How does apple uses inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is an approach where you draw in your target customers through releasing content about how your industry can help them minimize their challenges and reach their goals.
This differs from the traditional marketing technique, outbound marketing, which blasts ads out to anyone who can see.
It's a more targeted, and far less intrusive approach, because when your customers are searching for solutions, they'll be led straight to you in a way that fills them with gratitude, rather than annoyance from being bombarded with ads.
1. Emphasizing the human element of their products
Most modern Apple commercials feature people connecting. It could be a grandfather seeing his newborn grandchild for the first time through an iPad screen, or a group friends enjoying a group chat on their iPhones.
Apple has taken the feedback of their customers wanting to stay connected to their family and friends in the digital age and incorporated it into their products and marketing campaigns. Their product advertisements feature relatable life moments that emphasize the warmth and happiness their customers love and crave, creating a positive brand identity.
2. Brand Positioning
Apple’s focus has been positioning their brand as one that offers superior quality and innovation than their competition. There are fans of other companies who may disagree, but Apple has succeeded in drawing customers who believe the benefits and features of their products are unique and the best in the market, and this belief often keeps their customers loyal and true to the brand.
3. Educating Their Customers
Apple has done well to release content in a way that teaches their customers about the technology used in their products. Often the company will introduce a new feature and focus a campaign solely on that concept, making it easy to understand and pick up.
This educational content has helped Apple expand the reach of their potential customers to those without technical knowledge, which has helped make the brand friendly to the general public. Apple also doesn’t barrage their audience with overly technical jargon, instead they make the value of the product easily understandable coming from any walk of life.
4. Offers For Customer Information
Apple has often offered free trial usage or discounts of their products as lead conversion tactics. They also leverage these deals for honest user opinions, which can in turn be incorporated into later marketing campaigns and products. By creating special offers for users, Apple receives customer information and more marketing data to work to incorporate in their future product lines.
5. Retaining Customers
Apple has also done well to create a strong following of customers loyal to their brand. One of the ways they've done this is by listening to their customers and creating complementary products.
An Apple user can download music from iTunes onto their MacBook, then transfer their music to the iPhone and store it on iCloud. Both the cloud and streaming have eased this level of connectivity between Apple devices to include non-Apple software and devices as well.
6. Identified Their Buyer Persona
Many tech companies incorporate their buyer personas, or ideal customers, into their advertisements in order to create a connection to their audience and Apple is no different. This concept was a staple in their classic Mac vs. PC ads. The Mac character was portrayed as laid back, a little geeky, but still cool and up to the latest trends, which matches up very well with the personalities of many Apple enthusiasts.
