Success Stories: How These Brands Thrived with Inbound Marketing

There are two ways of finding new customers:

1. Seeking them out with outbound techniques like cold calling, emails, and LinkedIn messages.

2. Attracting them to you through a combination of targeted marketing techniques.

The latter is called "inbound marketing". The goal is to gradually bring customers and clients in without aggressively pursuing them. In practice, this is often done through a variety of methods: email marketing, social media outreach, blogging,  SEO, and anything else that a customer might find or stumble upon.

Inbound marketing is not necessarily better or worse than outbound marketing. Each one has certain situations and niches where they are appropriate. In practice, the full buying cycle for many industries often involves a combination of both approaches. Prospects may be drawn into a sales funnel through inbound means, and once they are far enough along the journey, sales staff can begin reaching out to them directly.

The goal of inbound marketing is to attract buyers into an ongoing and engaging relationship. By means of high-quality content, businesses can turn strangers into loyal, long-term customers. HubSpot describes this process as Attracting, Engaging, and Delighting.

This article will examine three success stories for inbound marketing. We'll take a look at what each company did that made their efforts worthwhile.

Patagonia: Content Quality Reflects Product Quality

In an era of high consumption and low-quality products, Patagonia is a major company that takes a completely different approach. They offer high-quality clothing intended to be consumed at a low rate. Patagonia once famously ran an ad that said “Don’t Buy This Jacket.”

Patagonia's strategy serves as one of the best inbound marketing examples, showcasing how their unique approach can inspire other businesses to adopt similar methodologies.

This may look like a recipe for smaller profits, but instead, it is a recipe for attracting millions of loyal customers who are committed to the same vision of environmental sustainability.

Patagonia’s social media content strategy for inbound marketing mirrors their product strategy. While much of the content marketing world is trending towards fast, disposable, 5-second videos, Patagonia is focused on high-quality, lengthy, engaging content that focuses on issues relevant to its brand’s environmental mission.

Take their recent Youtube documentary. Fittingly, it is about the global trend towards consuming high volumes of low-quality products. But it also clocks in at a substantial 46 minutes, setting it apart from fast fashion brands advertising on TikTok.

Patagonia intends for their customers to engage with their products for a long time. Similarly, their video content holds onto viewers’ attention for long periods of time. This makes it so the actual form of their inbound strategy completely reflects the form of what they have on sale.

Patagonia releases extended documentaries on a regular basis, many of which are more than half an hour long. They are always on topics related to sustainability and the consequences of overconsumption. Essentially, their strategy sells their mission and their vision as much as it sells their products.

And this makes sense. A customer buying a Patagonia shirt or jacket isn’t just buying a piece of clothing. They are simultaneously buying into an environmentally centered worldview, and the right to feel a part of that mission.

Patagonia’s blogging strategy follows their social media content strategy. Their blog regularly posts high quality articles related to environmental activism, sustainability, and outdoor athletics. Much like their video content, their blogs follow a quality-over-quantity strategy. The articles are unique and focus on individual human stories that demonstrate the company’s environmental mission.

Groove: Focused On the Customer's Experience

Groove is a popular customer service application. It helps business owners manage customer support requests with a single streamlined application.

There are dozens of customer service tools on the market, and it can be difficult to attract customer attention if the core offerings of each one are similar. That’s one reason why Groove’s blog content doesn’t focus exclusively on software-related issues. Instead, it talks about the issues that their customers experience on a day-to-day basis by employing effective inbound marketing tactics. These tactics are designed to attract potential customers through valuable content, building trust and credibility with the audience.

Some of their recent article titles include:

• What I Did When I Couldn’t find A Technical Co-Founder
• Too Many Startups Like Playing Startup
• It’s Lonely Being A Solo Founder

Inbound marketing is all about, well, bringing people in. And in order to do that, you need content that attracts their attention and is relevant to their interests.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t have product-focused content at all. On the contrary, you need to tell a story about your product, and what’s so great about it. But in a competitive market, where different companies might offer essentially the same service, you really need to stand out.  Differentiate yourself from the herd with deep customer knowledge and a commitment to making their lives easier with your products.

HubSpot: Authority and Expertise Driven SEO

No article on inbound marketing would be complete without mentioning HubSpot. The marketing and sales platform has established itself as a leader in the marketing world. And the term “inbound marketing” was reportedly coined by HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan.

HubSpot’s marketing efforts have generated hundreds of well-written, informative, and up-to-date blog articles on practically every subject related to marketing. These articles show up frequently in Google searches related to marketing.

In addition, HubSpot offers numerous newsletters, eBooks, white papers, courses and more, all working to maintain their presence on the internet. One could hardly work in marketing without encountering their content on a regular basis.

HubSpot Academy is a particularly well-known set of free online courses offered by HubSpot. The training covers inbound marketing, content marketing, and tutorials for using HubSpot software. Many people take these courses, exposing them to the HubSpot brand and becoming evangelists of their products even before using them.

HubSpot’s marketing efforts, driven by a strong focus on search engine optimization, have generated hundreds of well-written, informative, and up-to-date blog articles on practically every subject related to marketing. These articles show up frequently in Google searches related to marketing.

All this means that HubSpot has positioned itself as an authoritative and expert source of information. In an era of poorly written junk content, webpages with E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) are prioritized in search engine rankings.

What does this mean for HubSpot’s bottom line? Just looking at their content, it can be easy to forget that HubSpot is really a software company. Much like Groove, they have chosen to optimize their content around the interests of their customers, who in this case happen to be marketing leaders. By pursuing this approach, they make sure that they are always the first brand that comes to mind.

HubSpot’s Email Marketing Strategy

HubSpot’s email marketing strategy is based on the fundamental principle of all marketing: the customer’s own self-interest. It’s not a bad thing that customers are self-interested. It’s just that, when you have 500 emails in your inbox, you can only click on the ones that actually might benefit you.

One example is this email with the subject line “I’d rather ____, than update my website.” Here, HubSpot lets customers fill in the blanks with their imagination and then provides details about how their CMS system would make things easier.

Much like their website content, HubSpot’s emails are intended to be helpful and informative. They are designed to engage potential customers by providing valuable content and experiences, helping them make informed decisions and move further into the funnel.

Conclusion: Adapting Your Inbound Marketing Strategy To Your Position

Inbound marketing is not a single set of practices. Rather, it is a general strategy for marketing, one which can be adapted to many different business contexts.

The companies above were successful because they created inbound marketing strategies that attracted the attention of their customers. Patagonia produces high-quality documentaries related to sustainability. Groove's strategic blog content focuses on the day-to-day experiences of startup founders. HubSpot creates a wealth of informational content that provides tangible benefits for their customer base.

If you want to develop a similar inbound marketing campaign, reflect on the following:

• Make content that reflects your brand's identity and purpose. Use inbound marketing as an opportunity to distinguish yourself from your competitors, and hallmark your own original voice.

• Make content that is relevant to your customer's experience. Think about who your customers actually are as people, what problems they go through, and what their lives are like.

• And make content that is informative and useful. In our information-saturated age, trustworthy and accurate information stands out.

If you need help with your Inbound Marketing, the Ever Wonder team is waiting in the wings. We are huge advocates for this marketing strategy, and would love to help you succeed. Contact us today to get started.