Inbound marketing is a business philosophy that is based on helping, educating, and serving people with useful and relevant content . As that content attracts new sales prospects, they begin to receive nudges and incentives to become customers.
Therefore,Empowering customers with inbound marketing means giving them an active role in a community, where they acquire new skills for their daily lives; and their opinions and learning experiences are listened to in order to know how to improve the delivery of educational content and, in general, the sales process that occurs in parallel.
What does empowerment really mean?
Etymologically, “empoderar” comes from the translation and verbalization into Spanish of “to empower”. The concept of empowerment is easy to understand: it means to give or grant power, but is that all?
Sam R. Lloyd and Tina Berthelot pointed out in their work “Develop your potential to the maximum (self-empowerment)” published in 1994, that, to empower a person, they must be given the opportunity to make important decisions, but not before giving them tools that guide them to do so appropriately.
In a sense, empowering others is about helping them bring out their own intelligence, intuition, experience and creativity.
In this regard, we could say that inbound marketing has been able to integrate this concept into its methodology and foundations, reiterating the importance of sharing educational information that provides value and responsibly informs about a concept, situation or reality.
Inbound marketing, together with content marketing, has proposed a set of formats to deliver educational information to consumers that can nourish their learning, including:
Web articles.
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How to empower customers?
Customer empowerment is defined as the process through which a solid relationship is created with buyers; exchanging valuable knowledge and experiences. This relationship must be based on trust and transparency.
However, one of the biggest challenges for companies when they want to empower their customers is understanding the complexities of their users and knowing exactly what educational content they can offer them to help them gain more power in their workspaces.
Therefore, if you want to achieve this effect on your customers, you must have a deep understanding of their interests, needs, challenges, motivations and relevant information. How can you empower your customers if you don't know what they need?
The first step to carry out this action is to interview or send questionnaires to your existing clients with key questions to investigate the emotional, professional and physical context in which they find themselves.
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To attract future clients who are interested in the educational content you create, taiwan number example create a buyer persona or buyer profile, which consists of a semi-fictional profile of the characteristics of your ideal buyer and, in this case, the person you want to empower with your content, products and/or services.
The buyer persona basically simulates a person's resume: name, age, sex, profession, place of residence, tastes, motivations, problems, needs, among others.
If we want to further illustrate what empowering customers is all about and what type of content is useful for a particular audience, let's imagine a company that is dedicated to web programming.
Their core inbound strategy is to educate their customers by providing them with useful content.
Their audience is made up of companies that want to have a website that identifies them on the web.
Therefore, your educational content should be focused on helping companies monetize their website and take advantage of all the digital tools that can be incorporated. It can also be useful tips on how to start a corporate digital transformation and the steps to follow to create the right information for a website.
In this way, this web programming company is empowering its clients, providing them with useful information that helps them be smarter with their decisions and the services they are about to acquire.
Why is empowerment a practice that promotes inbound marketing?
Competition in digital markets, the need to achieve low-cost returns on investment and new technological tools have all called for a radical change in the way consumers are viewed: they are now seen as active users who increasingly demand more information.
Since the mid-20th century, psychologists, sociologists and marketers have used techniques such as participant observation and market research to understand the change in consumer behavior as technology and competitiveness advance.
In this sense, the founders of inbound marketing, Brian Halligan and Dhamesh Shah, realized, in 2006, the role that new technologies and digital media were playing in providing information to people and how they went to these spaces to learn and solve their problems.
Both authors thought of ways to increase company sales exponentially by involving the customer not from a passive position, but from an active and participating position. That is why blog posts, social networks and audiovisual media became important channels to achieve this.
Thus, a new principle emerged within inbound marketing: empowering customers with educational information that is transformed into knowledge and intelligence.
However, transforming the way companies approach their audiences was a drastic task that many professionals dedicated themselves to undertaking. But they finally achieved it thanks to the understanding that some people prefer to invest in and consume content that is useful for their lives, rather than goods and services that they do not need.
In conclusion, empowering customers as a requirement for having a successful company represented a great effort for inbound marketing specialists.
However, this technique has had a strong impact in recent years, within the digital channels that abound on the Internet, and more and more companies are joining to empower their customers, through inbound marketing .