Inbound Marketing methodically and specifically identifies, tracks, assesses, and decides on why and how companies attract, generate, and maintain customer behavior. The powerful and effective outcome can be sold or paid to maintain and ideally acquire customers. Inbound Marketing involves four core functions of business management.

1. Marketing

2. Sales and Customer Service

3. Quality Controls

4. Governance

1. Marketing

2. Sales and Customer Service

If the only advantage of Inbound Marketing is that it’s efficient and scalable, it’s not worth it. What really sets Inbound Marketing apart is that it’s generated a habit and emotional attachment between customers and businesses that other marketing or advertising alone could never create.

The marketing function, which is essentially implementing a customer acquisition strategy, begins with Determining the target audience. Depending on your own objectives and criteria, there are several business owner surveys to have the answer.

For example, prospective mortgage clients don’t just follow a set budget line. Where “no-hassle” is the operative word, it can set the rubric for the length and frequency of marketing efforts on their part.

In the first chapter of my book, The Real Story of Inbound Marketing, I outline various types of analytics that can get closer to truly defining the marketing problem. It can become easy to get overwhelmed with what is required to prove Inbound Marketing success. The Inbound Marketing Works for Small Business series is designed to help small businesses with the specifics of new and active systems that their implementation and measurement strategies require.

2. Sales and Customer Service

Like all marketing, you must deal with customers, and you are here to become one of them. After determining your ideal customer, your strategy to obtain them will be based on three strategies:

1. Inspire and Drive Follow Through

2. Invite, Diversify, and Lock Up

3. Establish and Orient

How to promote your product or service, how to appeal to them, and how to actively convert leads and customers into loyal, long-term clients.

When you promote your product or service, it must sound as if you’re your own personal sales and service team. How to assure high availability, support, and service from your team. The technologies on offer are creating speed and efficiency, but having the right people, treating customers as well as they treat you, and understanding the ins and outs of working with a team are vital.

3. Quality Controls

It’s part of any marketing program that data collectors, advocates, and super-users report on an everyday basis. That data tracking does not stop, even if the more difficult parts have been automated and fully automated. In the system you have, there are few or no reporting tools that can track and utilize customer and employee interaction the way you wish to see it. It is extremely important to analyze your indicators and perform an audit of your internal systems and reporting artifacts to ensure that you are complying with your most important business goals.

4. Governance

Inbound Marketing is dynamic in that, unlike most other marketing programs, it’s dictated and implemented by an audience. No matter how cold your message is or how potent your sales tactics, the point of entry is not the page view, the impressions, or the marketing results, it’s the attention. Simply having a website and buttonbar after the fact to post a banner ad to a couple thousand people is not enough.

To attract, retain, and manage relationships is the role of your campaign. Without your system as a foundation, you’re merely pulling the ram’s horn through the net. Yet, your user-first mindset and analysis-oriented organization are more likely to find you a permanent home with your loyal, return business.