In the world of inbound marketing, every industry has its own unique techniques that are effective. Depending on the industry you are in, you will find that different strategies connect with your consumers and attract them to your brand.
Let's look at the best inbound strategies for 5 major industries: retail, banking and insurance, education, tourism and non-profits.
Competition for online stores is fierce. Not only are there an endless amount of ecommerces, you also have to consider the competition from major suppliers like Amazon. To attract consumer attention in this over-saturated industry, take note of these retail-specific inbound marketing strategies:
In the banking and insurance industry, there is a fair amount of customer education that must be done. This helps customers make better informed decisions. Therefore, a brand that is able to earn their customers trust by offering high-quality content will rise to the top.
But how does a bank or insurance company do this? There are a few key inbound strategies:
Before beginning any campaign, it is essential to ensure that you are targeting the right audience. Banking and insurance products are targeted towards very diverse audiences.
To ensure you’re hitting the right mark, conduct a study and create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of the type of customer you want to have. For example, "Maria is a medical doctor, has an annual income of around 150,000 euros and is single. She is considering buying his first house in the southern part of Madrid, but she is concerned about the evolution of the real estate market in the medium term..." Your buyer persona should include any problems that the customer has that your product or service can solve.
Based on your buyer personas, you will then create a series of content that suits their needs. For example, a series of blog articles about what they need to know before they take out a mortgage. The idea is that this content positions on Google, thus attracting organic visits and increasing trust in the brand.
Once you attract users to your website using the articles, you can then offer them more in-depth content (for example, a guide on the best mortgages in Spain in PDF) in exchange for their data, through forms. This is how you generate leads.
For example, if you create an ebook guide about mortgages, users would have the download the ebook by filling out a form that asks for their name, email address, and other relevant information. But, you don't want to ask for too much information. This is a delicate science.
Once you have the lead’s information, then you enter the lead nurturing phase. During this phase you will provide the user with more relevant content in order to build trust. For the banking and insurance industry, this is especially important as the sales cycle can sometimes take several months. The idea is to focus on the long term and gain your potential customer’s confidence.
To assess the lead’s interest and which stage of the buyer journey they’re in, you can use a lead scoring system that will assign points based on their characteristics and the actions they’re doing (e.g. open an email or respond to a survey).
Finally, when you think the lead is ready to convert, pass it on to the sales department along with the information you’ve been collecting throughout the process.
Within the education sector there are many different circumstances and targets, but in this guide we’ll focus on one of the most common situations: Parents seeking a private school for their children. These inbound marketing strategies will help you adapt the different stages of the inbound marketing process to this industry:
The first step is to properly identify who you want to reach. Each school will have a different student profile. Some are more focused on bilingual education, others on sport and extracurricular activities, others cover different educational stages or development. What types of students does your school cater to, and what kind of buyer persona’s do their parents have?
Using your buyer persona, you will then need to develop a content and SEO strategy that helps attract these parents to your website. The content should be centered around the parent’s concerns, and why placing their students in your school would solve those problems. For example, if you are a private school focused on arts and music, write an article about how artistic students excel in private art schools.
Once you have attracted the parents' attention, the next step is to qualify them as prospects. It is most common to offer downloadable content in exchange for filling out a form. In the form, include a series of questions that will determine if this is a prospect or if they are not an interesting lead.
Carry out a lead-nurturing process based on this information. Parents usually have a lot of concerns about their children's education, so this is a good opportunity to advise and position yourself as experts in the sector.
When creating content, create a list of common parent concerns, and try to provide content that gives detailed answers to each question or concern.
When you determine that the lead is ready, you can then move them down the funnel with calls to action such as invitations to visit the school or meet with the principal or teachers.
It's critical to correctly identify what types of triggers encourage the lead to make the final buying decision.
As a school, this process will be repeated every year. This means you must implement a strategy that promotes recommendations from current parents and students. Refine the content and recruitment tactics with information that you learn after each school year. Don’t forget to encourage word of mouth marketing with the parents.
The tourism industry is one of the earliest adopters of digital marketing, and specifically inbound marketing. Our way of traveling has changed a lot in recent years thanks to the digital environment, and the best hospitality and tourism brands are the ones that keep up with this change.
If you want to do inbound marketing for the tourism industry , keep in mind the following strategies:
According to a recent Inbound Marketing report , inbound marketing can multiply a nonprofit’s qualified marketing contacts by 7x. If you’re a non-profit looking to attract new partners, inbound shouldn’t be ignored.
And yet, more than half of all nonprofits have not even implemented a strategy as simple as launching a blog. So, what can you do to take advantage of the full potential of inbound marketing in this sector?