What is Inbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing is the practice of sending messages or emails to potential customers. This type of marketing is often done through direct mail campaigns or email blasts.
The term “inbound marketing” was coined by HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah in his book, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Anywhere. He defines inbound marketing as “the art of attracting prospects through relevant content rather than cold calling or advertising.”
Inbound marketing focuses on creating valuable content that attracts visitors to your site. Once they get there, they become leads and eventually customers.
The goal of inbound marketing is simple: attract visitors who are interested in what you have to offer. Then engage them with useful content — like blog posts, case studies, ebooks, etc. – and make sure you follow up consistently.
Inbound marketing can be used for both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) businesses. However, it works best when targeting small businesses because these companies tend to have fewer resources and less money to spend on marketing.
Although outbound marketing has been around for a long time, inbound marketing has only gained popularity over the past few years.
Today, most people prefer to interact with brands online instead of via phone calls or snail mail.
The rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., has made it easier than ever before to connect with consumers.
According to Forrester Research, more than half of all customer interactions will happen online within three years.
As a result, many business owners have started using inbound marketing strategies to grow their businesses.
Here are some reasons why inbound marketing is becoming increasingly popular among marketers today:
1. It’s Easy to Start
Unlike traditional marketing methods, which require large budgets and lots of manpower, inbound marketing doesn’t require much effort at all.
All you need is an audience and a website. You don’t even need any special skills to create great content.
When you use inbound marketing, you focus on building trust and authority with your target audience first.
This means that you start from scratch and build relationships with your audience organically.
You then provide value to your audience so they want to do business with you.
Once you establish this relationship, you can continue to market to them without feeling creepy or invasive.
2. It Works Well With Social Media
One reason why inbound marketing is gaining traction is due to its ability to work well with social media.
Social media sites allow you to reach millions of users at once.
And since most of us spend a lot of our day browsing social media, we naturally gravitate towards websites that share similar interests.
For example, if you run a fitness center, chances are you’ll find yourself spending a lot of time reading articles about health and nutrition.
If you post regularly on social media, you’ll notice that your followers often comment on your posts.
And if you respond quickly, you’ll see positive comments roll in.
3. It Gives You More Control Over Your Brand
Traditional marketing relies heavily on third parties to promote your brand.
But with inbound marketing, you control everything from A to Z.
You decide how to write your copy, choose your images, design your website, set up email campaigns, etc.
Since you’re doing all the heavy lifting, you get to make sure that everything aligns with your brand identity.
4. It Helps You Build Trust And Authority
Trust and authority go hand in hand.
People who feel trusted by others are more likely to buy products and services from those individuals.
So, if you want to increase sales, you should always strive to earn trust and authority with your customers.
With inbound marketing, you gain authority by providing useful information and valuable resources to your audience.
For example, you could offer free ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, case studies, etc.
5. It Allows You To Focus On What Matters Most
Marketing has become extremely competitive over the past few years.
While it used to be enough just to have a strong product, now it’s also important to stand out from the crowd.
To achieve this, you have to invest a lot of money into advertising.
However, if you’re not careful, you could end up wasting a lot of money while still failing to generate results.
By contrast, inbound marketing allows you to focus on what matters most — your product or service.
It helps you avoid getting distracted by irrelevant things like ads, banners, pop-ups, etc.
6. It Can Help You Grow Your Business
According to Hubspot, there are four types of businesses:
• B2B (Business to Business)
• B2C (Business to Consumer)
• C2C (Consumer to Consumer)
• O2O (Online to Offline)
The majority of companies fall under the B2C category.
While this type of business model works great for many small businesses, it doesn’t scale as well when it comes to generating revenue.
That’s because consumers don’t want to pay for something unless they know it will benefit their lives.
As such, it’s much easier to sell directly to a business than to an individual consumer.
7. It Has The Potential To Generate Leads For Your Sales Team
When you use traditional marketing methods, you usually rely on third parties to help you reach potential clients.
This means that you can only target people that are already interested in your product or service. As a result, you may miss out on some leads.
On the other hand, with inbound marketing, your goal is to attract new leads. This way, you can keep your pipeline full and ready to convert at any given moment.
8. It Works Well With Other Types Of Marketing
If you’ve ever tried to market your business using traditional methods, then you probably noticed that it was difficult to integrate them together.
For example, once you start running paid advertisements, you have to stop promoting via organic search engine optimization.
Or vice versa.
But with inbound marketing, you can combine both strategies without having to worry about conflicting messages.
9. It Helps You Get More Clients
One of the biggest challenges facing entrepreneurs today is finding qualified clients.
While you might have a good idea about how to run a successful business, it’s hard to find someone willing to hire you.
And even if you do manage to land a client, you still need to convince them to work with you.
Traditional marketing techniques often rely on cold calling and cold emails. But these tactics aren’t very effective.
Instead, you should try to build relationships with your prospects first before asking for a sale.
10. It Makes Customer Service Easy
You can spend hours trying to get through to customer support. And when you finally make it to the right department, you might not understand why your request wasn’t handled properly.
With inbound marketing, however, you can easily communicate with your customers.
This makes it easy for you to solve problems quickly and efficiently.
11. It Allows You To Focus On What Matters Most
As mentioned above, one of the biggest challenges facing startups today is focusing on the right priorities.
This problem becomes more apparent when you consider that you have multiple projects going on simultaneously.
For example, you might be working on improving your website while also trying to grow your social media presence.
0 Comments