In short, it appears as an alternative to traditional marketing , which in certain aspects was becoming obsolete.
Faced with these questions, both Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (founders of Hubspot and creators of the Inbound Marketing concept) sought to compensate the advertising viewer, who for so many years wholesale email list has felt pressured to buy, while at the same time receiving the advertising message again, so these same questions stopped being asked out loud and were applied to each of the clients who were looking to have effective advertising again.
To do this, all advertisers had to do to become effective again was to offer useful content, fully usable and made for the benefit of the user, not directly for the benefit of the marketer. The problem was that in order to offer them this content, they first had to worry about something they had never done before: understand it perfectly.
“Inbound Marketing sought to reconcile advertising and viewers, and to do so it focused on offering them utilities rather than messages”
Why do we buy chocolate? What is our need to buy it? Why do we choose one brand over another? Is price the only value that prevails in the decision? Are there other emotional components that condition the purchase? Questions like these are the ones that those responsible for the marketing and communication department of a confectionery company must ask themselves before deciding to show their potential public the benefits of their product, because if they do not give it the right focus, they may not be interested…
Thus, a chocolate bar can be differentiated from any other similar bar, from appealing to the consumer's feelings (this is the chocolate bar that your mother gave you for a snack by putting a few ounces inside a loaf of bread), to offering to solve needs that other brands have not taken into account (our bar comes with a zip closure so that when you fancy an ounce, the rest of the bar is kept in perfect condition).
Therefore, what Inbound Marketing does is to widen the circle, breaking the barrier that exists between the client-buyer-seller relationship. To achieve this objective effectively, it is essential to know the AIDA method . Although it has not been present in recent decades, it has been carried out since the beginning of advertising itself and with notable cases such as the Michelin Guide , whose creation is a subject of study in Marketing schools.
Let's dive into an example to clearly see how a well-known company like Johnson's Baby oils came up with the right answers:
Johnson's Baby is a brand dedicated to products for newborns that sells everything from protective oils to talcum powder, colognes, liquid soap, etc.
Following traditional marketing patterns, the brand only needed to make an advertising investment in powerful channels to reach its target audience, such as a television advertisement during prime time.
However, Johnson's Baby's marketing department is aware that just as the message that its oils are relaxing for babies, making it easier for them to sleep after a bath, can reach a million-strong audience in an advertising block between 10 and 12 at night (Spanish prime time slot), but that like all those millions, the majority are single men and women, married people without children or teenagers, the elderly and children, that is, a target audience to which the message about baby oils is not directed at all.
How to reach Johnson's Baby's target audience? First, by getting to know them , and to do so, we return to one of the foundations of Inbound Marketing: asking and answering the right questions.
Who is the target audience, to whom the advertising message of Johnson's Baby is intended to be directed?:
First-time mothers who are unaware of basic baby care
Mothers concerned about their newborns receiving all kinds of care
Mothers who seek and need information on how to care for their children
Is this type of mother among the late-night viewers of an action movie? Probably not as many as there should be to make a large enough outlay to guarantee effectiveness. That's why the creatives in Johnson's Baby's communications department decided to fine-tune their strategy and combine it with the medium where they can filter and locate their potential customers: the Internet.
This is how they decided to develop an Inbound Marketing strategy through which they combined a website in which the product became secondary and they focused on informing mothers about how to care for their babies, a YouTube channel where they are taught in a practical way everything related to raising a child in the first months and a Facebook page that serves as a direct means of communication between the company and its clients in which they interact by disseminating advice, preparing contests, etc.
