Even if you don’t know what inbound marketing is, you must have heard of the term. It’s important to know that inbound marketing is so much more than just another passing trend. It’s a newfound way of marketing that poses a serious threat to traditional outbound content marketing services. Research shows that 68% of inbound marketers claim that their marketing strategy is effective – but only 48% of outbound marketers can confidently say the same.
So, the question is what makes inbound marketing so effective? Let’s establish the basics.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy aimed at drawing visitors to your company’s products and services. Instead of competing for attention, inbound marketing uses relevant content that naturally appeals to the reader.
Outbound marketing is the traditional form of adverts that includes print media, television ads, direct mail and cold calling. As you can imagine, this sort of marketing is more invasive and is more likely to lead to a dead end. It was fruitful during the pre-internet era when that was the only way to communicate your products and services to the world. However, times have drastically changed, and outbound marketing is now viewed as rather aggressive and pushy.
Inbound marketing is all about going against the norms of outbound marketing. Its existence heavily depends on people being able to connect and interact with each other, as well as with companies 24/7.
The idea behind inbound marketing is that instead of demanding the audience pay attention to your adverts, you create a high-quality experience that your customers will actually seek out themselves. By finding your company through search engines or social media, your prospective clients tend to initiate interactions with you. This is because they choose to receive your marketing messages – this alone gives inbound marketing a huge edge over its counterpart. The mere reversal of the client-business interaction has completely changed the sales game, altering the dynamic of the entire sales process.
In inbound marketing, you basically adapt to two important concepts: the principle of relevance and employing a foolproof content strategy to create targeted ads that your audience will find appealing. But what’s next on the agenda? The next course of action is to try and convince potential customers that your products and services are exactly what they’re looking for. With every purchase, your offerings should be consistency in terms of quality and convenience so that your customers will consider returning. Inbound marketing is merely the ice-breaker – you have to know how to carry the customer to the finish line from there.
Although inbound marketing and content marketing are sometimes used interchangeably, they’re not the same. Content marketing is the same as it sounds: creating persuasive, engaging, high-quality online content aimed at improving a company’s rapport with a targeted audience. This takes several forms – blog posts, articles, social media posts, videos, or any other format that’s considered relevant to the target audience.
With inbound marketing, however, the content is divided into three categories according to the likelihood of purchase: the top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel.
Aside from the above-mentioned content, inbound marketing comprises the following strategies to attract and convert leads:
There we have it – an essential guide to inbound marketing. It should be clear that it’s very different from traditional outbound marketing. And in today’s tech-savvy world, it remains the ideal way of ensuring the biggest possible audience for your products and services.
