Stéphane, you are passionate about digital marketing and co-founded the Kinoa agency in June 2000, which specialises in digital marketing. You were one of the very first to introduce inbound marketing in France.
1. L'Inbound Marketing is in two words, what is it all about? ?
Above all, it's a methodology that allows you to reinvent your marketing and adapt it to the new behaviours of consumers who are connected, multi-channel, agile, unfaithful and versatile.
When you consider that around 70% of the customer journey is now made independently, using information available on the Internet in particular, it is clear that it is in brands' interests to speak out to gain visibility on digital channels.
Inbound marketing is essentially based on the principle of sharing quality content at the right time, in the right place and in the right context to attract and interest qualified traffic.
It is the opposite of traditional marketing (or outbound marketing), which essentially seeks to interrupt the target audience in order to make itself visible to them.
Inbound marketing is therefore primarily based on "attraction". The means used by the company is no longer to buy attention, but to "earn" it.
But it's also a toolbox for meeting the famous customer engagement criteria laid down by Sanjay Dholakia, CMO at Marketo.
This commitment includes :
- Individualised relationships: mass communication is a thing of the past, and we now need to address our targets on an individual basis.
- Real behaviour: demographic criteria alone are no longer enough. To orchestrate marketing campaigns, we now need to rely on the actual behaviour of our targets on digital channels.
- Consistency over time: we now need to be able to engage with our targets on an ongoing basis, at the time and pace they want. It's not up to them to adapt to the rhythm of our campaigns. It's up to us to adapt to the rhythm of our targets.
- Focusing on a specific goal: launching mass marketing campaigns hoping for a return based on a percentage of respondents no longer makes sense. Each action needs to be individualised, as we have just seen, and geared towards moving the target along its journey.
Other criteria such as omincanality, agility and the measurability of the actions undertaken complete the picture.
Using the criteria set out by Sanjay Dholakia, it is finally possible to measure the gap between your marketing activities and those you should ideally be carrying out.
2. Consumers are increasingly solicited: you propose to reverse the mechanism and have them solicit brands; but is this really possible?
The more brands scream to be heard, the more consumers cover their ears. We can always continue with this kind of hysterical relationship, but it is less and less effective. The brands that succeed today are those that manage to offer a more enriching and intelligent relationship for consumers, but also for themselves. In the end, it's all about the customer experience. If it's positive, there's no reason why the relationship shouldn't work.
A positive customer experience is a very good way of boosting visibility on the Net, because it radiates through natural referencing and social media. So it attracts without shouting.
3. L'InBound Marketing requires a strategyQuality content strategy in quow do these differ from traditional advertising content?
Advertising content starts with the brand and moves towards the consumer. This is still a top-down, relatively simplistic relationship in which the brand says nothing other than "Buy my product". But in the end, why should we buy its product?
Until now, the role of marketing has been to represent the company: who it is, what products or services it offers, what trade shows it takes part in, etc. Today, it has to represent the customer: who they are, what motivates them, what makes them interested in our products or services, how they do their research on digital channels, etc.
Inbound Marketing provides an initial response to this challenge, notably through the concept of the Persona. This is very interesting, because by transforming the role of marketing to focus very strongly on the customer, we are moving from product marketing to experience marketing. And experience is currently a much stronger driver than ownership. Consumers are no longer so much looking to own as to enjoy a positive experience. We are therefore moving away from a 'quality-price' criterion towards a 'price-experience' criterion.
One of the vectors of this experience is quality content, not advertising.
4. L'Inbound Marketing meansis rathert for B2B or B2C?
Given what I've just said, Inbound Marketing can obviously be used in a B2B or B2C context. The content and marketing processes will be different, but the methodology will be the same.
