The Application of Inbound Marketing to Improve Business Performance: Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

In an ever-changing context characterised by a digital shift, companies are obliged to follow this evolution and accompany the digital transition, that customers contact entails now, this digital transition should affect all the strategies implemented in the company, in particular, by introducing new techniques into their marketing strategies, in particular the Inbound Marketing approach. This methodology allows companies that adopt it the creation of relevant and attractive content, which is distributed on the digital media owned by the brand, with the aim of encouraging their voluntary commitment to the company and the initiation and maintenance of a social, close and shared relationship that can guarantee their loyalty in the long term. This new concept has certainly aroused the interest of practitioners in the field, however, academic research on inbound marketing does not study the effect of its use on companies’ business performance.

In this article we propose a systematic literature review based on the PRISMA (Preferred Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) method, through which we conscientiously study the concept of Inbound Marketing and propose a synthetic definition of it, as well as Key Performance Indicators to measure it, then we examine all the intrinsic facets of companies Business Performance and finally we analyse the relationship between these two variables. The result of our work can serve as an initial and fruitful basis for future research in this field, offering scientists a considerable synthesis for the proposal of a conceptual model studying the relationship between Inbound Marketing and companies Business Performance.

Keywords: Inbound Marketing, Outbound Marketing, Search Ingine Optimisation (SEO), Digitalization, Business Performance.

JEL Classification: M 31

Type of Paper: Theoretical article