Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing is the method of getting found by customers.  It is new marketing to a new customer.  Technology has made traditional or outbound marketing (sometimes referred to as interruption marketing) less effective and also more expensive.  With Tivo, spam filters, caller ID, XM radio, and RSS feeds, customers have evolved with new technology, refusing to be interrupted.  Your marketing needs to evolve, too.  The days of successfully interrupting people with your message are long gone.  These messages are not highly targeted and not very cost effective.  If you want to attract new customers, customers of today, you need to be reaching customers where they are and providing them with information that they find valuable, interesting, or useful. 

Inbound marketing is just the opposite of outbound marketing.  It uses new methods to reach today's customers.  Replace TV ads with online videos.  Replace cold calling with content creation.  It also replaces a one-way conversation website with a lead generating website.  Inbound marketing provides customers with information they want to subscribe to, download, and opt-in to.  Basically, you can scream you are great all over the place and no one cares.  It is expected of you as a company to say you are great.  Today's customer also will not allow you to pound your message repeatedly into their brains.  They have evolved and have learned to ignore this type of messaging.  Inbound marketing will attract qualified customers to your business like a magnet.  You no longer need to pay for expensive outbound marketing tactics to reach customers.  With inbound marketing, customers will find you.

Content - Content is the heart of an inbound marketing campaign.  Content is the magnet attracting potential customers to your business. 

• Blogs
• Videos
• White Papers
• eBooks
• How-to Guides

SEO - SEO (Search Engine Optimization) allows customers to find your site and your content.  On-page and off-page SEO practices set the goal of achieving a higher ranking in search engines.  Search engines are where your buyers are going to begin their buying process or information search.

• On-Page
• Off-Page
• Keyword Analysis
• Link Building

Social Media - Your content is promoted is the social media networks.  Here it is distributed across many channels by people who have developed personal relationships with others.  As your content is shared, it gains more authority and will attract more qualified buyers.

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Blogs
• Online Forums
• Social Bookmarking
• Document Sharing

Why Inbound Marketing?

1.  It costs less.  Buying ads and renting booths is expensive.  Inbound marketing only costs time.  Yes, it does take time to build an inbound marketing campaign.  Yes, you spend dollars hiring someone to perform inbound marketing for you as well as for inbound marketing software, if you choose.  However, once you buy an ad, it runs and is done.  Once you go to tradeshow, you leave and the marketing is done.  Inbound marketing grows and only gets better over time.  Also, when you break the costs down, inbound marketing costs less.

2.  More Targeted Marketing.  When you perform inbound marketing, you will only be approaching leads that have already expressed an interest in your content.  This makes them more likely to be interested in your product.  They chose to opt-in to you.  Compared to cold-calling and e-mailing random lists, you are going to get better qualified leads with inbound marketing.

3.  It's an Investment.  Rather than spending money on ads and PPC that disappear when the money disappears, you will be investing in a long-term marketing strategy that improves over time.  When you spend dollars on optimized content that ranks in search engines, your content ranks there forever until someone else bumps you out of the spot.  And even then, you can take a second look at re-optimizing your content to regain your position in the search engines.  Using closed loop marketing analytics from your lead intelligence will allow you to use best practices in the future to continue improving your campaign month over month.

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