Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing tests the methodology rather than a single tactic: attract strangers, engage prospects, and delight customers so they become promoters. Expect the flywheel, buyer's journey, personas, and the difference between pull and push.
Core rules
- Inbound is pull: educational content, SEO, and helpful experiences earn attention. Outbound interrupts. Inbound can include paid promotion, but the asset and experience are still built around the buyer's problem.
- The flywheel replaces the funnel as a model of momentum. Attract, engage, delight. Friction slows it; momentum speeds it. Delight matters because happy customers refer and renew.
- The buyer's journey still runs inside the flywheel: awareness, consideration, decision. Content, CTAs, and offers must match the stage.
- Personas keep the work specific; a broad "all businesses" persona produces generic content.
Worked example
A project-management SaaS attracts with a guide to remote team rituals, engages with a comparison page and a free trial, and delights with onboarding calls, a help center, and a community. The team tracks referrals and expansion revenue, not only new leads. Reasoning: if delight is ignored, the flywheel leaks at the customer stage; referrals and retention are inbound outcomes, not post-sale extras.
Traps
- Treating inbound as "blogging only."
- Using the funnel as a complete model and ignoring retention and advocacy.
- Applying decision-stage CTAs to awareness content.
- Writing for a persona that is too broad to change any content decision.
- Measuring only traffic, not engagement, conversion, retention, and referral.