Inbound marketing is the methodology of attracting customers through valuable content, SEO, social engagement, and helpful experiences rather than interruptive advertising. Coined by HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006, it is structured around an "attract, engage, delight" lifecycle that turns strangers into customers and customers into promoters. It is the explicit counterpart to outbound marketing (cold calls, cold email, paid interruption ads) and was the organizing philosophy behind one of the largest marketing-software businesses ever built.
The classical inbound playbook had four stages: attract (SEO content, organic social, paid search to high-intent terms), convert (landing pages, lead magn...