing”. The debate among inbound marketers
and content marketers resembles the dilemma "which came first, the chicken or the egg?". The
dilemma here is which is subset of the other, which one is a strategy and which one is a tactic.
According to our observation more appropriate term is “Inbound marketing” since it incorporates
content marketing in its strategy, but also includes other marketing techniques like opt-in email
marketing and web automation, SEO, CRM and others.
Having a single name, accepted by most of the internet marketers and broader stakeholders
for this holistic strategy, could be useful for numerous reasons. A specific profession can be shaped
under this industry and would be very pragmatic for training and educational purposes of these
professionals. On the other side, clients looking for such services would be aware what to look for
and what to expect under such services provided by different companies.
The second important innovation brought by the Inbound marketing it’s the holistic
approach it has toward all acknowledged pull online marketing practices in order to maximize the
results of the overall marketing effort. If all these techniques are practiced in isolation of each
other would generate smaller return on investment. The Inbound methodology trends to follow the
prospects trough whole buying cycle (Consumer Decision Journey) and act timely to reinforce the
marketing effort for the best results.
Another discussing point for the Inbound marketing is its expected lifecycle. Namely, this
concept is currently very successful but since the internet environment changes fast and users
change their behavior would it be successful in the future and for how long? For example; since
the inbound methodology relies on opt-in emails what will happen when most of the customers
will be subscribed/engaged with too many Inbound marketers? Could Inbound become the new
SPAM?

5. CONCLUSION
Inbound marketing is a recently formulated internet marketing concept or a strategy that
aims to attract prospects to a company’s website, convert them to leads and further to lifelong
customers and brand promoters. The customers are attracted by developing high-quality and
targeted content that is distributed through multiple online channels. Unlike the interruptive
marketing messages that are pushed to the internet users (ads or unsolicited emails), the inbound
methods tend to earn the prospects’ attention in channels and in time when they are prepared to
engage with the marketing communication bait deployed by the company.
In order to achieve its goals, the inbound methodology goes through four specific phases:
attracting visitors, converting visitors to leads, closing sales, reconverting customers to lifelong
customers and promoters. These phases are in correlation with the four stages of the customer
decision journey, a concept recently developed to reflect the changes in the customers’ behavior
as a result of the digital environment. During all of these phases, specific online marketing tools
are used that reinforce the marketing effort addressing the specific needs of the prospects in every
stage of the buying cycle. The content creation and its distribution are important in every phase of
the process and they should correspond to the expectations and needs of prospects (or the current
customers) in every stage of the decision journey.
Besides the content marketing as its cornerstone, the Inbound marketing incorporates
several other acknowledged online marketing techniques in order to attract and retain customers

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such as blogging, search engine optimization, social media publishing, social media marketing,
opt-in e-mail marketing, public relations, CRM, web automation, web analytics, data-mining etc.
Since the Inbound marketing, as a holistic marketing strategy, is very effective and brings
results to its practitioners more and more companies are adopting this concept in their marketing
strategic plans.

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