The discovery of gravity by Sir Newton was a breakthrough in the world of physics. And nothing has managed to counter it or defy its existence and relevance to science. The discovery of inbound marketing as a modern day communication concept offers a very similar parallel.

It’s been almost a decade now that the digital marketing community was made known of the genius of inbound marketing, and even today there is no parallel to its value potential. The ability to pull customers with enticing content precedes all other marketing communication strategies in the present day. The magnet approach has found ground with everyone from the marketing domain and sledgehammer approach is out, and it is nothing short of a fact to admit that this approach will stick around.

Inbound marketing is when a brand’s content talks context so as to result in a pull-effect on its audience.

With greater proliferation of media, every channel of communication has become its own little medium of promotion. And because of this abundant choice, it’s become almost impossible to intervene with consumers; for, they will find a way to switch channels — they know many other ways to stay connected with their peeps and stay informed.

And so, as egocentrism of brands go out, in comes the era of contextual marketing — being so relevant to the people that there is no way they will discount you.

Attraction without aggression but with expertise is at the core of inbound marketing.

According to HubSpot, inbound marketing is especially effective for small businesses that deal with high dollar values, long research cycles and knowledge-based products. The underlying premise is that audiences for such products are attracted to brands that lend a sense of expertise through their content — be it on the brand website or even social media for that matter.

5 tools to help boost your inbound marketing efforts

There are a plethora of great tools available to inbound marketers today. Many of the tools are available on a freemium model, but almost all tools offer a basic free version that can lend itself well to the cause of boosting inbound marketing efficiency, if at all on a very crude level.

1. HubSpot

‍

There is no denying that this is THE tool for inbound marketing assistance. The platform brings all your essential tools needed to execute an inbound marketing strategy, including social media, blogging, SEO, content management, landing pages, call-to-actions, lead management, marketing automation, and CRM integration. HubSpot’s marketing grader tool specifically looks at your website through six critical Inbound parameters: Overall, Social Media, Blogging, SEO, Lead Generation, and Mobile Optimization. And for each category, it provides insights and specs on the things the website is doing well and where it needs to improve. Plus, HubSpot offers an impressive array of educational tools on inbound marketing that are best kept handy. For outstanding inbound marketing results, HubSpot is the tool you need to acclimatize yourself with.

2. Buffer App

‍

Managing social media communities of a brand of any size is quite the task. But by synching all of the brands’ social accounts — Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram or Google+ — with Buffer app, you can streamline this long-drawn-out activity into an effort of managing everything from one place alone. Buffer is a hassle-free social media management tool which lets you scheduled posts across your social pages at the click of a button. Queue up content will in advance and thanks to its super simple UI SMM is remarkably easy, efficient and structured.

3. Google Analytics

‍

This one’s a cliché but most definitely a tool to invest in. For all critical information about website traffic and user behavior, be it where your traffic is coming from, which of your content is being viewed and how visitors choose to engage on your site, Google Analytics is a one-stop solution. Every digital marketing strategy is borne out of the direction provided by Google Analytics, and for good reason too — it’s the ultimate digital data center. Check the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and take data-backed decisions by tracking users through the conversion funnel, mapping appropriate touch points and engage in relevant audience profiling with Google Analytics.

4. MailChimp

‍

Sending out newsletters and promotional notes to customers is super easy with MailChimp. MailChimp is a cloud-based third-party email service provider, better known for helping you building and manage your email marketing list. This tool grants you the ability to create amazing email templates, categorize mailing lists for appropriate targeting and track the engagement of email subscribers with much ease.

5. Google Drive

‍

While it is equally good to use OneNote, Box or Dropbox for cloud-based file storage and synchronization, nothing beats the simplicity of creating, saving, editing, sharing and collaborating on projects with Google Drive. It is incredibly versatile, and simple to use for small and large teams alike. Effortlessly create campaign documents and spreadsheets, edit blog posts, and store photos and images on one place that can be accessed by whosoever you want. And the ability to access all this data from just one Google account, across any device, is a proposition that’s hard to beat.

These are just few tools that you can get started with. While there are a whole set of more exciting options out there, mastering just these will surely help you improve your inbound marketing efforts. Each of these tools is designed to help bring in structure to your campaign planning, implementation and tracking processes so that you don’t waste too much time trying to manually do it all.