To successfully generate traffic, leads, customers, and promoters, you need the right marketing tools.
Inbound marketing provides the right tools for each phase of your customer management. The power of inbound marketing becomes evident as it orchestrates your marketing efforts. Finally, the numerous online marketing tools receive the proper attention they deserve. Each marketing tool plays a crucial role and leverages its strengths at the optimal phase of the customer's buying process. What are the key steps and the most important tools in the process of customer acquisition with inbound marketing?

The starting point is always creating attraction for potential customers (Attraction). You establish a personal connection with these target customers (Connection). You then build this contact into a trusting relationship and continuously increase the engagement of your prospect until the purchase. After the purchase, you want to maintain and increase the satisfaction of your new customers, creating delight so that customers stay as long as possible and actively recommend you (Delight).

Now, the question remains: how do you concretely design the customer acquisition process, i.e., which marketing tools you use on which customer contact channels. How do you attract people on the internet, and how do you create a connection with them as potential customers? With which tools do you build this connection into an intensive relationship, creating more and more closeness to the new prospect? Through which marketing tools do you maintain the relationship and strengthen the involvement of your customers until they are delighted, once a customer has been won?

1. Attraction – Creating Attraction

To establish contact with many people on the web in a targeted manner, you need marketing tools with high reach and easy manageability. The best options are communication channels where you have substantial control. These include your own website, your blog, your presence in search engine result pages (keyword rankings), and your social media presence on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others. Here, you can place the content optimized for your buyer personas.

Before you take action, first analyze which topics your potential customers are searching for and reading online. Using search engine optimization (SEO) methods, identify the key terms (keywords) that are frequently searched in search engines or blogs related to these relevant topics. You can then produce keyword-optimized content and place it on the internet where Google and your potential customers will notice it. This includes the text on your website, posts on your own blog, guest posts on other blogs, and contributions on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. In all these online media, you can now be found on current topics relevant to your target audience. The high quality of your own content positions you as a relevant solution provider for potential customers. In your content, you should reference additional information and content offers on your website and include a corresponding internet link (hyperlink). With a click, a new visitor who is already interested in the topic will land on your website. The first step of your inbound marketing has been successfully completed.

2. Connection – Establishing Connection

You have attracted people to your offer on the internet and now want to establish a real connection with potential customers on your website, in your blog, and on social media. Marketing instruments and techniques that provide individual value to potential leads are best suited for this purpose.

Inbound marketing primarily relies on high-quality content and contact tools on your website that allow customers to provide their contact details in exchange for valuable content and register as leads. To acquire such leads, offer your visitors useful content and dialog opportunities on your website so that they are willing to share their contact details in exchange for free content or service offers and enter into a dialogue with you. In this phase, attention-grabbing and action-driving landing pages are crucial.

On these specially designed web pages, smart forms should be integrated to collect essential information from your new leads during registration for a content offer. This establishes the initial connection with a new contact. It forms the basis of a relationship with a lead – but initially, it is just that.

3. Engagement – Building Relationships

You have gained a new contact, a lead. Now comes the exciting task of building this contact into a trusting relationship, providing value at every interaction, and not coming across as pushy.

Inbound marketing software helps you keep track of the numerous relationships you maintain with different contacts simultaneously. When you want to build and deepen a genuine relationship with a prospect, use marketing tools that foster individual connections between your company and the prospect. Proven tools like email marketing come into play here, as well as new tools enabled by your inbound marketing software, such as automated marketing workflows.

Email marketing plays a crucial role in this phase because you can deepen and update the individual relationship with personalized emails. You can provide a target customer with new impulses that can advance them in their decision-making process. Think not in terms of "email marketing campaigns," but in terms of individual emails for specific contact steps. However, if you approach this with traditional campaign logic rather than a personalized customer dialogue, email marketing can become counterproductive and potentially damage freshly established relationships, leading your prospects to opt out or unsubscribe.

Automated marketing workflows help you link certain customer engagement processes to different customer reactions or behaviors. For example, you can automatically send further information via email to anyone who downloads a specific content product, which aligns with the decision-making process in this phase. With your inbound marketing software, you can track whether your new contact returns to your website or mentions their problem or your offering on social media. Provided you have obtained their consent at registration, you can now supply your new contact with additional information via email or social posts that help them in such situations.

In the engagement phase, marketing and sales should ideally work hand in hand. Therefore, integrating your CRM database with your inbound marketing software is essential to manage prospect profiles comprehensively and customer-oriented. Together with the sales team, determine how to evaluate specific customer actions on the internet and on your website. What customer behavior is a particularly positive signal for high purchase intent? For instance, a prospect's request for a product demo could be such an indication. Other signals may make a purchase less likely and reduce a lead's attractiveness to your company. For example, if someone has not visited your website for over a year. Lead scoring assigns numerical values to these positive and negative customer behavior indicators, calculating an individual score for each prospect that can change over time and ideally increase continuously.

4. Delight – Keep the Delight

What marketing tools can you use to increase customer satisfaction and create delight after a purchase? Key tools include activating social media campaigns (social media engagement), targeted email campaigns, content inspiration, and building a customer community. After the purchase, Inbound Marketing proves invaluable. Through email sequences and advanced content offers, you can assist your customers in optimizing their product use, inquire about their problems and experiences, and encourage repeat purchases and upselling opportunities (cross-selling). Customers seek confirmation of their purchase right after buying. Here, you can provide informative content and also inspire them with engaging materials (e.g., videos). This motivates your customers to share your content with others in their network. Once this happens, you've achieved all your Inbound Marketing goals—transforming a stranger into a satisfied customer and advocate for your brand.

Of course, after the purchase, you should seize every opportunity to maintain and enhance customer delight to encourage them to actively recommend your brand. Ideally, you will use marketing tools that foster individual customer dialogue (e.g., email campaigns). Additionally, integrate customers into communication platforms where they can interact with other customers and advocates (e.g., customer academies, customer communities, fan clubs, or user groups). The four phases of Inbound Marketing (Attraction, Connection, Engagement, and Delight) and their respective marketing tools form the core structure or framework of your Inbound Marketing strategy.