Ads are irritation in its finest. Interruptive, distracting and irrelevant are just a few of the thousands of words that can describe that outbound marketing approach. Like most people, you probably find yourself screening out advertisements on TV, online and essentially any other place where ads can be found. As part of an outbound marketing methodology, ads seek to buy your attention with unsolicited emails, phone calls and text messages.
Does your company take part in this madness? Put humbly, it’s time for a change.
Marketing rules are changing quickly and the newly coined term, inbound marketing, is now vital to your business.
The concept is simple— inbound marketing is about creating and sharing useful and compelling content that appeals to qualified prospects. It is a way to bring potential customers to you, rather than having to fight for their attention. By publishing the right content in the right place, your customers see your work as relevant and helpful, not interruptive.
Now that’s the marketing that keeps people coming back for more.
Need more convincing as to why you absolutely need to use the inbound methodology? Read the 6 reasons below:
1) Inbound Marketing will allow your business to be found naturally.
Inbound marketing permits your company to organically show up on a prospects search. By utilizing valuable keywords, individuals looking for answers and solutions to a problem which your company addresses can find your website. By producing problem solving content with your most relevant keywords, prospects can organically come across your content during their search. One way to be discovered is to write useful blog posts or create live webinars to engage your potential customers.
2) Inbound Marketing will evaluate your performance based on real data.
Marketing should be considered a science. You cannot solely create content and just hope that some of it will spark an interest in a prospect. Today, marketing is about producing content and then tracking to see what is performing well and changing based on specific metrics. By tracking metrics such as engagement on social media, website and blog traffic, lead generation and email marketing click-through rate, your business can uncover patterns of what is working and what can be improved for future content.
3) Inbound Marketing will make the most of your customer’s experience through engagement.
Your customers are your most powerful advocates and the inbound methodology pushes your business to consistently create a wonderful experience for them. Inbound marketing is centered on the idea of customer engagement. Your customers deserve to be recognized for their interaction with your business. What better way to know exactly what people love about your business than to have a personal conversation on a blog post, Tweet or Facebook group. People love personalized attention and the inbound strategy focuses on engaging and appealing to them on an individual level. Spending time constructing this relationship creates trust and continues to build your brand.
4) Inbound Marketing will help you build trust with your prospects.
Inbound marketing builds trust with individuals by creating useful, knowledgeable content. If a person seeks out important problem solving information from your content, he or she is more likely to confide in you and your product or service. Someone who learns something valuable from your content is probable to using your resources again and establishing a relationship with your company. This methodology benefits both you and the prospect because it increases your standards and level of expertise.
5) Inbound Marketing will help you use your time wisely.
In outbound marketing, you can waste hours cold-calling individuals to try to make a sale. Why dedicate so much time in hopes of finding a new customer? Inbound marketing saves you time by having leads come to you. This is not to say that you will work less, but rather that your time put into your work will extend past the time it took you to create the content. Content like blog posts and videos can answer questions of your existing audience and generate a new customer the day of, two months after or even a year from publishing.
6) Inbound Marketing will make your marketing strategy affordable.
No more wasting money on outspending competitors using traditional marketing methods. Using a low cost marketing methodology like inbound marketing will provide you with a huge advantage over your competition. By investing in an inbound marketing plan, your company can cut down the amount of individuals it needs to produce valuable content and do so at a much greater productivity level. Additionally, using software like HubSpot can help your company efficiently organize your marketing at a low cost each month.
Conclusion
Are you now ready to stop bombarding your prospects with ads and focus on naturally attracting customers to your content? By following these six easy steps you can be well on your way to engaging the right customers at the right time and the right place. Still want more clarity on the inbound marketing approach? Check out our weekly live webinar.
